Search - Teresita Fernandez :: Mi Gatico Vinagrito

The Queen of Cuban Children Songs

Manuel Salinas | Cologne, Germany | 02/27/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It is always a difficult task for a Cuban exilee to write soberly about Cuban personalities who still live in the island, mostly if the person in question has not defined a clear distance to the communist regime. But in my opinion, the merits of Teresita Fernadez as a unique song writer and children entertainer clearly overtop any (voluntary or forced) ties with the tyranny.My generation -- I am 31 -- grew up singing the adorable songs of Teresita Fernandez. To hear their highly sensitive and fanciful words was like an escapade to fantasia. Songs about e.g. an oblivious rabbit, a little singing frog, a boy who finds an abandoned and freezing hopper and offers him a cup of cofee and a place on his pillow, and the song after which this collection is named: about a cat that is a good friend of mice and which "was so thin and ugly that I gave him the name of Vinagrito" (Little Vinegar).As a grown man now I realize which influence Teresita's songs played in the formation of my personality. In a system where children are forced to wear uniforms, to sing military hymns and to shout patriotic verdicts every day, being thus manipulated and involved in policy and the enacted hatred against the "enemies of the Revolution", her songs far away from all that were like an oasis of love and conviviality.There is another children song composer in Latin America, also a woman, and approximately the same generation of Teresita Fernandez, who left an indelible mark in my upbringing: the Argentinian Maria Elena Walsh. I wish the two great artists would sing together one day."