El Cuarto de Tula
Buena Vista Social Club · 1997 · written by Sergio González Siaba, from the album Buena Vista Social Club
Tula fell asleep with a candle burning and her room caught fire. The whole neighborhood runs to help, and the band has a lot of fun with the double meaning.
The story
1.Alarm in the barrio
There's a commotion in the neighborhood: people are running, and the firefighters are on their way with their bells and sirens. Somebody asks what happened.
2.What happened
Tula's room has caught fire. She fell asleep and left the candle burning.
3.Everybody comes running
The singers call for help, and the help is the band: call Ibrahim Ferrer, here comes Eliades running to see the fire, someone go fetch more musicians. One of them tells a friend to grab a bucket, fill it with water and come put Tula's room out.
4.The joke
Along the way the song lets you in on its joke: maybe Tula is the one on fire, and what she really wants is someone to put that fire out. By the end the whole band is burning with her.
Key phrases
- “Al cuarto de Tula le cogió candela”Tula's room caught fireCandela is fire, and in Cuban slang it's also anything hot: a wild party, a lot of trouble, a person with a lot of heat. Coger candela, to catch fire, is where every double meaning in the song starts.
- “se quedó dormida y no apagó la vela”She fell asleep and didn't blow out the candleThe whole plot of the song, in one line.
- “se ha formado la corredera”They've kicked off a mad rushA corredera is a stampede, everyone running at once. The fire is the news of the neighborhood.
- “que le apaguen el fuego”She wants somebody to put out her fireThe wink in the song: maybe what's burning isn't the room.
Context
El Cuarto de Tula is a Cuban son by Sergio González Siaba. On the Buena Vista Social Club album (1997), the same Havana sessions that gave us Chan Chan, it's sung by Eliades Ochoa, and it runs past seven minutes.
The second half is a descarga, a jam: Ibrahim Ferrer and Manuel “Puntillita” Licea join Ochoa and take turns making up lines on the spot, and Barbarito Torres plays a wild solo on the laúd, a small Cuban lute. The timbales were played by a 13-year-old, Yulién Oviedo.
The improvised lines call out the musicians by name, so you're hearing the band joke about itself, live in the studio. The song later turned up in the film Training Day (2001).
On the dance floor
A bright, bouncy son, faster than Chan Chan. It's a song for smiling and playing with your partner, not for showing off.
The chorus keeps coming back with the room on fire. Once the descarga starts, the singers trade lines and the energy keeps climbing: that's the time for your turns.
Near the end, listen for the laúd solo: fast, bright and a little crazy, and a great moment for a shine.
This is our own retelling of the song, not its lyrics or a translation of them: the few short phrases quoted are there to explain what they mean. The song belongs to its writer, Sergio González Siaba.