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Yesterday’s and today’s friends will honor the 90 birthday of the most popular singer of the Cuban history, Benny Moré who, although is not physically present, left etched in memory his image with the walking stick, his dancing step and harmonious refrain Santa Isabel de las Lajas querida.
 
The 90th birthday of Maximiliano Bartolomé Moré or Benny Moré or just Benny, as Cubans call him, has become an excuse for friends of those years to meet around the legend and express their praises, their memories, their anecdotes, either real or as a result of popular imagination.

The time of the merrymaking, whose most irrefutable argument is the most popular Cuban singer of all times, has rung and the reveille can be heard from Santa Isabel de las Lajas to the drop curtains of the América theater, in Havana’s busy Galiano avenue –registered as Italia avenue, a name only valid for tourism maps.

The ill-fated singer is a legend, maybe the biggest legend of the whole Cuban culture and music in particular, and I am convinced saying so is not any exaggeration.

In fact, those who are over sixty and were close to the legend have dared to tell the story of an X day when they were around the corner and Benny gave them some coins for having cleaned his car or played in the phonograph the most popular bolero of the time.

Benny is a legend that has been unsuccessfully taken to the cinema twice, as his grandeur cannot be easily reflected in some film meters.

The “El Bárbaro del Ritmo,” as he is also known, came to silver screen because in the end it seems to be the ideal way to immortalize any image, though that’s also a double-edged sword.

Benny, Cubans’ most beloved legend, has not gone well in the seventh art. A first attempt took place in the 1980’s, by Constante Diego, with a free version that came and went almost unnoticed and that nobody currently remembers.

By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, the nightingale of Santa Isabel de las Lajas returned to the big screen in a most lucky version though looked at distrustfully by experts, friends and music lovers.

On the stage, Alberto Pedro, an important Cuban playwright, gave him life in “Manteca”, a play welcomed by critics and the public, but things would be different if it were from the stage to the cinema.

El Benny will not be present to blow out the candles of his ninetieth anniversary, but he will be present in the memories he left throughout his career. With a walking stick in hand, he will make a gesture; he will perform a step and his height will be seen; the height of the legend that without greatest display, is still waiting for a street of this city to be named after him.

Translated by Yanely Interian

Source: Cubanow.net

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