CAMAGÜEY.- How many times have you herd that phrase “He killed himself like Chacumbele”, when we talk about an announced ending? Was there such a character whose death was sing by all of Cuba in a son with a chorus that says: “Ay Chacumbele, él mismito se mató (Ay Chacumbele, he killed himself)”? Truth or lie? Fable or reality?

You will be surprised when I tell you that it was a real character, that his true name was José Ramón Chacón Vélez, and that he was born on November 9, 1912 in Santa Cruz del Sur.

Since very little, it is said, José Ramón was drawn by the circus and he always dreamed to become a  trapeze artist. During the awful tragedy of the hurricane of 1932 he managed to save himself from the sea by climbing with his dog Lolita to the top of a carob tree. His family was not so lucky and perished along with the thousand of victims of such disaster. Then he was evacuated to the city of Camagüey and from here he started a long travel to Havana along with Lolita and the little money he managed to rescue.

In the capital, he got a job as the apprentice of a trapeze artist in the circus Santos y Artigas as a student of the renown Polish trapecist Bronislav Korchinsky, who made him a great talent in the air, choosing the name Chacumbeles (with a final s), also bringing his dog Lolita to the act.
Eventually, Ilona Szabó “La Muñequita Húngara (The Hungarian Doll)” joined him in his act. She was a Hungarian Jewish woman of great beauty, that ended up becoming his mistress. Something was about to go wrong; the American Negro Harry Silver, born in Mississippi, arrived to the circus. He sang, tap danced, juggled and played the banjo.

One day, while Chacumbeles was performing his routine on the tightrope with Lolita, from the top  he saw Ilona and Harry Silver kissing, which made him loose balance and fall to the ground, taking Lolita with him, who unfortunately lost her life. The trapecist spent the next six months in the hospital with several fractures, both legs broken and a lung pierced by a rib, and besides with the pain of loosing his dog. As a consequence of this accident, he could no longer continue in the trapeze.

He joined the police force, but one night, totally depressed, he took his own life with a gunshot. After his death, Chacumbeles passed to immortality in a song written by Alejandro Mustelier and recorded by the famed trio Servando Díaz, which suppressed the final “s” in his name and made him “Chacumbele”.

The endings of the Hungarian woman and the American man was no different. She went back to France and there, the Nazis, who had invaded the country, seized her as a Jewish and send her to a concentration camp, where she died.

Harry Silver became famous and devoted his every effort to seducing white women. He went back to his country, and since he had gotten used to living the life of an Ebony God in Cuba, he tried to do the same in his homeland, but he forgot that Mississippi is no Havana. When he dared being with a white woman, the Ku Kux Klan dragged him out of his house and he received the next day hanging from a tree.

That is the end of the story of Chacumbele, a poor boy from Santa Cruz, survivor of the hurricane of 1932, famous trapeze artist in the circus Santos y Artigas, who committed suicide for a broken heart. “Ay Chacumbele, él mismito se mató”.