Hasta Siempre, Comandante

The story

"Hasta Siempre, Comandante" ("Until Forever, Commander"), often simply "Hasta Siempre", was written in 1965 by the Cuban composer Carlos Puebla. Its words answer the farewell letter that Che Guevara, a commander of the Cuban Revolution, left when he departed Cuba to spread revolution in the Congo and later in Bolivia, where he was captured and killed. The song recalls moments of the Cuban Revolution and presents Guevara and his part in it in admiring terms; its title takes part of Guevara's well-known motto "¡Hasta la victoria siempre!" ("Until victory, always!"). In the manner of Cuban and Caribbean song, it has a refrain and five quatrains of eight-syllable lines rhyming ABBA.

The song became famous after Guevara's death, when many left-leaning artists recorded their own versions; more than two hundred are known, among them Compay Segundo, Soledad Bravo, Silvio Rodríguez, Robert Wyatt, Wolf Biermann and Maria Farantouri. Some are often credited to the wrong singers: Puebla's own recording is sometimes attributed to Víctor Jara, who never sang it. The most commercially successful version, by the French singer Nathalie Cardone, produced by Laurent Boutonnat, reached number two in France and spent 38 weeks on the French charts; the Argentine model Inés Rivero released a rival version at the same time.

What it says

A song of farewell and homage to Che Guevara; the song presents him and his role as a revolutionary commander with admiration. Its mood is solemn.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so the Institute does not print them itself: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.