El Cuarto de Tula is a Cuban song composed by Sergio González Siaba, who preferred to be known as Sergio Siaba. Siaba wrote it after witnessing a fire in a Havana neighborhood, and he was known for a guarachero, lively musical style. It gained worldwide fame when Ibrahim Ferrer and Pío Leyva performed it with Buena Vista Social Club on tour, and it appears on the 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club. In the first million copies of the album the track was misattributed to Luis Marquetti, a mistake corrected after a rights dispute; the family later registered the work with SGAE to collect royalties. Siaba died in 1989 in poverty, yet the tune traveled the world through other artists such as Celia Cruz and La Sonora Matancera, and today the family receives royalties from several European countries including Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France. El Cuarto de Tula remains one of the signature pieces of the Buena Vista Social Club project and a landmark in modern Cuban music.
