Good day dear readers, listeners and blog followers!

Today we shall look into a nice little composition called “Guararey de Pastora”, also well known simply as “Guarare”.

So, what does it mean?

In Cuba Guarare means to have an informal, secretive, relationship with someone, mostly outside of your “official” one, or at least wanting to have one with somebody specific.
Outside Cuba it can also mean “to have a beef with \ to be annoyed by somebody”.

This song, with its typical “doble jugada”, is a classic Changui composition, common to the musical groups of Guantanamo and other parts of Oriente in Cuba.

A typical traditional interpretation of the song would sound something like this:

The song was picked up by Los Van Vans’ Juan Formell during the early 1970s, when the group was touring Cuba, and performed in Guantanamo.
Formell once told in an interview that a band which was them on stage one day with Van Van played this song.
Formell liked it, and later on recreated it from memory, recording a Songo version on his 1974 album.

Despide the american blockade of Cuba at its peak during those years, the record somehow made it to the USA, and less than 2 years later, New York salsa musician Ray Barreto released a version of his own on his album “barreto”, released in 1975.
This version is the one most fans of Latin music outside Cuba are familiar with…

So, here you go… an interesting story about how a classic of an old genre gains world fame!