Since he was a child he decided to live intensely. When he was 12 years old he wrote a drama in three acts (Amor Tragico) Tragic Love and several poems.

At the age of fifteen he composed his first musical work, a piano waltz. Several months later he acted as soloist in a ceremony of tribute to the medicine students that were executed in 1871 playing Sonata op. 13 Pathetic, composed by Beethoven.
He learned to play violin, saxophone, clarinet and several percussion instruments.

He was the founder of the Society and Concerts Orchestra of Caibarien and the Chamber Orchestra of Remedios. He conducted his own jazz band and sang with his well-pitched voice of baritone in many celebrations directed by Jorge Anckerman, Ernesto Lecuona and Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes.

He composed songs, fox trots, dances, danzones, small format chamber works, musical pieces for piano and violin and even a chamber opera (Manita en el Suelo) with libretto of his close friend Alejo Carpentier.

He traveled first to Havana, later, to Paris and Barcelona and he took advantage of this to keep with the European musical tendencies at that time.

However, the trip that really opened him the doors to eternity was the one he made going to the deeply-rooted Afro Cuban tradition. Maybe, the first liable people were his own parents that provided a black nursemaid that brought him much closer to the world of bembes and drums.

Afterwards, he fell in love. He never mind the skin color of his girlfriend. Love and the innate rebelliousness of Caturla family made him to defy the scandal to marry a black young girl. They had 11 children.

Those who try to approach Caturlas life could imagine that he was a man of long life but this Cuban musician was marked by the social commitment that historically goes with some of the most important figures of Cuban culture.

Perhaps in other regions of the world this commitment is not shown in the same way but in this brave Island the intellectuals are mainly progressive, relevant personalities such as Jose María Heredia, Felix Varela, José Martí, Rubén Martínez Villena, Alejo Carpentier, Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, Juan Marinello, Alicia Alonso and Alejandro García Caturla were progressive according to their historical moments.
He wrote to Carpentier from Paris in order to put his name in each necessary manifesto against the dictator Gerardo Machado. In 1933 he composed "Fanfarria para Despertar Espíritus Apolillados" that together with the work "Para despertar a Papá Montero"by Amadeo Roldán, and " A un romántico cordial", by José Ardévol, were musical ultimatums that demanded the resignation of the tyrant.

The vocation and the familiar commitment of Caturla led him to a job combination. He shared his eminent musician qualities with that of a vertical and incorruptible jurist and all of these virtues incompatible with the difficult time of the Republic he had to face, lead him to his death. The man of law sacrificed the musician like the politician did it with the poet in Marti and Villena.

On November 12, 1940 when he was only 34 years he was gunned down at Independencia Street of his birthplace Remedios. Two shots at close range of a criminal charged by him and who had disappeared, shattered his most glorious moment of life.
After one hundred years of his birth, this man continues looking at the Cuban expression. His musical contribution, more than an influence, it is considered an eternal challenge.

(Cubaheadlines.com)