2023-07-30 12:02:00
When Sergio Reyes Santos confessed to the poet and researcher Juan Carlos García Guridi, president of Uneac in Mayabeque, that he wanted to compete in the Justo Vega 2023 National Sudden Prize, within the Cucalambeana Day, the latter’s response was forceful: ¨ if you go to the event, you have to come back with first place. Don’t go to anything else.
Sergio accepted the challenge, went to Las Tunas to cross the steel with top-level sudden poets and ended up on the top of the podium, just as he had promised Guridi when he summoned him to compete for all or nothing in the homeland. Juan Cristóbal Nápoles Fajardo’s girl (El Cucalambé).
The award and other conversations about poetry were the best pretext for arranging an interview with this sudden Bautense at the Antonio Maceo municipal library, in Bauta, where I decided, without much preamble, to give him a tenth:
Sergio Reyes, tall, / you are a fighting cock. / Whoever challenges you does not believe / that you will end up defeated. / In the locked combat / it springs from your throat / each verse that rises / your tenths towards the sun / bathed in the crucible / of an enchanting victory.
It’s just ten verses. But they serve to warm the verb of those who have neither a fixed time nor a specific place to launch into improvisation or take on a theme from the wide repertoire of traditional Mexican music, since their clear and powerful voice allow them to do so.
¨The contest was very tough, the rivals were very prestigious. They spent three days improvising hard, with three themes as a pretext: trains, the selfish and fame. In the case of the latter, they asked me if I would attack or defend her. I chose to defend her¨.
Sergio Reyes carries the magic of the pentagram and suddenness in his DNA. His paternal great-grandfather Juan Reyes, a native of Guira de Macurijes, in Pedro Betancourt, Matanzas, was a musician and also an impromptu performer. Like the mythical Cucalambé, one day he got lost in the confines of some road and was never heard from again.
His grandfather Inocente Santos Casanueva, who raised Sergio’s mother, had the habit of taking the future improviser to whatever guajiro point was assembled in Bauta, while his other grandfather, Julio González Cardoso from Las Tunas, remained linked to the universe of the tenth thanks to his canarian ancestors.
On shoulders like those of Manuel Aguilar, Gilberto Morales (Guambín), Claudio León and Jesusito Rodríguez, very outstanding figures in the art of suddenness, he found full support and was fortunate to debut as a suddentista poet, at Leonel Moreno’s house, together with one of the best Cuban improvisers: Juan Antonio Díaz.
Sergio has sung in almost all of Cuba, except on the Isla de la Juventud, where he would not take twice to say yes to any invitation, and enjoys not only the usual stages, but also giving serenades, a marvel that -curiously- is not part of the from a distant past, but also from today, since the same gift is given to fifteen-year-olds as to centenarians.
In addition to singing wherever he is summoned, playing a little tres, the lute and the guitar, he is a plumber, bricklayer, electrician, he was awarded one of the prizes in the Celestino García contest a few years ago for his work Pasión de barranca y río and admits his admiration for El Indio Naborí, Angelito Valiente, Pablo León, Homero Montesino, Omar Mirabal, Jesusito, Juan Antonio, Guambín and Luis Paz (Papillo), among other bards.
Of all his opponents on stage, he singles out Lázaro Gónzález as the most difficult, due to his immense charisma and, because by masterfully handling humor and throwing everything loosely, he knows how to escape any poetic “tie” in which Sergio entangles him. Of all his performances, he remembers one in La Curva sin Nombre, in the Los Jimaguas chalet, in Guira de Melena, before more than 700 spectators and with Juan Antonio as his rival.
At the age of 41, at the peak of his creative faculties, Sergio is waiting for a musical company that will welcome him, as has already happened with many of his colleagues, several of whom, deservedly, ended up forming part of the membership of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC).
And if we start with tenth grade, well with tenth grade we say goodbye, only this time, in a Self-portrait, it was the turn of the interviewee to define himself in the brief space of two spinels:
Emulator of humility, / affectionate son to respect, / confidential to the secret, / icon of honesty. / Fervor, volcano of friendship, / modest to the point of reason, / inheritance in tradition, / happy son of my Cuba, / Spanish and Yoruba mix / of cane, tobacco and rum.
Friend of my friends, / brother of my brothers, / furrow open between the grains / of affinity of shutters. / Happy eyes, witnesses/ of Cuban conviction. / River, palm and boardwalk, / jícara, canuto and guiro,/ ranchera and punto guajiro: / Martiano is my heart.
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