A student at the Escuela Superior de Art(Fine Arts School) in Havana, the nation's premier music-education center.

"If you ask an old trova composer or singer what his favorite subjects are," writes Cuban music journalist Olga Fern ndez in her book Strings and Hide (Editorial Mart¡, 1995), "he's sure to say women, love, homeland, and death." She relates the story of Angel Almenares, a septuagenarian composer from Santiago who outlived several of his fellow singers and elaborated on the theme of death in his work. "Singing to those who die fulfills a long-standing pact," he told Fern ndez. "Sometimes there are inviolable pacts between two trovadores calling for the one who survives to sing at the other's funeral." Almenares, according to local legend, even penned a work to be sung at his own funeral, Caj—n de muerto (Coffin), writing the telling verse, "Now this moment's pain doesn't matter, now the pain of my past doesn't matter."

A typical son is "Que Viva Chango" by noted mœsica campesina composer Celina Gonz lez. The song's lyrics explore the duality of Cuba's religious traditions, Catholicism and Santeria, the West African--based rites that evolved among the island's slave community. Forced by their Spanish masters to observe Catholic rituals, Cuba's African slaves maintained their own religious beliefs by the practice of what Cubans call sincretismo, in which African deities were matched with corresponding Catholic saints. In this song, Saint Barbara and Chango, the god of fire, are both praised.