The third La Bayamesa

In 1919, the musician and composer, Sindo Garay y Garcia, who, as a boy, carried messages between units of the Cuban Liberation Army during the Ten Years’ War, visited Bayamo for the first time.  He spent the night in the house of a friend and woke to see the walls of the patio still blackened by the burning of Bayamo in 1868.  Inspired, he wrote the words to a song which he, as had others in the past, called La Bayamesa.  He wrote the melody later and played it for the first time in the Teatro Bayamo.

You can hear Garay’s La Bayamesa by clicking the link below or by listening to the Bueno Vista Social Club recording, on which it is performed by Compay Segundo.  There it says: La Bayamesa was written by the great bohemian troubadour Sindo Garay.  Composed in the criolla rhythm, it is a patriotic hymn to the Republic.  The lyrics tell the story of a woman from Bayamo, the first town to be liberated in the revolutionary war of 1868, who burns her house rather than let it fall into the hands of the Spanish.