To me the film is much more than just a dark comedy or a scathing satire of life under Castro. It is about how life carries on, how the past is relayed and memories connected through a chain of synapses. The voice-over and music stitch the disparate episodes and broken memories into what in the end turns out to be a redemptive journey.

A few days after watching the film, I saw the old Sandpipers record in a St Vincent de Paul shop. The poncho-wearing quartet looked more Asian than Caucasian. It was a serendipitous find; then the conviction strengthened that there was something more than coincidence stitching random events into some coherent pattern. Whatever it was, I embraced this emissary from the past and told the septuagenarian volunteer over the counter the story. She smiled indulgently and wished me good listening.

The song is braided with the dazzle of afternoon light on the field in front of the block of flats, the feeling of hope, of familial intimacy… For me the song will always bring back the moment when I first became aware of the complex world that grown-ups inhabit, my first inkling of the carousel of romance, heart-break and death, the alloy of happiness and pain in equal measures.

As I read the lyrics on the insert, it began to make a little sense, though I had to resort to an internet search to get the translation and history of the song. The song is now officially attributed to Jose Fernandez Diaz, though many argue it was already widely sung by Cuban peasants before Diaz appropriated it for his radio program. Diaz used it as a signature tune and its melody as a scaffolding for comments on daily events. Over time, ‘Guantanamera’ became a vehicle for expressing romantic and patriotic sentiments or for social and political satire, in Cuba and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. The original lyrics are purportedly about a girl from Guantanamo who had broken Diaz’s heart. I wonder if the inmates of Guantanamo have adapted it to their own needs or if the campaigners against American treatment of the detainees have invented their own protest song around it.

The song, its haunting tune, the catchy lyrics, has become inextricably linked with that tract of my child-hood spent in Tanglin Halt; hearing it again after all these years brings back the hoarded associations, and it is ‘yesterday once more,’ to quote the Carpenters. The song is braided with the dazzle of afternoon light on the field in front of the block of flats, the feeling of hope, of familial intimacy. Strangely, at the age of five those days were already dressed in a sentimental nostalgia, and my recollections now seem like memories of memories. For me the song will always bring back the moment when I first became aware of the complex world that grown-ups inhabit, my first inkling of the carousel of romance, heart-break and death, the alloy of happiness and pain in equal measures. It brings back the image of Aunt Shirley looking out each day for mail from Montreal, where her future husband was studying, and being attracted to another man. A few times we tagged along on her outings with this man. I was dimly aware that Aunt Shirley wanted my sister and me as a safety measure; she had sworn she would wait
for her fiancé’s return. Not that we minded; Aunt Shirley’s friend had a car and took us on our first rides. I could sense how happy she was, even though she must have felt miserable at being tempted.

The melancholy beauty of the melody evokes that amber tone of light, the captivating aroma compounded from an assortment of things: my grandmother’s cooking, the fragrances the women in the house wore, the spiced flavours from the Malay families three floors down, the bodies of the grown-ups around. In its mantra-like refrain, it brings back the heady days that my uncles and aunts lived through, all of us packed into that tiny flat in Tanglin Halt, three generations welded together, like the Cubans in their haberna. It was the early days of nationhood, and there was promise in the air. A lot happened during the time the song climbed, reigned, slid and lingered in the charts. The Rolling Stones came to Singapore. Long hair was banned and hippie travellers were turned back at customs. Uncle Andrew, Dad’s younger brother, left his fiancée, a pretty lady whom we all liked. National service was introduced with Uncle Heng, Grannny’s youngest child, as one of the first servicemen. He would return from camp with a duffel bag and spend the entire weekend starching and ironing his uniform, waxing and polishing his boots. I also remember seeing death for the first time. It was our neighbour, a gentle Peranakan man who smoked his pipe in the corridor. I fell in love with the fragrant bourbon-laced tobacco smell and the idea of the pipe, a dream I realised thirty years later when I bought my own Peterson pipe in Dublin. Maybe it was not him but his mother whose face in the casket we filed past in the nearby Blessed Sacrament Church. What have remained are the sweet wreaths and the sweet scent of the pipe tobacco, the air bright with romance blossoming and my family still whole, together.

I remember a car ride, in Uncle Andrew’s Ford, breezing on the Pasir Panjang Road. It could be Cuba, with the coconut palms and the smell of the sea. We were visiting my grandmother’s sua teng friends in a seaside kampong. We had the beach on our left and coconut trees moving at a smooth clip. There was the bucolic kampong life at the end of the ride: we would play gaseng (Malay top) and perhaps be taken out to sea. But now we are ‘eating air’ (Chinese idiom for ‘relishing the drive’). The radio was on and inevitably it was ‘Guantanamera’. I did not know who Castro or Che Guevera was, but the road unreeling became one with the song, carrying us forward, the unknown country faraway blending with the Atlantis that one has loved and lost, the words like a chant of faith, an inexpli-cable happiness that life is worth living despite the sorrows: ‘Guantanamera/ Guajira Guantanamera/ Guantanamera/ Guajira Guantanamera.’