Cuban Songwriter Pablo Milanés Passes Away

November 22, 2022

Cuban songwriter Pablo Milanés passed away this Monday at age 79 in Madrid. The artist was one of the most recognized voices in songwriting. Founding songwriter of the ICAIC Experimental Sound Group and of the New Trova movement alongside Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola.

Last November 13, Pablo Milanés was hospitalized in Madrid, where he had lived since 2017 and was receiving medical treatment for the oncohematological disease he had suffered from for some years and which had worsened in recent months.

His last performance in Havana was at a concert at the Ciudad Deportiva, where hundreds of Cubans shared fragments of various songs he chose for that night.

Beginning and End of a Green Morning, You See, I Don't Ask You, or To Live are part of Pablo's work that transcended ages and borders.



Silvio wrote him this poem in 1969:

Pablo



I met you tearing



open death's chest one day.



You knew nothing



and you were the one carrying it



by the hand.







And so you will continue,



without noticing your advantage:



that you are the one who carries it,



who tames it and shrouds it,



walking.







You are a space that turns



without a spine and that is lost



in the joy of turning.



But your voice is already fading,



your hand is already engraving



an entire name with its teeth.







Who that has not seen sadness



with its four thousand heads



can hear you with rest.



Who that has not loved at length



and lived with the strangeness



of this time without stillness.







I met you pressed



against heaven's wall one day.



You were carrying then



under your arm a guajira



and walking,



walking.



(1969)