Sindo Garay was born Antonio Gumersindo Garay Garcia (Santiago de Cuba, 12 April 1867 – Havana, 17 July 1968). He was the first, the smallest, and perhaps the longest-lived, of the trova artists taught by Pepe Sánchez

Pepe Sánchez (trova)

Pepe Sánchez, born José Sánchez , was a Cuban musician, singer and composer. He is known as the father of the trova style and the creator of the Cuban bolero....

. Garay was one of the four greats of the trova. Sindo Garay was Spanish & Arawkan descendant. He was Indo-Cuban.

Life & work

Garay was the most outstanding composer of trova songs, and his best have been sung and recorded many times. Perla marina, Adios a La Habana, Mujer bayamesa, El huracan y la palma, Guarina and many others are now part of Cuba's heritage. Garay was also musically illiterate – in fact, he only taught himself the alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...

 at 16 – but in his case not only were scores transcribed by others, but there are recordings as well.

For a long period he sang in a duo with his eldest son Guarionex; he had two other sons and a daughter, and gave them all Indian names.

In the 1890s Garay got involved in the Cuban War of Independence

Cuban War of Independence

Cuban War of Independence was the last of three liberation wars that Cuba fought against Spain, the other two being the Ten Years' War and the Little War...

, and decided a stay in Hispaniola

Hispaniola

Hispaniola is a major island in the Caribbean, containing the two sovereign states of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The island is located between the islands of Cuba to the west and Puerto Rico to the east, within the hurricane belt...

 (Haiti

Haiti

Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

 and Dominican Republic

Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...

) would be a good idea. It was, and he came back with a wife. Garay settled in Havana in 1906, and in 1926 joined Rita Montaner

Rita Montaner

Rita Montaner, born Rita Aurelia Fulcida Montaner y Facenda , was a Cuban singer, pianist, actress and star of stage, film, radio and television. In Cuban parlance, she was a vedette , and she was well known in Mexico City, Paris, Miami and New York, where she performed, filmed and recorded on...

 and others to visit Paris, spending three months there singing his songs. He broadcast on radio, made recordings and survived into modern times. He used to say "Not many men have shaken hands with both Jose Marti

José Martí

José Julián Martí Pérez was a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. In his short life he was a poet, an essayist, a journalist, a revolutionary philosopher, a translator, a professor, a publisher, and a political theorist. He was also a part of the Cuban...

 and Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...

!" Carlos Puebla

Carlos Puebla

Carlos Manuel Puebla was a Cuban singer, guitarist, and composer. He was a member of the old trova movement who specialized in boleros and nationalistic songs.- Biography :...

, whose life spanned the old and the new trova, told a good joke about him: "Sindo celebrated his 100th birthday several times – in fact, whenever he was short of money!"