HAVANA -- Dressed in light blue silk and towering high heels, her dark brown hair lacquered immobile and her long nails and lips painted perfectly, Olga Navarro pauses not a second when asked about the Cuban love song called the bolero.

"It's life, it's death," said Navarro, a composer and conductor who has introduced the bolero to generations of audiences. "It's liquor, it's happiness, celebration, love, a form of expression through music."

As Navarro spoke, scores of people -- most of them, like the composer, more than 50 years old -- gathered before a small stage bathed in colorful lights for a tribute to the bolero, a musical genre born on this island more than a century ago before its popularity spread across the Americas.

"People still listen to boleros although they are not played much any more on television or radio," Navarro said before the show at Las Vegas Cabaret, one of about 50 Havana nightspots specializing in this traditional expression of Latino culture. "For them, (the bolero) will never die, its a feeling that will go on living forever."

"Two gardenias for you/ with them I want to say/ I love you, I adore you, my life!/ Focus all your attention/ because they are your heart - and mine." --"Dos Gardenias," by Isolina Carrillo

When the ladies of the legendary "Cuarteto de D'Aida" hit the stage, the cabaret audience goes wild.

"What the artist feels in his or her heart -- that's what they sing," Lilita Penalver says of herself and other bolero artists. "It must be the tropical climate ... we feel with so much intensity."

Penalver is a successor to one of the original singers who performed with the "Cuarteto de D'Aida" group formed by diva Omara Portuondo and her sisters in the 1940s.

Omara Portuondo, who later broke off from the quartet to perform solo before joining the world-famous Buena Vista Social Group of veteran musicians, sang briefly with the group on that recent night.

It was a key performance during last weekend's International Festival of Boleros of Gold, an annual event that celebrates the old romantic songs and spurs couples in the audience to wrap their arms around each other and dance.

"What do you care that I love you?/ that you don't love me anymore/ that past love can not be remembered." --"Veinte Annos," or "Twenty Years," by Maria Teresa Vera.

Cuban music experts have long tried to decode the magic of this enduring style that many people throughout Latin America have fallen in love to.

Although its roots are not totally clear, musicologists generally agree the bolero was born in Cuba in the early 1880s, when Santiago composer Pepe Sanchez wrote "Tristezas," or "Sadnesses," a piece wedding the traditional Spanish serenade with Cuban rhythms.

At the time, strict societal mores prevented much contact between young men and women. The bolero created an accepted way young lovers could express their romantic feelings through words or a shared dance.

"I could be with you all my life/ I don't care in what form/ nor when, nor who, as long as I'm with you." --"Todo Una Vida," or "All of a Life," by Osvaldo Farres.

Sanchez's disciples brought to the bolero the African-influenced beat of the "son," a traditional Afro-Cuban musical genre born in the early 20th century that later went on to form the core of salsa music.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Cuban composers took the traditional bolero and developed it with more sophisticated lyrics and elements of jazz and blues into a romantic musical style known here as "filin" -- from the English word "feeling."

Cesar Portillo de la Luz, Frank Dominguez, Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo were among the best known performers of the "filin" style.

The traditional bolero, meanwhile, was being embraced in other parts of Latin America, developing new flavors in places such as Mexico and Puerto Rico.

"God says that glory is in heaven/ that's what gives mortals comfort when they die/ blessed God because I have you in my life/ I don't need to go to heaven/ yes, my soul, the glory is you." --"La Gloria Eres Tu," or "The Glory Is You," by Jose Antonio Mendez.

Even when Cuban folk singers began expressing political and social ideas in their music in the 1970s, the bolero with all its melodramatic romanticism did not disappear.

"Yolanda," a popular love song by folk singer Pablo Milanes, is a bolero as intimate and romantic as its more traditional predecessors.

Many of the older boleros failed to catch on with the younger generations.

"What happened is that at some point the bolero was unpopular, for being decadent, for being out of style," said Roberto Zurbano, a musicologist at Cuba's Casa de las America's, the island's premier cultural institution.

But younger composers and musical stylists are now updating the old genre, mixing it with modern rhythms such as hip-hop.

The result, said Zurbano, is a coexistence between "the most traditional bolero of the old people at their gatherings and the emerging genre of the young people."

"The important thing is that the bolero keeps being sung," added fellow musicologist Lino Betancourt. "And that it stays alive."