A few years ago I met Nancy Pérez Rey, wife of Pablo Milanés, in a Havana restaurant. At that time, the troubadour was successfully recovering from a complex surgical intervention. Nancy, in a gesture of love, had donated a kidney, and Pablo’s body accepted it satisfactorily. I went up to his table and asked him how the teacher was doing and I thanked him for his altruistic gesture on behalf of our culture. We exchanged a few words. As a farewell I asked him to convey to her husband that on this side of the sea there are legions of us who love him, and that we are always waiting to see him appear, guitar in hand, on any stage in Havana. She wanted to know my name to add it to the message. But I told him that it didn’t matter, that he was just a Cuban.
Back at my table, my companion and I recalled what Pablo Milanés meant to each one of us. She had been born in a South American country, and she had never heard it live. Even so, Pablo’s songs had accompanied her in her youthful dreams, they had been a vehicle for messages of love, they had helped her feel part of an area that surpassed the arbitrary lines of borders: it was more Latin American thanks to Pablo Milanés.
I evoked for her the days sleeping in the doorway of Teatro Estudio to listen to the troubadour, together with Silvio and Nicola, many hours later, on a night in Havana that I remember starry. I told him about the fabulous concerts of the ICAIC Sound Experimentation group, about the voluntary work days, numb and hungry, singing at the top of their voices, between the hostile grooves of the sharp reeds “Para vivir”. Nothing less than a heartbreak theme in the middle of what was supposed to be an epic campaign.
I told him that I don’t remember a transcendent moment of my life in which Pablo’s music was not present in some way. I was one of the young people he narrates in “Short Saturday”, looking all over the city, after the scholarship, for a place to love, away from the queues and the sordid environment, that our hormones and adolescent eyes could not notice. .
Already advanced in years, I had to remind a young woman “that I don’t think I’m the man that any lady amazes / and it’s that my best time is over.” Pablo, on that and on so many occasions, did not speak for me, but sang for me, in that state of sublimation in which words and musical notes blend into a unique alchemy. But not only in the plane of love and heartbreak. He communicated to me his existential anxieties due to the “relentless” passage of time, the pain at the loss of his friends (“The Warrior”), his anger at the genocide to which Vietnamese children were subjected.
A lot in the formation of my civic sense has to do with Pablo Milanés, always lyrical, oblivious to slogans, upright in defense of his principles. He also inoculated me with a passion for the traditional trova and deepened in me a feeling of Cubanness that knows nothing of impositions, scams or prefabricated designs of “ideologues”. A love and a filiation that no clumsy official can curtail.
The six discs dedicated to filin, the three volumes of Years, are monuments of national music. He has sung Martí and Guillén, but above all he has sung himself, which is like saying: he sings to us.
The filmmaker Juan Pin Vilar writes to me this morning:
“I think of something remarkable in Pablo, the beauty of his voice and the simplicity of his songs, which are also deep and touch the heart, whatever the reason for them. In what the vast majority of singer-songwriters describe beautiful metaphors, as well as complicated ones, he, as Eliseo Diego would say referring to poetry, ‘uses the same words that the neighbors insult each other with’. I have known great cultivators of the trova that reach a certain audience. On the other hand, when you listen to Pablo, you visit the most sophisticated lunetary and the small bodegón of the town. That is the singularity of his Cuban identity, the mixture between the afterlife and the hereafter ”.
Pablo is not my guru, nor my leader. He is my contemporary (time is responsible for sweeping generational compartments) who spreads beauty. Something that will always be thankful for.
