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"Hasta Siempre, Comandante", or simply "Hasta Siempre", is a 1965 song by Cuban composer Carlos Puebla. The song's lyrics are a reply to revolutionary Che Guevara's farewell letter when he left Cuba, in order to foster revolution in the Congo and later Bolivia, where he was captured and killed.
Contents
The lyrics recount key moments of the Cuban Revolution, describing Che Guevara and his role as a revolutionary commander. The song became iconic after Guevara's death, and many left-leaning artists did their own cover versions of the song afterwards. The title is a part of Guevara's well known saying "¡Hasta la victoria siempre!" ("Until victory, always!"). The song was re-released by Nathalie Cardone in 1997.
Metrical structure
Like many of the songs of the author and in line with the tradition of the Cuban and Caribbean music, the song consists of a refrain plus a series of five verses (quatrain), rhyming ABBA, with each line written in octosyllabic verse.
Lyrics
There are more than 200 versions of this song. The song has also been covered by Compay Segundo, Soledad Bravo, Óscar Chávez, Nathalie Cardone, Robert Wyatt, Nomadi, Inés Rivero, Silvio Rodríguez, Ángel Parra, Celso Piña, Veronica Rapella (whose performance is attributed to Joan Baez by a common mistake), Rolando Alarcón, Los Olimareños, Maria Farantouri, Jan Garbarek, Wolf Biermann, Boikot, Los Calchakis (commonly wrongly attributed to Buena Vista Social Club), George Dalaras, Giovanni Mirabassi and Al Di Meola, Ahmet Koç, Mohsen Namjoo, Enrique Bunbury, Verasy, Interitus Dei among others. Although Victor Jara never sang this song, many attribute the Carlos Puebla's version to him by mistake. The first 8 lines of the song has also been rendered as prologue to a melody song in a Malayalam socio-political movie entitled "Left Right Left" released in 2013, directed by Arun Kumar Aravind and composed by Gopi Sunder.