130 years after the birth of the outstanding composer and conductor Gonzalo Roig, his works still stand out as part of Cuba's musical identity, and suffice it to mention two: Cecilia Valdés and Quiéreme mucho.

The latter song has been widely disseminated on the island of his birth and beyond, through the cinema and other art forms, while Cecilia Valdés became Cuba's most international zarzuela.
Roig was a founder of several orchestras, is considered to be a pioneer of the symphonic movement in the country and one of the main composers who redefined zarzuela.

His healthy Cubanism and his love for work led him to the direction of our famous Symphony Orchestra, said the also composer Eduardo Sánchez de Fuente, author of several books on the history of Cuban folk music.

Maestro Gonzalo Roig masters the science of orchestration, and many times we have seen him disarticulate works of very difficult structure, solving the valuable teachers of his orchestra problems of performing technique, he added in a text in 1936.

According to Sánchez de Fuente, his colleague was a connoisseur of instruments and their timbres, a positive value in the art of instrumentation.

The maestro conducted both the Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Havana, with which he took on works of extraordinary complexity by composers such as Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Weber, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Puccini, Gounod, and Mascagni, among other classics.

Roig's career cannot be seen only inside Cuba; in Mexico he was part of Maria Guerrero's company, which performed at the Lyric Theater; and the Pan American Association invited him to conduct a series of concerts in the United States, where he coducted the U.S. Army Band, the U.S. Soldier's Home Military Band, the U.S. Marine Band, and the U.S. Navy Band.

In 1943, he even conducted a Cuban music program at Carnegie Hall in New York and would return to his island to manage different orchestral formations in theater, radio, and television.
As a composer, he shaped boleros, guajiras, Afro-Cuban caprices, claves, congas, cuplés, Cuban dances, danzones, guarachas, habaneras, marches, romanzas, rumbas, sones, tangos, tarantellas, waltzes, musical magazines, and zarzuelas.

In addition, Roig was a full member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters; president of the Cuban Society of Music Authors, Composers and Publishers; of the board of directors of the National Corporation of Artists; secretary of the Music Section of the National Academy of Arts and Letters; and founded the Society of Cuban Authors. In Costa Rica, he was made an Honorary Member of the Association of Musical Culture and in Spain, a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.