Havana Cuba. – A few years ago, Pablo Milanes He complained about foreign journalists because when they interviewed him they asked him more about politics than about his music. And it was not for less: for decades, Pablo was, together with Silvio Rodríguez, one of the official singers and propagandists in Latin America and Spain of Fidel Castro’s Revolution.
That is something that many do not forgive Pablo. To the intransigent, to those who never quite forgot that infamous little verse of “Bolívar launched a star that shone together with Martí, Fidel dignified it to walk through these lands”or that other, even more infamous, that “It will be better to sink into the sea than to betray the glory that has been lived”. It is not enough for the intransigents that for more than a quarter of a century the author of Yolanda he would distance himself from his unconditional support for Castroism and, without ceasing to be a man of the left, he would be critical of the regime.
Probably, many of those intransigents will not forgive Pablo Milanés or recognize his merits, not even now that he has just passed away in Spain, at the age of 79, after several days of hovering between life and death.
Due to his disaffection of the last 25 years —and that, in his case, because he was famous and loved by the left, his criticism had more repercussions and was highly taken into account—, the ultra-Castro supporters behind the wall and their cronies and foreign pimps, such as Ana Hurtado, the Spanish documentarian who dared to describe him as mean and worm and earned the rejection of thousands of Cubans who love and respect Pablo, without being able to admonish her and silence her by the bosses who entertain her in the absence of supportive intellectuals of more weight, like those they had in other distant times already.
No matter how extreme the political positions of one faction or the other, one must be very obtuse and stingy not to recognize the many musical virtues of Pablo Milanés, his feelingthe incomparable second voice that he sang when he sang as a duet, the beauty of his songs, which, whether we are willing to admit it or not, being an important part of the soundtrack of life in Cuba in the last five decades, have marked more than two generations of Cubans.
Perhaps some of my regular readers, knowing that I am a lover of rock, blues and jazz and staunchly anti-Castro, will be surprised that I count myself among the admirers of the music of Pablo Milanés. Well yes, I have no qualms about admitting it: I love Pablito’s songs, I enjoy them and, at times, they have moved me to the point of watering my eyes.
I discard the pro-Castro teques that Pablo once composed, I prefer to forget them. I will forever treasure his good songs, which are the vast majority. With those, I stay.
OPINION ARTICLE
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