At the Café Nostalgia on Calle Ocho in Miami,
in Little Havana, right before the musicians
take the stage for another descarga, they show
old time footage from Cuba’s golden age of music:
Olga Gillot, Ceclia Cruz, Benny More, Perez Prado,
Bola de Nieve, Trio Matamoros, in sepia, scratchy,
out of sync, but it is Barbarito Diez, the black
crooner of my grandmother’s time with his smooth
songs as he stands on the stage of what appears to be
a retirement community’s country club somewhere
in Marianao perhaps, his band behind him, and he,
cool as a sea breeze that sweeps the palm fronds
of the hills behind him, perpetual balance between
son and decima guajira on his lips, everyone
in the film clip dead now for thirty or forty
years, except for Barbarito Diez, the man my father
listened to when he fought asthma in the late
Havana nights when he coughed and cried
because the singer was my grandmother’s favorite
and my grandmother my father knew was dying
in the dark of the room next to the living room
where the old Marconi radio hissed those melodies:
“La mujer de Antonio camina asi… Pintor que pintas
iglesias pintame unos angelitos negros…
Mama yo quiero saber de donde son los cantantes…”
this potpourri of traditional Cuban tunes, and I, six,
could hear my father cough, clear his throat, blow
his nose into the embroidered handkerchiefs he used.
Now I am sitting here at the bar in Café Nostalgia,
between sets, a mojito drink wet in my hands,
Barbarito on the wall-sized screen, singing, not even
blinking, the music that has saved us all from ruin,
madness, bloodshed, from dying, from bitterness.
Originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 1.
