Havana Cuba. — This October 9 marks the centenary of the birth in Santiago de Cuba of Olga Guillot, for many —among whom I include myself— the best bolero singer that she has produced in Latin America.
The curious thing is that Guillot, who was called La Reina del bolero, was not a proper bolero singer. But everything she sang, even though it wasn’t, by dint of emotion and the rhythm she imposed on it, she turned it into a bolero. In a painful bolero, which is how every self-respecting bolero should be.
The above happened when he sang the songs of the Mexican Armando Manzanero, the songs of the feeling or your version of Lie to Methat number that identified her and that, although it had been sounded in the voice of dozens of interpreters, nobody interpreted like her.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, in his chronicle my extreme music, explained: “A bolero singer can bring a song with no more rhythm than its lyrics into the orbit of the bolero. It was what Olga Guillot did with ´The other afternoon I saw rain´ by Armando Manzanero. When Olga Guillot sings “I was always taken by the bad” she makes a hymn not only to love (received romantic renunciation), but to a masochism of the soul that she knows how to invoke with her singing. The Guillot is the spirit of the bolero as Billie Holliday was the spirit of the blues. When Olga Guillot sings a first song of the feeling, ´La gloria tú´, in a rhythm that is between the beguine and the disco sound, it is still a bolero. The great Guillot, plain Olga, is also affected by the loose sonority of the bolero, but always falls into the natural two-four accent, which is the ideal rhythm of the bolero. But the bolero, ultimately, is not a rhythm, but a sound atmosphere that is wanted above all poetic art.”
Unfortunately, Olga Guillot’s centenary will be overlooked in her homeland. La Guillot is one of the many exiled artists whom the Castro regime has banned and tried to erase. The cruelty has been particularly strong against Guillot, who, like Celia Cruz, always made clear her rejection of Castroism and never gave up.
In 2008, in an interview, he said: “In Cuba they silenced my boleros, they burned my radio and television programs, as if I had never existed. It hurts me a lot. Fidel Castro took away my house and my career of 18 years. They took me to jail three times and when my daughter was 18 months old they told me that if she continued to speak ill of the Revolution, she would not see her again.”
When Olga Guillot went into exile in February 1961, she was one of the most popular singers in Cuba and Latin America. After settling in Mexico, which she considered her second homeland, she continued to be. She and she was also a great influence among singers of later generations. Suffice it to remember that it was on her television show where she began José José’s career in 1969 and that it was she who chose her stage name (his name was José Rómulo Sosa).
Multi-awarded, loved, respected and with a fit voice until her last days, Olga Guillot died in Miami, at the age of 87, on July 12, 2010.
When he felt close to the end, he said that the greatest pain he carried in his soul was not seeing Cuba free and being able to return to sing in it.
OPINION ARTICLE
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