"Buh-luh-la-la-la, buh-la-la..." When William Vivanco walks down the street in Havana that’s what people shout at him, the chorus from "Cimarron,” the song (and especially the video) that made him a star.

"I wrote ‘Cimarron’ using funny little onomatopoeic sounds, ‘buh-luh-la-la,’ and it became like a big joke," Vivanco says. He still enjoys the joke, even if it seems at odds with the song’s more serious subtext. The word ’cimarron’ (literally, “one who lives on mountaintops”) refers to African slaves who ran away from their Spanish masters, and the song is the story of Vivanco’s personal quest for freedom.

He wrote "Cimarron” when he first arrived in Havana but he had brought the story with him from Santiago de Cuba. The idea struck him while he was rock-climbing in Baconao, a huge natural park about 20 kilometers from Santiago. "That’s where I first felt the spirit of Cimarron, the black man who had been a slave, who had escaped and fled to the mountains. I felt I was discovering my own story as well as the story of Cimarron. In a way Cimarron is me, because of my origins, my Haitian-African ancestry, but I didn’t know who he was, who I was."

So who is William Vivanco, then? He’s a troubadour, in the tradition of the musician-poets who roamed around Europe in the Middle Ages, but more precisely in the tradition of Cuban "trova" singers who emerged from Vivanco’s hometown starting in the 19th century. Growing up in Santiago, birthplace of Cuban son and bolero in addition to trova, Vivanco drifted naturally toward music. He learned to play guitar hanging around the legendary Casa de la Trova on Calle Heredia, "stealing chords". He played in the streets for tourists, for tips. He also performed with a professional children’s choir, training his voice, learning the techniques that would enable him to develop his distinctively percussive vocal style.