Cuban and universal, Pablo Milanes, founder of Nueva Trova, strongly embraced Fidel Castro’s revolution at its beginnings and with time distanced himself, but he never broke the bond that united him to his people through his music.
The artist, who died early Tuesday morning at the age of 79 in Madrid, offered in June 2022 his last concert in Havana.
After three years without singing in his land, full of gray hair and with problems getting around, “Pablito” kept the light of his myopic eyes, the affable smile and the strength of his voice. His countrymen sang one tune after another in a reunion that, for many, was also a farewell.
Gone was the skinny young man with the afro hairstyle who He had his way through the political song. He entered Cuban music, setting up a chair, in the 60s with my 22 years (1965).
Awarded with two Latin Grammys for best singer-songwriter album (2006) and musical excellence (2015), her voice was “a song, from a patio, serenade and garden, but also from a strong and supportive square, the voice of an infinite island and mainland (…) already sweet powerful time,” says his close collaborator José María Vitier, a Cuban pianist and composer.
Pablo was born on February 24, 1943 in Bayamo of the marriage of the soldier Ángel Milanés and the dressmaker Conchita Arias.
Conchita forced the family to move to Havana, so that her son can attend conservatories. In the 1950s, considered the golden decade of Cuban music, Pablo learned the piano and explored new tonalities and texts with other creators.
“That was brutal”
The film Los Paraguas de Cherbourg (1964), with music by Michel Legrand, marked him. Pablo saw her 16 times.
Being in his twenties, he experienced disappointment. “He fulfilled my duties as a citizen and as a revolutionary too”, but “a certain repressive order was operating that I did not like“, he recalls in the documentary about his life made in 2019 by the Cuban director Juan Pin Vilar.
During his military service he was assigned to the UMAP, a unit that was a work camp for homosexuals, religious, and young people of considered non-revolutionary conduct, where it was intended to re-educate them.
“For a 23-year-old boy, that was brutal,” recalls the singer in the film.
He returned to music and in 1967 with renewed passion he joined Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola in the beginnings of Nueva Trova.
Who sang with Silvio Rodríguez When I found you (1989), an iconic theme for generations of Cubans, passed from a very adult age to a bitter political disappointment.
“It will be better to sink into the sea / Than before betraying the glory that has been lived”says the theme sung by these two greats of Cuban music.
He recorded dozens of albums, musicalized films and poets such as César Vallejo, Nicolás Guillén and José Martí. In 1985, Joan Manuel Serrat, Ana Belén, Luis Eduardo Aute, Silvio Rodríguez and others paid tribute to him on the album Dear pablo.
“I want to be happy”
He is a human being who “teaches you to love, to be supportive (…) to enjoy friendship without conditions,” says Vilar. “Grudges make you sad and I want to be happy,” he remembers Pablo once telling him.
At the end of the 1980s there was a break with Silvioalthough both avoided talking about it.
Only in 2011, after a critical statement by Pablo in Miami to the Cuban government, did Silvio refute it.
“I don’t feel capable of judging, less publicly, an old friendbut he mentioned the “crude and unloving” form of criticism, “Without the slightest affective commitment,” Rodríguez said on his Segunda Cita blog.
