Twenty years documenting a song movement, from inside the room.
The Nueva Trova is the Cuban song movement that emerged publicly in February 1967 and went on to define the sound and the argument of several generations: Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Noel Nicola, Vicente and Santiago Feliú, and the three waves of songwriters who followed them. It is studied in Latin American departments, in ethnomusicology and in cultural history.
Between 2001 and 2019 Antonio López Sánchez published three books on it. He is not a musician. He is a journalist with a degree in Social Communication from the University of Havana who spent two decades interviewing the people who made this music, writing about their records in the Cuban cultural press, and, on occasion, reading his own poems on stage between their guitars.
The three books do not repeat each other. Each one asks a question the previous one left open.
2001
The author's first book, and a history of the movement told with the voices of its own protagonists, from its public appearance in February 1967 onwards. It reads the three successive waves of songwriters, what separates them and what they share, and it argues that the guitar remained the centre of gravity even when other instruments arrived. Written close to the source, with interviews given by the founders themselves.
2008
Working women songwriters speak about the place they, and the women before them, have held in Cuban song. Alongside them the book carries two specialists: Isabel Moya on gender and the musicographer Lino Betancourt. For a gender studies or Latin American music list this is a primary source in interview form, and there is very little like it in any language.
2019
Which woman are our troubadours singing to? Have the women in those sung portraits changed, or grown? The book reads the lyrics as a running argument with Cuban society and follows what they say about women entering public life, about sexuality inside and outside couples, about sex work, about breakups and infidelity, and about homosexual love. It is the most directly citable of the three for a university press, and the one that travels furthest from Cuba.
The research was not done from a distance. The author was also invited into the movement's own spaces, and the site keeps the recordings that survive.
World rights outside Cuba are available for all three titles, separately or as a set. The three together make a twenty-year account of one movement, written from inside it, which is a stronger proposition than any of them alone.
These are the shortest books to bring into English on this list: essays and interviews rather than novels, and a subject with a defined academic readership. Full manuscripts and synopses are available on request.