Photo: Daniel Boczarski/The Recording Academy/Getty Images
Angela Alvarez is a Cuban singer and songwriter, who has always confessed that her love for music was born when she was very young, but currently, thanks to the help of one of her grandchildren, the musician and composer Carlos José Álvarez, she managed to jump to professional music.
Historically, Álvarez achieved a Latin Grammy nomination at age 95having managed to record his first album just in 2021.
In recent years, the Cuban singer offered their first concert at the iconic Ávalon theater of the Angels.
He learned to play guitar and compose when he was 15 years old, but his father did not agree with his dream of dedicating himself to music, so he forgot about it for a while.
In May 1962 he had to make a key decision in his life, he had to see how their four youngest children left Cuba alone to Miami, because an airport worker denied him permission to board the plane.
Angela’s family had made the decision to flee the island because of the communist trend that the revolution was on, but their children had to undertake the journey alone and were taken in by “Operation Peter Pan”, which allowed minors to enter the United States alone.
Three months later, Angela was able to travelbut years would pass before he could live with his children on the same roof, since he did not have a job.
I didn’t know how to speak English so she had to take any job like picking tomatoes in the fields or cleaning offices at night.
Over time, she was able to visit her children at the orphanage in the town of Pueblo, Colorado.
The family reunification It happened a few years later, thanks to Álvarez, through a friend, sending a letter to the then president of Mexico, Adolfo López Mateos, who was helping Cuban families leave the island.
In that letter he asked for power take her husband out of Cuba, who was an engineer and worked in the sugar industry, giving him a job and a house in Mexico; then Álvarez and his children moved with him to the Aztec nation.
But, exile and longing for Cuba It is always present in the heart of Álvarez, something that is manifested in his songs such as “Un canto a mi Cuba”, “Romper el yugo” or “Añoranzas”.
The tragedy also had an impact on her work, her husband died in 1977 of cancer, for whom she wrote the song “Camino sin direction” and later, after the death of her daughter María for the same cause, she composed a song that bears her name.
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