Guantanamera

Up till recently I'd thought of Guantanamera as a cheesy folky pop song. Only when hearing a poet (who served Saddam Hussein as a human shield in the first Gulf War and goes by the name of "The Singing Marxist") sing and simultaneously translate it a capella in a room above a pub in St Giles' did I start to appreciate its powerful message. That also explained why Vanessa Redgrave chose it to sing as part of her Vietnam war protest. The verses, translated:

I am an honest man from where the palm tree grows
and before I die I want to throw my poetry from my soul.

My poetry is clear green and burning red;
my poetry is a wounded stag seeking shelter on the mountain.

I want to throw my lot in with the poor people of the world.
The mountain stream pleases me more than the sea.

Those aren't the original verses. The original verses, along with the tune, were written probably by a Cuban songwriter in the late 1920s, and were about meeting a girl from Guantanamo - hence title and chorus, which have survived unmolested. The other word in the chorus, Guajira, means "peasant girl", but to add to the confusion, Guajira is also a type of Cuban folk song and that is how people unaware of the song's previous incarnation have sometimes translated it.

The verses we have now were plucked selectively from the first few pages of Versos Sencillos by Cuban revolutionary writer/philosopher José Martí, who had died in the Cuban War of Independence shortly after writing his literary will (see verses 1 and 3).


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