At EGREM recordings studios, we find the young repentista Role Ávalos with the backpack ready and the heart loaded with expectations and good energies to leave, together with the Oralitura Havana project, towards Guantanamo, invited to the Chocolate con Café Festival, so the conversation began there:

“It’s a time to show how human we are, I believe that this is the commitment of an artist, we are men and women, human beings, before being creators, before the aesthetic enjoyment, so in addition to taking verses, songs, joy for their lives, a distancing from their reality, we also carry some donation with great affection and a little light to their lives, from what little we have and from who we are. The best thing we can do, as artists, is to show our entire vocation to so much vulnerability, in the face of so much fragility and try to make them a little happier. ”

From the opening gala of the event, that excess of solidarity and Cuban feeling came true. Roly told us that Oralitura boys on their first visit to “the easternmost of the provinces, we have a show that has improvisation, music, Neorepentismo, which is a bit spoken repentismo, mixed with other manifestations in the scene. Pieces of the work we’ve been doing and that has become known thanks to programs like Al mediodia of the Cuban TV... "

However, he clarifies that the daily life of the project "is only the tip of the iceberg of what we do, because we still offer poetic improvisation workshops and diverse performances ..."

Role is an all-terrain. What is your training and what is your job, in addition to inspiring and telling the ten octosyllable verses of the Cuban decima as a flowing river?

“I come from many places: I am a theater art instructor, I am a graduate from social communication, I work like in four places at the same time because I am a corrector and editor at Trabajadores newspaper, in Aurora Editions, in Pimienta Editions, I am a literature specialist at Hermanos Saíz Association and well, I am also a writer. ”

Havana, like all cities of this island, gives birth to poets, repentistas, authors and singers, defenders of that tradition which is so Cuban, who thinks repentismo is a characteristic only of the country side of Cuba, needs to know a family and a Havana family:

“Precisely our project, Oralitura Havana and let’s say that my whole family on my mother’s side, we have dedicated ourselves to demonstrating the atypical of this phenomenon. My uncle, Alexis Díaz Pimienta, was born in Centro Habana and, although much of his formation and his growth in traditional repentismo was forged in Matanzas, he has established a more city, more urban movement and we can say that we also inherit it ”.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff