The Street Vendor Cries of Havana
HAVANA TIMES – I remember my grandfather pausing in the doorway every time he heard the “Peanut Vendor” coming down the street. He didn’t always buy, but he never failed to listen. “That voice,” he would tell me, “dates back from 1927—but the man who invented it doesn’t even know it.” It was his way of teaching me that the streets of Cuba are full of history—and that history is often told through street cries.
The pregon is the soundtrack of daily resistance. It is a tradition that officially began in 1523 in Santiago de Cuba, with an announcement about the removal of a Spanish governor. Over the centuries it moved from public squares into the alleyways, becoming a form of folk art.
What my grandfather called “the symphony of the street” had its own movements and its masters. The great Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet explained that a true pregón is defined by two musical features inherited from Africa: melisma (stretching a single syllable over several notes, as in flamenco singing) and the appoggiatura, a sharp, cutting flourish at the end.
From the Street to the Stage
That innate musicality was so powerful that composers couldn’t resist it. From the anonymous cries of street vendors came immortal classics. “El Manisero” (“The Peanut Vendor”), by Moisés Simons, is the perfect example—a pregón from an unknown peanut seller. Rita Montaner brought it to the theaters, and it later became the first global hit of Cuban music.
The pregon became a genre in its own right. Musicologist Cristobal Diaz Ayala compiled a list of nearly 500 popular songs based on street cries—from “El Yerberito Moderno,” immortalized by Celia Cruz, to “Frutas del Caney,” a sonic map of the island’s flavors.
More Than an Announcement—A Conversation
For my grandfather, a good pregon was not a monologue but the beginning of a conversation with the neighborhood. “¡Se va el dulcerito, se va…!” (“The sweet seller is leaving!”) didn’t just announce the arrival of sweets; it was also a question thrown into the air: “Does anyone need me?”
Today, that tradition struggles to survive. In Havana’s Historic Center, street vendors are still encouraged, and in Santiago de Cuba an annual Festival del Pregón keeps the spirit alive. But as my grandfather used to say with nostalgia, many of the new pregones are shrill shouts, blasted through loud speakers, acking the musicality and wit of the old ones.
Even so, the essence endures. The tradition reinvents itself in the verses of many troubadours, and in the creativity of street vendors who, against all odds, still prefer to sing their wares rather than shout them.
In the end, the pregon is like Cuba itself: it resists, adapts, and finds in music the strength to carry on.