For a season in my life which coincided with the later half of the sixties, ‘Guantanamera’ reigned in the air. Nobody knew exactly what the word meant, let alone the Spanish lyrics. The song ambled out of the Rediffusion, the radio and turntables. It wasn’t that the music moved me to tears or grabbed me in a catatonic trance; the voices were not remarkable and the lyrics did not mean anything to one who did not know Spanish. But it somehow cut a groove in the memory; the freight of sorrow in the song was carried with dignity by the strong harmonies floating on melodious strings. The refrain suggested endurance in the face of adversity, a mantra which plugged deep into us. It was whistled in the streets, hummed in the lavatories and you could half expect the singers garbed in sombreros and ponchos to be sauntering and strumming among the Chinese, Malay and Indian faces of the neighbourhood in Tanglin Halt, where we lived at this time.

It wasn’t that the music moved me to tears or grabbed me in a catatonic trance; the voices were not remarkable and the lyrics did not mean anything to one who did not know Spanish. But it somehow cut a groove in the memory; the freight of sorrow in the song was carried with dignity by the strong harmonies floating on melodious strings.

There were of course the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’, The Carpenters’ rendition of ‘Mr Postman’ and other exciting sounds. At the marketplace in Tanglin Halt, they would set up a wooden stage and aspiring rockers would crank out the Beatles opus. Those were the courting days of my aunt and uncles and we were often whisked to the marketplace to act as chaperones. It was like a theme to the drama unfolding before me; Aunt Shirley, my father’s youngest sister, was petite, with an oval face, big eyes, curled lashes, sassy long hair. There was a string of wooers and with each change of the top twenty there seemed to be a change in boyfriend. Those were the days of ‘agogo’ and it thrilled me to see young women like my aunt in flowery minis and bell-bottomed hopeful young men shaking and rolling in the open space in front of the stage. Inevitably, when it came to the slower numbers, ‘Guantanamera’ took centrestage and the couples would close in demure embrace.

Nobody understood the lyrics, not even the Malay troupe singing it, I think. But its melancholy melody and the plangent sound of the words had a profoundly soothing effect. If the song was an enigma, the group’s name was even stranger. The Sandpipers. At an age when I was navigating language without the guidance of a dictionary, relying solely on guesswork (as I still do), the group’s name conjured up sand-dwellers on the beach, transmitting the strains through holes in the sand. Later I confused them with ‘The Sandman’, the song by the seventies group America.

Then one day the song vanished from the airwaves, displaced by new hits and then the music became different; the late sixties and early seventies were over. The age of disco, funk and less melodious sounds and meaningful lyrics. For years ‘Guantanamera’ languished in silence until a few weeks ago when it drifted back, as though it had been playing all the time in the back-chamber of my mind with the volume turned down, the Spanish words indistinguishable but not the less mesmerising. It is not the current and ironically American-fuelled revival of Cuban salsa or the militant anthem English football fans had turned the tune into that recalled it. The tune started playing again after I watched the 1994 film of the same name by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juna Carlos Tabio. Yoyita, a famous singer, on returning to Guantanamera, meets her old lover Candido but expires just as Candido is about to declare his undiminished love for her. This is when the Cuban road movie really kicks off. Adolfo, the husband of Yoyita’s niece and a zealous Communist bureaucrat, has engineered a corpse transportation plan to save the state fuel. Yoyita is to be relayed from town to town, changing hearse as each town is supposed to supply the means of transport for the different stages of the procession to Havana. The cross-country cortege provides ample opportunities for escapades, misadventures, social and political satire and insights into the lives of ordinary Cubans.