npub196…q9gyj on Nostr: LIFE IS A CARNAVAL The most joyful song in Latin America was born out of a bombing. ...

LIFE IS A CARNAVAL

The most joyful song in Latin America was born out of a bombing.
On 18 July 1994, a bomb destroyed the AMIA building in Buenos Aires. Days later, an Argentine composer living in Caracas, Víctor Daniel, saw a woman on television who had lost her entire family in the explosion. He said he wanted to console her through the screen, to tell her nobody is alone. He sat down at the piano and wrote La vida es un carnaval.

He recorded it first with an orchestra in Venezuela and chose not to release it. He waited four years for the right voice to appear.
Every time it plays at a party, someone is answering a woman who lost everything.

The voice he was waiting for belonged to a Black, poor, Cuban woman.
Celia Cruz was born in 1925 in Santos Suárez, a working-class neighborhood of Havana. Her father, Simón, was a railway stoker: the man who feeds coal to the locomotive's fire. Fourteen people lived in that house on one modest wage. She was the second of four siblings and her chore was getting the little ones to sleep by singing to them. That's how she learned to sing: working.

Her father wanted her to be a schoolteacher, and she studied for it so as not to disappoint him. She quit before finishing.

When you hear that enormous voice, you're hearing the stoker's daughter. She didn't learn to project in a conservatory. She learned it rocking children to sleep in a crowded house.

What a woman!

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