/ARTS WEEKLY/MUSIC: Montañez, Cuba’s First 21st Century Legend

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jan 14 2003 (IPS) - Virtually overnight, Polo Montañez became Cuba’s most popular musician, and he has just as quickly been converted into the country’s first great legendary figure of the 21st century since his death in late November of injuries caused by a car crash.

A music video of the folk singer-songrwriter, whose real name was Fernando Borrego, was broadcast nationwide by Cuba’s state-controlled television at midnight sharp on Dec. 31, 2002.

”He never forgot who he was, nor where he came from,” Rosalía Bermúdez, a nurse who moved to the capital nine years ago from Montañez’s home province of Pinar del Río in western Cuba, told IPS.

Stories about the artist are being passed by word of mouth around the country. One of them tells how Montañez gave away television sets to people of modest means in Las Terrazas, the small town where he lived 60 km west of Havana, after he received the check from his first album.

People also say that his newfound fame – the ‘guajiro’ (peasant) country-style singer became a household name in Latin America – did not keep him from giving his monthly concerts for the people of his hometown, which is located in a mountainous area.

”I am a natural guajiro, don’t get me wrong,” says the chorus of one of Montañez’s most popular songs.

The car accident that caused his death occurred on Nov. 20 when Montañez, 47, was driving to his home in the village of Las Terrazas after a family party in the capital. He never came out of coma, and died six days later.

According to reports from Las Terrazas, over 100 people a day visit the singer’s home, which has been converted into a museum.

In San Cristóbal, the town near Las Terrazas where the singer was born, a life-size statue will go up, showing Montañez – who took his name in honour of the mountains of his home province – with his typical peasant sombrero.

Television producer Armando Arencibia announced that within the next few months he will direct a fictional film on the singer’s ”social relationships”.

Few Cubans even knew who Montañez was three years ago, when he signed up with the French label Lusafrica. His first album, ‘Guajiro Natural’, sold more than 60,000 copies in Colombia, launching his international career.

The second, ‘Guitarra Mía’, was released in Colombia and Cuba in the early summer of 2002, and in October in Europe. Montañez performed in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal last year.

Within the space of just a few months, he became the third Cuban artist – after singer-songwriters Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés – to be awarded a platinum record in Colombia, for the sales of ‘Guajiro Natural’.

His fame extended throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, where some of his songs began to be taped by prestigious artists like Puerto Rico’s Gilberto Santarrosa, who released his own version of the track ‘Un montón de estrellas’.

Among Montañez’s plans for the future were the recording of three other compact discs, including one containing ‘boleros’, ‘guarachas’ and ‘sones’ – typical folk rhythms – along with the elderly Compay Segundo, a leading Cuban figure in the internationally renowned musical project known as the Buena Vista Social Club.

Cuban musicologists remarked Montañez’s capacity to establish a close rapport with a broad audience through songs that spoke in simple terms about country life in Cuba, women and love. His music emerged from traditional folk styles, the Latin American ballad, and Caribbean rhythms like the ‘bachata’.

Another likely element in Montañez’s success in Cuba, besides the quality of his work, was the lack of variety on the country’s music scene, which is dominated by tropical dance groups that are constantly emerging and splitting up. It is often nearly impossible to distinguish one band from another, since they all sound somewhat alike.

Meanwhile, groups with well-established careers and followings, like Los Van Van, Adalberto y su Son, and NG La Banda, are in the midst of a period of creative stagnation.

In a February 2002 interview, Montañez said that he had never been happier, because at last he was enjoying ”the harvest of so many years of cultivating life.”

On that occasion, he talked about growing up surrounded by the magnificent mountains of Pinar del Río, and said he did not experience electricity until the age of 12, when his family moved from the town of San Cristóbal to Las Terrazas, a rural village built in harmony with the surrounding environment.

Montañez, who received no formal musical education, began to write songs while continuing to work as a rural labourer, until he put together his own band in 1994 and began to work in a hotel catering to foreign tourists.

More than once he confessed that he felt uncomfortable in cities. Other successful artists move from their hometowns to large urban centres, but Montañez stayed close to his family. ”The only thing I like about fame is that I have more and more friends,” he once said.