Victor Amela He spent years living intensively with Federico Garcia Lorca (1894-1936). The journalist said in his previous book:I could save Lorca– how grandfather managed to prevent the murder of the poet. A story that fits into the aura of tragedy that accompanies the poet throughout history. While promoting this book, Amela learned more details about Lorca’s 1930 trip to Cuba; he explored and traveled to a Caribbean island to find his mark.

“We know a lot about the tragic Lorca and Lorca from New York, but not about Lorca of Cuba, the happiest, most joyful, most vital, most sensual and most pleasant Lorca. This is what I’ve been doing for years. I read all the testimonies that I found about his stay in Cuba, and I went to Cuba to see the places he saw, eat what he ate, talk to people who knew the people Federico was with, ” Amela explains. Result of this trip if i get lost (Fate).

An adventure whose ultimate goal was to find a recording of Lorca’s voice. “The voice of Federico García Lorca, which everyone who heard him describes as amazing, magnetic, unique, incomparable, with bass, treble, with intonations… That’s how he let me know beautiful cucumberwho shared a room with him in a student dormitory and told me: I feel sorry for all of you who didn’t hear Federico’s voice“, – says Amela. A search process that the journalist does not consider complete, even after returning from Cuba.

But from the Caribbean, Amela returned with the happiest Lorca. “Ice cream, parties, cocktails, rum, dancing, music and sex,” he lists. “To deprive oneself of the spectacle of the world is to sin against lifeLorca wrote in Cuba,” Amela recalls. The Spanish poet arrived in Cuba by passing through New York, where he arrived “in a state close to suicide. He was left by his lover to marry a woman, he was abandoned by Salvador Dali, who told him that gypsy romance it sucks, and besides, Dali is going to Paris with Buñuel, and they andalusian dog which he considers an insult to his personality.”

From New York to Havana

He arrives in the city of skyscrapers at the most inopportune moment. crack 29, poor Federico was out of luck. He encounters people jumping out of office windows and crashing into the asphalt. He talks about this in a letter to his mother. He is in a bad mood, he is at the bottom of the well, he is sad. Everything is in disarray.” And the fruit of this moment is born Poet in New York. “This is an extraordinary, but very sad collection of poems, where he denounces the horrors of the world.” Before returning to Spain, Lorca received an invitation to travel to Havana to perform.

He falls in love with Havana, a mixture of Malaga and Cadiz. They speak their own language and it comes up.

Victor Amela

“He enters Havana and says again: “Spain”, “Peace of Andalusia”, this is the yellow of Cadiz, another degree, this is the pink of Seville bordering on carmine. This is the green of Granada with a slight fishy phosphorescence. He falls in love with Havana, a mixture of Malaga and Cadiz. They speak their own language and it comes up. Negroes sing in the streets. And he says that he recognizes in the rhythms of the Negroes the rhythms of the great Andalusian people. In other words, he identifies the cante jondo of flamenco and gypsies with the Negroes of Havana. And this happens because they begin to understand that there, being black, which means they are disadvantaged in the world, they are happy, ”says Amela.

For a journalist, this emotional shock had a great impact on the poet, who wrote from the island to his family: “If I get lost, they may look for me in Andalusia or Cuba.” “I think,” Amela continues, “that he understands that you can be happy on earth, even if you are one of the disadvantaged, even if you are a faggot. If you’re saying that blacks, being black, are happy to recognize themselves, then why can’t I be happy as a homosexual. I claim in this novel that for the first time in his life he forgives himself for homosexuality, ”he assures.

Apart from Lorca’s lack of lethargy on the island during his three months there, the journalist points out the importance of the fact that he wrote there. Public. “A play that Lorca describes as overtly homosexual and non-representational, which he predicted would take fifty years to complete, as it actually did. This is a work in which he says that homosexuality should be allowed. This is Federico saying that one day you can see love between two men and nothing will happen. I hope that day will come. He represents it in Cuba,” says the author. This is another voice of Lorca that Amela finds in Cuba, the voice of a poet who is accepted for who he is.

the shadow of death

Despite the happiness he experiences in his Cuban days, death haunts the poet, who, as Amela reflects in if i get lost- It is a shadow that does not leave his head. “He was afraid of death since childhood, there is even a moment when he says that one of the first panics in his life was in Vega de Granada, when one night he looked up, saw the stars, and it seemed to him that the stars were going to kill him He was always afraid of death, and look how curious or how sad, how tragic that on the day he was killed there was no moon, only stars. As if in childhood, he already had a premonition of an early and tragic death.

A feeling that does not leave even in moments of the greatest happiness. “Every time he was happy, he played the piano, sang, and everyone was happy around him, the more happiness he felt when suddenly what he called my dramashe descended because he was clearly aware that it was fleeting, that happiness would not last forever.