La Navidad was a settlement that Christopher Columbus and his men established in present day Haiti in 1492 from the remains of the Spanish ship, the Santa María. La Navidad was the first European colony established in the New World though it was destroyed the following year.

The building of La Navidad

Columbus called the colony La Navidad, Christmas, because it was founded on Christmas Day. He appointed Diego de Arana, the cousin of his Córdoba mistress, as governor of the settlement.

On Friday, January 4, 1493, Columbus set sail in the Niña in search of the third ship in the fleet, the Pinta. The Pinta was commanded by Martín Alonzo Pinzón, and had been absent for six weeks. On the night of November 21, the caravel Pinta had vanished into the darkness off the coast of Cuba, and in his journal Columbus accused Pinzón of deliberately having separated the Pinta from the other ships in order to beat the admiral to the rich sources of gold which Columbus imagined were in the immediate area. Even more disquieting was his fear that Pinzón might break for Spain in the fast-sailing Pinta to be the first to bring news of the discovery to the Catholic Monarchs and to “tell them lies” about the admiral’s conduct of the expedition. On Sunday morning, January 6, 1493, the missing Pinta was spotted approaching from the east, and after a heated argument between the two men, the fleet returned to gather people and supplies for a return voyage.

Later years

Columbus decided to build a settlement farther east in the present day Dominican Republic and named it La Isabela after Queen Isabella.

Rediscovery

References

Category:1492 establishments Category:Populated places in Haiti Category:History of Haiti Category:Populated places established in the 1490s Category:Spanish colonization of the Americas Category:Former Spanish colonies Category:Spanish West Indies

Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez (born November 29, 1946 in San Antonio de los Baños) is a Cuban musician, and a leader of the nueva trova movement.

He is considered Cuba's best known folk singer and known for his highly eloquent and symbolic lyrics. Many of his songs have become classics in Latin American music, such as Ojalá, Playa Girón, Unicornio and La maza. He has released nearly 20 albums.

Rodríguez, musically and politically, is a symbol of the Latin American left wing. His lyrics are notably introspective. His songs combine romanticism, love (even eroticism), revolutionary politics, and idealism.

Biography

When the Revolution led by Fidel Castro triumphed in January 1959, Rodríguez was only 13 years old, and, like most Cubans of his generation, became involved in the new Revolutionary enthusiasm. He participated in the Literacy Campaign held in 1961, and then started working as a comics designer in a magazine. During this period a friend of his, Lázaro Fundora, taught him how to play the guitar.

Guitar playing took a major role in his life while he was doing his military service in the army, during 1964, but it wasn't until 1967, with his first television experience, that he started to become well known and influential among Cuban revolutionary youth. With pro-revolution yet very independent lyrics (together with his very informal dress code), Rodríguez soon attracted the animosity of some members of the new Culture Ministry, which was devoted to the eradication of the United States' influence in Cuban culture. In this context, a very important role was played by the cultural institution Casa de las Américas and its then director Haydée Santamaría, the former a respected revolutionary who participated in the Moncada barracks assault of 1953 and sister of Abel Santamaría, who was tortured and killed after the failure of the assault. Haydée Santamaría became a protective mother-figure of the young composers and of several of his colleagues at the time. Casa de las Américas became the home not only for the new Cuban trovadores but also for many other Latin Americans on the left. It was in this institution that Rodríguez met Pablo Milanés, and Noel Nicola, who along with Rodriguez would become the most famous nueva trova singers and composers.

In 1969, for almost five months, he worked as part of the crew on the fishing boat Playa Girón, and during this fertile episode he wrote 62 songs, among which are the famous "Ojalá" and "Playa Girón." The lyrics and music of these songs became a book named Canciones del Mar. In 1976, he decided to join Cuban troops in Angola, playing for the soldiers.

After more than 40 years of artistic work, Rodríguez has now written a vast number of songs and poems (said to be between 500 and more than one thousand), many of which have never been set to music and probably never will be. Although his musical knowledge has been continuously increasing (counting among his teachers the famous Cuban composer Leo Brouwer), he is more widely praised for the poetry in his songs than for the accompanying music. His lyrics are a staple of leftist culture throughout the whole Spanish-speaking world, and he has been banned from the media during several of the dictatorial regimes that ruled Latin America in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

His debut album was Dias y Flores, launched in 1975. Al Final de Este Viaje and Cuando Digo Futuro feature songs he composed before Dias y Flores. He reached international popularity in the early 1980s with Rabo de Nube and, in particular, Unicornio. In the early part of his career his work displayed a fair amount of revolutionary optimism. Mujeres, released in 1979, is in contrast a romantic and highly intimist album. In the middle of his career, Silvio Rodriguez experimented with sounds and rhythms departing from his trademark acoustic guitar, accompanied by the group Afrocuba (e.g. in Causas y Azares). At maturity, Silvio Rodriguez thoroughly purified his sound through a return to acoustic guitar, great care and sophistication in the voice, and exclusive control of the production process from beginning to end. His lyrics became more introspective, at times even self-absorbed or self-justifying, expressing melancholic longings about the shortcomings of real-life socialism in Cuba while vindicating idealism and revolutionary hope amongst the youth. The trilogy, called Silvio, Rodriguez, and Dominguez (his first name, his father's last name, his mother's last name) displays sound artistic talent. The doubts, absent in the early part of his career, also correspond to the fall of communism worldwide and the so-called Special Period in Cuba. An unnoticed recurrent theme in the lyrics of the early part of his career is that of death, particularly although not only as associated with guerrilla warfare. In contrast to the explicitness of his early songs and political positions, there was a displacement of emphasis in his later years toward fantasy and dreams. Both, however, are about an alternative that is not present but is called for, or what Laclau would call a longing for a "missing fullness". This is true politically, romantically, and existentially. In a similar way, the unusual confessional tone of many of his songs allows for an unorthodox combination of transgression, eroticism, longing, and at times (probably accurate) self-deprecation in many of his lyrics.

The entire work of Silvio Rodriguez offers an intimate and introspective window into the life cycle of the artist. If the lyrics of the early part of his career are about revolutionary enthusiasm, love encounters and disappointments, as well as sensual desire, and if the middle-aged Silvio is more self-questioning, often looking backward; his most recent albums, such as Cita Con Angeles, talk in part about his life as a grandfather and has a certain focus on children, while Erase Que Se Era is the release (with all the means that come with being an established artist) of songs written early in his youth but never previously recorded. Mariposas also featured two classics composed in his youth.

Silvio Rodriguez stands out in the Spanish-speaking world for the intimacy and subtlety of his lyrics, as well as for his acoustic melodies and "chord picking." He is particularly popular amongst intellectual circles of the left in Latin America and Spain. He has also often served as Cuban cultural emissary in events of solidarity, whether in Chile (Silvio Rodriguez in Chile, 1991) or Argentina (En Vivo en Argentina, recorded in 1984), both massive concerts given shortly after the fall of the right-wing dictatorships. Cuban flags are always conspicuous during his concerts in the crowd.

In 2007, he received a doctorate honoris causa from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Peru. (Lima, Peru).

Rodriguez has been a major influence on many folk artists, including the Swedish artist José González.

U.S. Appearance

Discography

References

External links

Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:Cuban male singers Category:Cuban musicians Category:Cuban communists Category:Cuban people of Spanish descent

Biography

Carlos

Critical reception

Discography

References

Biography

When he was 18 he went to Buenos Aires to try his luck. There he became acquainted with Litto Nebbia and Gustavo Santaolalla, who found him some chances to play as an opening act for better-known musicians.

He got to play with different people, including David Lebón, and in the Buenos Aires Rock Festival in 1971, 1972, and 1973. That same year his first album was released, recorded independently with Santaolalla during the previous two years. Its main song was En el país de la libertad ("In the country of freedom"), and the record acquired certain recognition.

A year later, the second LP La Banda de los Caballos Cansados ("The Tired Horses' Band"), followed the same style of trying to "understand the destiny of the peoples, the reason of injustice" (entender el destino de los pueblos, el por qué de las injusticias).

León had a series of concerts with a stable group of musicians, as well as other presentations with Porsuigieco, the supergroup formed with Raúl Porchetto, Charly García, Nito Mestre and María Rosa Yorio. They had relative success and released an eponymous record in 1976.

At the same time, he continued to play with his other group and had a contract for two shows, but the breakup of the band forced him to perform solo at those shows. The audience seemed to like the one-man show, and Gieco decided to continue his path alone. In 1976 he released El Fantasma de Canterville ("The Ghost of Canterville"). The record suffered a great deal of censorship from the military government; he had to change the lyrics of six songs and remove three others altogether. Nevertheless, the record was a success, and he had concerts not only around Argentina but also in other countries of South America. Two years later he released IV LP, with one of his most famous songs: Sólo le pido a Dios ("I only ask of God"). Because of the political situation in Argentina, he moved to Los Angeles, California for a year.

In 1981 he had a concert in Buenos Aires alone on stage, with a guitar, harmonica, and charango. He then released Pensar en nada ("To Think About Nothing"). That same year he started a 3-year, 110,000-kilometre-long series of independent concerts all over Argentina, playing for a total of 420,000 people. He gathered material from the different places he visited in during the tour, and recorded in Buenos Aires with various autochthonous musicians the first volume of De Ushuaia a La Quiaca ("From Ushuaia to La Quiaca") in 1985. The following De Ushuaia a La Quiaca 2 and De Ushuaia a La Quiaca 3 were recorded in a mobile studio in different locations of the country.

In 1985 he went to Moscow for the 12th "World Youth and Students' Festival" alongside Juan Carlos Baglietto and Litto Nebbia representing Argentina. He also had concerts in Germany with his good friend Mercedes Sosa, and upon his return to Argentina he had another tour around the country during 1986. In 1987 he returned to Germany for seven concerts, including that of Berlin's Political Song Festival.

When he returned, he performed for free in two concerts: for 40,000 spectators at the National Flag Memorial in Rosario, and for 35,000 in Buenos Aires. At Boca Juniors' Stadium he did a concert with Pablo Milanés and Chico Buarque, and guest musicians Mercedes Sosa, Fito Páez, Nito Mestre, Juan Carlos Baglietto and Sixto Palavecino. At the end of the year he went on a world tour that included countries such as Mexico, Peru, Brasil, Sweden, Germany and Denmark.

In 1988 he performed in Germany and Austria. Back in Argentina he participated in the final concert of the Amnesty International Human Rights Now! Tour at River Plate Stadium, with Charly García, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and others.

After eight years of touring, Semillas del corazón ("Seeds of the heart") of 1989 marked his return to the studio. That same year he performed at the Teatro Ópera in Buenos Aires with United States folk legend Pete Seeger, material that was edited in the 1990 Concierto en vivo. The following year, Seeger asked him to join a tour that took him to Washington, D.C., Boston and New York City. There he played with David Byrne, whom he had already met in Buenos Aires shortly before.

In 1992 he played with Milton Nascimento, Mercedes Sosa, Os Paralamas do Sucesso, Gilberto Gil and Rubén Rada at the inauguration of the Latin American Parliament in São Paulo. He also released Mensajes del Alma ("Messages of the Soul").

In 1994 he edited Desenchufado ("Unplugged"), an ironic name mocking the popular MTV unplugged concerts, with a recompilation of old songs. Even though the 1997 Los Orozco had a few songs that did not follow Gieco's folkloric past, the rest of the disc had his style, and many guest musicians participated in the recording, among them Mercedes Sosa, Ricardo Mollo (Divididos), Santaolalla and Ricardo Iorio.

Also in 1997 he participated in the 20 year memorial concert for the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, with bands such as Divididos, Las Pelotas, La Renga, Los Piojos, and Attaque 77.

Discography

External links

Category:1951 births Category:Living people Category:People from Santa Fe Province Category:Argentine musicians

José Luis Perales (born January 28, 1945 in Castejón, Cuenca Province) is a Spanish singer-songwriter and composer who is very popular in Spain and Latin America. He has performed some of his extensive work at Carnegie Hall, New York.

Biography

Although it was difficult for Perales to leave his job, and dedicate himself to his new career, he was able to find a way to integrate his musical career into his life. He still lives in Castejón with his wife Manuela, son Pablo, and daughter Maria.

Perales has recorded 27 albums with 50 million copies sold worldwide. His compositions have been recorded by singers such as Raphael, Rocío Jurado, Jeanette, Miguel Bosé, Isabel Pantoja, Julio Iglesias, Paloma San Basilio, Mocedades, La Oreja de Van Gogh, Ricardo Montaner and Marc Anthony, among others.

He has given concerts in Uruguay, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, United States, Brazil, Italy, France, and Portugal. Although Perales does not tour the United States often, when he does, his shows are immensely successful.

Perales' most popular singles are "Quisiera Decir tu Nombre" (I Would Like to Say Your Name), "¿Y Como es Él?" (And What Is He Like?) and "¿Que Pasará Mañana?" (What Will Happen Tomorrow?)

Discography

External links

Category:1945 births Category:Living people Category:People from Cuenca (province) Category:Spanish male singers Category:Spanish-language singers