By Juan Carlos Esteban

r. Director of the Museum-Prison of Ushuaia

When on September 13, 2005 I visited the museum which many years ago was a penitentiary for second offenders and a military prison, I was able to verify that at the Ward Nº 4, the cell Nº 15 at the right side was designated as the place where Carlos Gardel had been confined.

In that prison, on the wall, are exhibited portraits and a writing  excerpted from a book by Blas Matamoros which states that El Zorzal was jailed in the Ushuaia prison.

Without judging the intellectual quality of the author, I think that the story told to justify his confinement was written at a time when the biographical data of Gardel were uncertain, contradictory and when the legend prevailed.

Below I detail the elements that deny that fallacy:

1. In the 70s the first scientific biography was published. It was written by Miguel A. Morena in 1976 "Historia Artística de Carlos Gardel". It’s a work of a great moral probity and impartiality in its judgments.

On page 19 it confirms that he begins to be called Gardel, instead of Gardés to "achieve a better euphony" between 1910 and 1912.

2. In 1986 a biography is published in English about Carlos Gardel: his life, his music, his time by Simon Collier, professor of the University of Essex, England.

It is a work to be consulted, with a great professional rigor, which made our artist be included in the Encyclopedia Britannica. In its first edition in Spanish, on page 36, the change of family name of Gardés is acknowledged only in 1912.

3. Contemporarily, from Toulouse, France, Mr. José Félix reveals the first data taken from the municipal archives, as born on December 11, 1890 with the name of Charles Gardés.

4. In later works documents were found of his arrival in Buenos Aires as Charles Gardés, on March 11, 1893 on the steamboat Don Pedro, when he was two years old.

5. In 1897 there is record of Carlos Gardés as pupil in the Escuela Superior de Niñas Nº 1, at age 7, with mark 9.

6. In 1904 Carlos Gardés finishes his primary school at the Colegio "San Estanislao", with mark 10 for all the subjects.

7. In September 1904 he quit his home and, is detained in Florencio Varela, as Carlos Gardés, age 14, French, typographer.

8. In 1906 Carlos Gardés dedicated a photo to a friend with his signature -Carlos Gardés-, which appears on page 26 of the book I wrote.

9. On January 30, 1913 his mother filed an order for the search of Carlos Gardés in the Policía Federal Argentina.

10. That same year he started a professional tour as Carlos Gardés in the early days of July and only he appears as Carlos Gardel on August 26, 1913 on the newspaper "El Siglo" of Mercedes, province of Buenos Aires.

11. On October 24, 1915 he filed in the record of Migrations his nom de plume on his comeback from Brazil. That document is supposed to be apocryphal.

It’s quite unlikely, then, that C. Gardel was detained in Ushuaia and set free in 1907. If we pay attention to his hand writing, the signature on the famous card alluded by Matamoros has nothing to do with the one Gardel had recorded since he changed his family name. Neither with his signature on the warrant of arrest in 1904.

12. On October 8, 1920 he testifies at the Uruguayan Consulate, spontaneously, without birth certificate, to be born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, and that he is named Carlos Gardel.

On November 4 he gets his Argentine Identity Card, that then it legally enables him before the Public Powers, the courts and the police. That is to say 15 years after his presumed identification as convict.

On February 15, 1923 he got his Certificate of Good Behavior. That would have been impossible had he been sentenced to prison in Ushuaia.

13. On March 7 that year he applied for the Argentine citizenship, an unimaginable thing according to the Law 7029/10, restrictive and rigorous with foreigners with irregular documents. On October 8 of that year he required his passport. With it he eluded military service and his participation in the 1914 war in France and so he began his brilliant career which lasted until his tragic death.

14. Gardel was acquainted with great personalities. With Charles Chaplin, the great English actor; with Luigi Pirandello, Italian poet; with Jacinto Benavente, Spanish playwright; with Prince Edward of Windsor who was introduced to him on August 24, 1925 together with Dr. Roberto Ortiz, the future president of our country and Dr. Tomás Le Breton, minister of Agriculture. Previously he had come to know the tenor Enrique Caruso on a trip to Brazil in 1915. On August 20, 1916 he met the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset at the Círculo de La Prensa (Press Circle). In 1933 he had an encounter with Federico García Lorca, the unforgettable Spanish poet.

All the testimonies coincide about his great consecration to study, which does not match with the legend of his links with the underworld.

15. On September 19, 2003 the UNESCO, declared that his voice is a Patrimony of Humanity, as an Argentine singer born in France.

16. Freed from the black legend that, with no evidence, is irresponsibly endorsed to everybody who had contributed to our historical, cultural values, today he is an important part of our pride as a Nation.

Furthermore, there is no hint, file or criminal record that our "Centro de Estudios Gardelianos" had managed to locate to confirm such a nonsense which spoil the prestige of your Museum. It is a gratuitous derision that wrongly informs our youth and the many foreigners that visit it.

We are willing, as an institution devoted to the research of his career, to present all the necessary information to inform your personnel and blow the remaining doubts away.

I ask you, for the sake of our beloved Fatherland, to restore his figure by placing his true story at that same cell.

Please I beg you that, next to the legend, without excluding it, be included also this brief historical summary which is solidly documented.

Sincerely.

Juan Carlos Esteban