Walking Cuba: El Camino del Cimarron

Guaracabulla

Esteban Montejo never mentioned Guaracabulla to Barnet, but he roamed this entire region for years. He must have approached it at least once. During his Mambís, revolutionary years, his troop captured a Spanish convoy headed to Manicaragua somewhere south of here. Whether he stood alongside the ceiba at the center of Guaracabulla or not, Esteban knew the region.

The Casa de Cultura is a simple two-bedroom house converted into a welcome center. White plastic chairs line the large living/dining room. Cold fruit juice and water have my name on it on a table at the far end of the entrance area. I grab a bottle of water, settled into a chair, and watch the show unfold.

A young man, who seems to have a speech impediment but not a singing impediment, strums his guitar, checking the tuning before singing. I do not recognize the two ballads, beautiful as they are.

“They’re my songs,” he says. “I wrote them.”

Accompanying him on the maracas is a tall, thin man with a perpetual smile shaping his lips. He will be my guide tomorrow and I will always remember him as the “king of the decimas.”

The decima, which has a rich tradition in Cuba, is a rhyming, ten-line stanza of poetry. In the Cuban countryside, it has a musical rendition in the Punto…