Jorge Bolet in Camagüey

Manuel Reguera Saumell recalls Jorge Bolet in Camagüey

Born in the old Francisco sugar mill in Cuba, when Gerardo Machado began his first term in office (1928), Manuel Reguera Saumell studied Architecture at the University of Havana, worked on the Master Plan for Havana as an urban planner, wrote very successful plays and left Cuba more than half a century ago for Barcelona, ​​the land of his paternal ancestors, where he had already lived as a child.

His novel La noche era tan joven y nosotros tan hermosos ("The Night Was So Young and We Were So Beautiful") is probably one of the most revealing books of the years preceding the triumph of the 1959 Revolution, with an intrigue in which the homoerotic ingredient (the change of sexual orientation of one of the characters in the plot) makes him a sharp narrator in this field.

―When I was 14, I was sent to Camagüey to study at the Escolapios in this city. I was locked up for five years, during which the only contact with the outside world was the masses in the beautiful neo-Gothic church of the boarding school. I don't remember anything special about that school of priests. Everything was stupidly normal.

The only one who was a little different was Father Ullastres, who taught music and had noticed that I was a little different from my classmates, almost all of them country bumpkins (casi todos guajiros catetos), sent by their wealthy families to study at that institute. The only student who knew that Beethoven was not a player on the Almendares team was me.

That's why Father Ullastres took me to the Teatro Principal and there he introduced me to the great Jorge Bolet after he had played Chopin during an unforgettable concert (mid-1940s?). The Escolapios were known for having a very good basketball team, but I wasn't interested in sports.  Francisco was the name of the founder of the sugar factory, the Asturian Francisco Rionda Polledo, who built it in 1899 a few kilometers from the port of Guayabal, southeast of Camagüey, and which is now called Amancio Rodríguez. 

From an interview in January 2022, the year the author died