The Saga of a Song: Authorship and Ownership in the Case of "Guantanamera"

The Saga of a Song:

Authorship and Ownership in the Case of "Guantanamera"

This article constitutes a case study in the interaction between a localized form of music-making that emerged from oral tradition on the periphery of the Euro-American commercial mainstream and the dramatically expanded and globalized commercial music industry of the latter twentieth century. Some such encounters, of course, have resulted in the effective extinction of local traditions. In other cases, however, local genres, songs, or practices have evolved or been absorbed into modern commercial popular ones, in ways that may be at once organic and beset with tensions. Such tensions may be particularly overt when songs circulate "schizophonically" on the global music market and generate massive profits for parties other than their creators. This essay looks at a particular instance of such an encounter, involving the evidently step-by-step and collective evolution of what became a renowned commercial popular song, "Guantanamera," and the subsequent and ongoing disputes regarding the song's ownership. The popularity of the song and the detail with which its evolution can be hypothetically reconstructed make it a somewhat unique case, of interest in itself. While I do not intend to definitively resolve the question of authorship, I do review and expand upon the competing claims and attempt to construct a plausible evolution for the song, whose incremental and sequential evolution sheds light on more general processes of oral-tradition composition. Further, I outline the major contestations regarding the song's ownership and suggest how these reflect competing and changing conceptions of intellectual property rights.

The song "Guantanamera" is undoubtedly the most popular song to emerge from Cuba, and must also be ranked as one of the most familiar melodies in the world. Since its popularization in Cuba in the 1930s, it has been recorded innumerable times,¹ and has become a sort of icon of Cuban popular culture. Although having certain associations with "folk" music, "Guantanamera," far from being a folk song in the public domain, is also a copyrighted, legally protected composition. Accordingly, its mass-mediated renditions have collectively generated prodigious sums of money. Disputes about the origin of the song have also generated ongoing lawsuits and considerable profits for the lawyers involved. Indeed, the "saga" of the song is one not only of its rise to worldwide renown, but also of decades of contestation regarding the circumstances of its authorship and the question of who deserves the profits it accrues. The controversies have also generated a fair amount of journalistic literature and legal reports. These, however, despite their quantity, leave several questions unresolved and, more importantly, do not attempt to address what from a scholarly perspective might constitute the most interesting and significant aspects of the case. The saga also comprises the way in which the song's status has been subject to different socio-economic milieus with incompatible notions of intellectual property rights.

"Guantanamera" at a Glance

The most standard account of "Guantanamera"'s origin—and in legal circles, the prevalent one—attributes the composition to Joseíto Fernández (José Fernández Díaz, 1908–79). Fernández had been a semi-professional singer of Cuban popular songs—bolero, son, guajira, danzonete, and guaracha—since his teenage years. In 1928, he later relat-ed, he was the singer in a sextet performing such genres. It was the custom for such groups to end performances with a catchy, familiar song. Fernández stated that to vary this practice, he composed a new melody—that of "Guantanamera"—to which he set various text refrains, such as "camagüeyana, divina camagüeyana," or "villaclareña, divina villaclareña" (divine woman of Camagüey/Villa Clara). From 1933 he further popularized this song as the signature tune of his regular broadcasts on a radio show. In 1934, he attested, he had settled on the chorus "guantanamera, guajira guantanamera," in various subsequent interviews giving different accounts...