"Guantanamera" ("girl from Guantánamo") is perhaps the best known Cuban song and that country's most noted patriotic song.
The music for the song is regularly attributed to José Fernández Diaz, known as JoseÃto Fernández, who claimed to have written it at various dates (consensus puts 1929 as its year of origin), and who used it regularly in one of his radio programs. Some researchers[who?] claim that the song's structure actually came from Herminio "El Diablo" GarcÃa Wilson, who should be credited as a co-composer. GarcÃa's heirs took the matter to court decades later but lost the case: the Supreme Court of Cuba credited Fernández as the sole composer of the music in 1993. Regardless of either claim, Fernández can safely be claimed as being the first public promoter of the song, through his radio programs.
The original lyrics to the song, as written by José Fernández, relate to a particular woman from Guantánamo, with whom he had a romantic relationship, and who — if the lyrics are to be believed — eventually left him. The alleged real story behind these lyrics (or at least one of many versions of the song's origin that Fernández suggested during his lifetime) is that she did not have a romantic interest in him, but merely a platonic one. If the details are to be believed, she had brought him a steak sandwich one day as a present to the radio station he worked at, he stared at some other woman (and made a pass at her) while eating the sandwich, and his friend yanked it out of his hands in disgust, cursed him and left. He never saw her again. These words are rarely sung today.
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