By: Santiago Romero, MSc.
Angel Miguel Alea was born in San Luis, land of Los Maceo, where the famous Guillermon Moncada fell in combat, the birthplace of many Cuban cultural personalities such as Felix B. Cagnet, Navarro Coello, Andres Houdayer and Enrique Bonne.
Of Catalan descent, Alea comes from a middle class family, he studied until graduating from high school, he worked as a skilled worker, then as a technician until he devoted himself to the studies of speech, applied linguistics and his love for motorcycles.
Radio Majaguabo is so familiar to him because in San Luis he not only had his childhood, but also his first steps as an announcer in a small radio station where there was a single RCA Victor microphone and a modest amplification in the so-called “CuatroEsquina”, so he took advantage and often appeared before the radio audience gathered there to hear the promotion of various household products.
“El Profe”, as many radio and television producers call him, today is proud of his artistic-professional and educational life, at least, that’s what I found out in an exclusive interview in his house in the Sueño neighborhood, very close to the foundational studios of Tele Rebelde, a genuinely local oriental channel which Angel joined after that foundational day of July 12, 1968.
Alea arrived at Tele Rebelde with a surprising maturity, because he was that restless young man, with avidity for reading, good memory and fluency in his expressions; thus he was only fourteen years old.
Today he remembers how the radio station in Santiago influenced him to join Tele Rebelde, his work as an announcer, first as a substitute, and then as a permanent worker at CMKD; at CMDH, on Garzón and Pedraita avenue, a plant owned by Esteban Hernández Gallardo who rented the CMKT premises, “Radio Libertad”; until the Cuban Broadcasting Institute was created on May 24, 1962, whose initial process of centralization of Cuban radio stations led to the creation of the Regional Radio Center in Santiago de Cuba.
Angel Miguel worked there, in that fabulous building of the Aguilera Cinema, where there were three radio stations, CMKW and two other instrumental stations, one with an announcer and the other without.
From the Regional Radio Center Alea went to CMKC, thanks to the announcer Ulises Escalona who invited him to give the hour in a radio program, and then asked him: “Do you dare to go to the provincial news? All this motivated him to take a speech course until he was approved in Havana. At the doyen CMKC he was better forged, because he had, in addition, another talented tutor: Antonio Lloga, very demanding in the locution of dramatized, informative, humorous, children’s and varied programs.
The Natural Amphitheater of Eastern Cuba
Little by little, Angel Miguel Alea grew as a young actor and announcer and unconformably took up the challenge and presented himself in the new Santiago channel Tele Rebelde, as an actor in the television show of Aventuras, at 7:30 in the evening, in “live” series such as Zorro….
Between cameras and microphones, the Profe was related to other consecrated in the Santiago television. Finally he joined studies in linguistic in the locution with the doctors, VitelioRuíz and EloínaMiyares.
Today he is retired. The Profe feels that he can still do much more, that is why he gets up early every morning to be updated with the International Tracking section, in charge of the author of this report; later, he calls for the debate, corrects some sentence, congratulates and waits for the transmission of Tele Turquino at noon and at 5 in the afternoon, with the Santiago magazine.
Before the first pause of this report, he remembers his dear friends Georgina Botta, Jose Raul Castillo; the younger ones like the unforgettable Ado Sanz, Ileana Navarro, in short, more than five generations of broadcasters, many of them, positioned abroad and in different Cuban provinces and who know well of the humble Profe: Angel Miguel Alea.
Backpacks on our backs carry dreams
