It is a warm voice, a round timbre, a whole human being. There are things that she only says with her eyes. I have seen Taiyana Garbey Guibert grow up and I have grown by her side. At the age of fourteen – dream age – she visited the radio and was fascinated. Those are her own words.
She knows how to be grateful to the smallest radio station in the Santiago radio system, with which she shares music and company, with the instrumental station from the Caribbean, as reads her slogan.
“Radio Siboney is everything to me. I grew up in it, and the little I have learned -because learning never ends and human beings limit themselves when they think they know everything-, I owe it to this station, to its work team. I started at Radio Siboney in 1998 and got to voice all the programs. I worked in the Pentagrama music magazine for ten or twelve years, then came my growth period with Iluminados para la sabiduría and Noticiero EntreArte. It was a time demanding a lot of discipline, a lot of self-preparation”.
The daughter of Xiomara and José, the mother of Melisa, Hamlet’s partner, tells me, and something evidently trembles inside her, that broadcasting has become her life. She never imagined it, but there it is, and there has been for a quarter of a century.
Her charisma, her smile, her drive to excel, took her beyond the radio studio. When you are an artist, there is no remedy. Show directors preferred her, namely Santiago Carnago, Roberto Sánchez (“Papo) and Ricardo Alonso. Her style is associated with La Maison fashion house, in the Vista Alegre neighborhood, a place that she has hosted for more than a decade, whether on the catwalk or any part of the show during the night. A few weeks ago, I heard her speak on Radio Rebelde. I felt her as always, so close, so real in the mornings of Frecuencia Total, in the afternoons of the cultural magazine Así. Radio Enciclopedia has also given space to her style. Taiyana remains faithful to her compass, widens her passion, expands the horizon. Cuban Radio deserves people like her because…. All Cuba is in her voice.
