Between 1954 and 1958, Cuba's main radio station (Circuito CMQ) broadcast from 10:00 to 11:00 in the morning, the famous program National Troubadour Competition, consisting of lively controversies of the most notable Cuban country music singers. Among them were Ángel Valiente (Angelito) and Jesús Orta Ruiz (El Indio Naborí).

The daily counterpoint interested the people so much that their followers, dissatisfied with the brevity of the polemics that the radio offered them, demanded in thousands of letters the encounter of both before a jury, on subjects chosen at random and in a feasible place to numerous public. The improvisers accepted the request, which expressed a fervent popular desire and, days later, the first meeting took place at the Spanish Casino of San Antonio de los Baños, Havana province, where the prestigious poets Raúl Ferrer, José Sanjurjo and Rafael Enrique Marrero acted as jurors. The improvised "décimas" were taken by the stenographer and poetess María de los Refugios Segón, thus saving them from time and oblivion. This first meeting was held on June 15, 1955, and the second on August 28 of the same year, but at the Campo Armada stadium (Lucero distribution, Havana).

The themes proposed by the admirers of the "décimas" were: Love, freedom and death, dealt with in the first meeting. For the second one, they were: the peasant and hope. In total, five themes.

To converse, to discuss, to dialogue? According to dictionaries consulted, Pequeño Larousse and Ciencia del lenguaje y Arte del Estilo, by Martín Alonso, controversy is, among other meanings, discussion, polemic, dispute, debate, impugnation, and "tell me and tell me so". To discourse means to reason, elucidate, expose, spin. While dialoguing is, among other assertions, conversation, colloquy, talk, consultation, comments.

I believe that the so-called Controversy of the Century was -and I fully agree with Dr. Virgilio López Lemus-, more than a standoff, an exalted dialogue between two pillars of 20th century "canturia". Its transcendence as an event of "repentismo" goes beyond local and national circumstances and constitutes a milestone in the oral poetry of the Spanish language.

This poetic work containing one hundred "décimas", twenty on each theme, was first published in booklet form in the Canary Islands in 1997, with a prologue by Cuban poet and pedagogue Raul Ferrer Perez. Letras Cubanas Editorial published them in 2004, with a foreword by Maximiano Trapero and notes to the Cuban edition by Dr. Virgilio López Lemus.

Let's close this little sketch with two" décimas" of the first theme: Love.

Naborí expressed: Love... What is love? / Maybe the mysterious law / that taught the butterfly / the secret of the flower / Bonfire whose heat / saves from death the traveler / who travels along the path / frozen by a sad winter... / Force of attraction that exists / between the magnet and the steel.

For his part, Angelito Valiente, upon seeing his mother seated and enjoying the famous encounter, his first version in the Spanish Casino of San Antonio de los Baños, addressed her and masterfully closed the encounter:

Great love the one I feel / for that old mother, / from there with a gray hair / she illuminated my thoughts / Arise, monument / of light, of hope and faith; / to look at you is to know why / no one so much light expands... / There is the greatest love / in the world, standing.

Controversy, dissertation or dialogue, however you want to catalog these two poetic encounters between Jesús Orta Ruiz and Angelito Valiente, constituted, according to López Lemus, a milestone in the oral poetry of the Spanish language.

Taken from September 5th

English version Hector Hdez.