Here in ExpoFlamencoWe attended the performance of Manuel Gerena at the Main Theatre of Puerto Real, Organized by the Republican Athenaeum from this municipality in Cádiz. As the president of this organization stated, Elena RomeroIn an eloquent speech that opened the evening, the meeting was conceived as a celebration of a peaceful April and, at the same time, as a firm protest against the current wars that continue to devour the world.
After the performances of the chirigota The Ken And from a ballad singer, the famous flamenco singer emerged, whose career was framed from the beginning by his well-known courage in the fight for democracy against the tyranny of a Franco regime whose soulless repressive measures failed to silence him.
Gerena opened with fandangos, delivering a performance of absolute commitment and striking vocal power that held the audience in suspense. Far from showing any signs of age, his singing retained remarkable expressive strength, grounded in a direct and unembellished delivery.
The guitarist's accompaniment Juan Ignacio González It proved ideal, not only for its technical proficiency, but also for its ability to sustain and underscore the inflections of Gerena's discourse. The guitar did not merely accompany, but rather articulated a sonic space that allowed for the organic integration of the singer's spoken interventions, in which he recounted episodes and reflections on Francoist repression.
"Manuel Gerena began with fandangos, delivering a performance of absolute commitment and power that left the theater breathless. Far from showing the passage of time, his cante He maintained a remarkable expressive firmness, sustained by a clear and direct way of speaking, without concessions.
This memory, far from being contrived, is rooted in childhood experiences of oppression. When he was ten years old, Gerena left school to work in the fields of La Puebla de Cazalla. It was then that his first letrillas began to take shape, born out of the harsh experience of working from sunrise to sunset under the watch of a mounted overseer:
The horse's shadow bothered me,
even though the sun's rays
They were burning behind me.
These early verses not only anticipate an emerging artistic sensibility, but also reveal the seeds of a committed form of cante in which personal experience is transformed into collective protest.
Both his singing and his anecdotes transported the audience to a recent chapter of Spanish history that, all too often, seems to fade into oblivion. A time when democracy was labeled “organic”—a fiction sustained by the grandiloquent and ultimately hollow rhetoric of Francoism. In contrast, Gerena’s voice stands as a testament to those artists who actively contributed to the struggle for the freedoms we enjoy today—at least for the time being.
Credits
recital of cante by Manuel Gerena
Main Theatre of Puerto Real, Cadiz
April 10th 2026
CanteManuel Gerena
Guitar: Juan Ignacio González
Presenter: Tyler Barbour
