Remarks for Rico Stover Concert
COMR, June 4, 2005

Thank you all for being here this evening.

My wife Dee Dee and I have just returned from a visit to the United States — and to my 50th class reunion at Yale. It was good to see old friends there, but it also good to come “home” to El Salvador.

This is a particularly delightful homecoming, since we have with us this evening American guitarist Rico Stover. Rico has been a concert guitarist for four decades. In the 1990s, he was a Fulbright scholar in Paraguay, where he did research for Six Silver Moonbeams, his biography of Augustin Barrios Mangoré, one of the century’s most important composers for guitar.

I am very pleased that – thanks to support from our Public Affairs Section and the efforts of Embassy physician, Dr. Georges McCormick, a former student of Rico’s, we have Rico here in El Salvador. I understand we’ve kept him busy: two concerts, three master guitar classes, and several press events. Tomorrow he travels to Paraguay for a 10-day celebration in honor of Barrios Mangoré, some of whose music you’ll hear this evening.

Rico, thank you for coming. Let me also extend a welcome to Federico Sheppard, a friend and colleague of Rico’s who is also a guitar maker. Both men visited a project supported by USAID’s EXPRO program that is making classical guitars in El Salvador. I hope you found the visit interesting and the project worthwhile.

I hope that you both have had an enjoyable visit and that you will return to San Salvador again.

With that, let me invite Rico to say a few words and then we will begin the program.