History of the Origin of the Song Yolanda by Pablo Milanés

January 31, 2022

Suylén Milanés is the eldest daughter of Yolanda and Pablo.

The origin of the mythical song "Yolanda" has remained hidden for many years. Recently, writer Wendy Guerra has published some details that reveal certain aspects of the origin of this famous song, perhaps the most well-known song by the singer-songwriter.

Yolanda is from Cienfuegos; she moved to Havana as a teenager. Little by little she became accustomed to the capital and became a professional in the world of image.

Many Cuban films from the sixties and seventies came from her hands. Among them, Soy Cuba. Many of those films have the soundtrack by Pablo Milanés, who at that time was not as well-known as he is today.

From that life was born a great love song, an anthem, the testimony of an era, whose original, according to Pablo, was written on cartucho paper.

Yolanda points out: "I was that girl whom he fell in love with and it could have been someone else, I don't think I have any personal merit, the talent, of course, is his". This is what Yolanda Benet always says when speaking about her song and her eternal and indestructible bond with Pablo Milanés.

Yolanda and Pablo were married one hot afternoon in Old Havana in a law office on Tejadillo Street, with ready-made witnesses, as many of their generation did. They didn't need to dress up or sign "Ten gray papers to love": they needed to be in peace and harmony with their family.

Their marriage lasted six years. Neither the divorce, nor new loves, "nor time the relentless…" erased the indestructible bond between them.

Yolanda is not trapped between the strings of a song. Yolanda is much more and Pablo always knew it. His eternity is the great treasure that protects him.

Yolanda Benet, granddaughter of French people, reinvents herself like her infinite country. She is a woman who jumps beyond the myth and asserts herself. According to what she has told me, the first song she heard by Pablo was very popular, "Estás lejos," and she sang it when she was part of the quartet Los Bucaneros, in the early sixties. Yolanda met him in November 1968, when she was working at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (Icaic), and upon hearing "Para vivir" she realized that this composer, only 23 years old, was unlike anything that sounded here at that time; he had something different. She first heard his voice, then he appeared.

These were times when it was possible to see great trovadores in parks, in theaters, or in the living rooms of houses; they were not inaccessible. Life flowed differently.

They met thanks to a friend who treasured a tape with all the songs he sang in those days and she never tired of listening to them. She fell in love with the voice and the songs, but she had never seen Pablo. Until one day that friend brought him to her living room.

"When I saw you I knew it was true

This fear of finding myself discovered

You undress me with seven reasons

You open my chest whenever you fill me

With loves

With loves

Eternally with loves".

Yolanda remembers this day as if it were today. It was the moment when they initiated the first working meeting to produce the film "La primera carga al machete." By chance, they brought Pablo to her house, and since the idea had already been discussed that he could make the music for this new film, they spent the night talking. She confesses that Pablo thought it was impossible to be part of the film team, because he was doing military service and didn't think he would be allowed to join this other world, that of cinema.

Yolanda made some arrangements and that's how he started working with them. Milanés composed four songs that narrated the plot, a historical argument based on the War of '95. In the midst of this production they grew closer and got to know each other more and more, working together.

At that time Pablo was a young man in uniform, a recruit, an ordinary man, but it affected Yolanda deeply.

In 1969 the Icaic Group began, he joined and began to study music. We're talking about a singer-songwriter who had never made a musical arrangement or knew how to write his own music. There he develops and grows. All of them are an enlightened generation.

Pablo had known Silvio Rodríguez since 1967; Omara Portuondo introduced them, and they had the custom that whenever one wrote a song they would show it to the other. It was fortunate that they met at that moment. Many musical concerns converged there and they learned in the process itself, helping each other. It was a laboratory; Yolanda spent several of her nights there. It was part of her daily life.

She remembers that the first arrangement the group made was precisely of one of Pablo's songs and that they went to the Egrem Studios to hear how "that" sounded, because each one had written something: one the guitar, another the drums. For her it was a unique and moving moment; later, many directors would call them for documentaries, newsreels, and feature films.

The first thing they did was a feature film by Rogelio París, "La nueva escuela," and then, "Quién (15 preguntas sobre un maestro)," which had music by Pablo and Silvio Rodríguez, and it was wonderful.

Then came the concerts. The music was novel, experimental, but at the same time very Cuban. "If I close my eyes and think of that moment, then I remember them all together: Pablo, Silvio, Noel Nicola, Belinda Romeu, also Omara; it was a great concert and they participated on the Cuban side. It was that stage when some Latin American singers joined them: Daniel Viglietti, Mercedes Sosa, Víctor Jara, Isabel Parra... ah, and also Peter Seeger".

Little by little Pablo was more and more beloved. His presence became frequent on a television program of that era called "Te doy una canción."

In my opinion "Silvio and Pablo," "Pablo and Silvio" are the same word, an inseparable concept. We are in 1970, the moment when Pablo begins to set to music the poetic work of José Martí. With those songs the Casa de las Américas releases a memorable album.

Yolanda recounts that Pablo wrote many songs during their marriage. One day he sang to her "yo no te pido que me bajes una estrella azul…" and she said to him: "What a beautiful song by Silvio," and he replied: "No, Yolanda, it's mine and for you." It was the first of all the great songs that Pablo composed for her.

Yolanda is a jingle bell, sharp and humble, reserved and coherent, revolutionizing everything in her path. Pablo, melancholic, quiet, with his square-framed glasses and his calm, tranquil gait. When she met him he sang her very sad things, he dragged a bit of all that personal sadness into his great songs: many of them were about breakups, distant loves, and suddenly "Yo no te pido" emerges. It was a leap to his joy, a sign that something had changed within him. It was a song different from the ones he was accustomed to composing. "It was a change in his energy. His earlier work had nostalgia, sparrow, I saw in that song a change for the better".

Pablo always told her that he needed to be sad in order to create. At 25 years old he was settled in his sadness, pouring it all out on his guitar. But that ingenuousness of Yolanda is what changes certain nuances of his work from then on.

The song Yolanda is luminous, a chant to eternity, a heart-wrenching cry. "Yolanda?, well, Yolanda is all magic. She appears to me, she is a delicate spirit, and she accompanies me. You can't imagine to what places in the world it reaches, the remote places where I have been and found myself with that song".

She travels far, with you and with me, she resembles you and you her. It's what I feel when I'm away and I hear it. I hear it wherever I am and I see you, Cuba-Yolanda. I can't separate it from you and from my mother and from a generation that has given us what we are.

Pablo composed it when his first daughter was ten days old. He was crazy about having a child and the first of the three daughters they had together was born.

"When the girl was a little more than a week old Pablo traveled to do work for Icaic. It was terrible to tear himself away from the house; he went to the interior of the country and when he returned we were at my mother's house. The girl was fussy, she cried, she didn't want to sleep; I tried but it was a struggle. Noel Nicola arrived and Pablo picked up his guitar and sang me "No me pidas," "Quiero poner la tierra a tus pies" and "Yolanda".

At that moment she didn't listen to him attentively, she was caring for the girl, she didn't notice the frustration on Pablo's face. Calmly, later that night, very late when everyone had fallen asleep and they were alone, while she was nursing the girl, she asked Pablo to sing the new songs to her again. And for the first time she heard Yolanda.

For a woman who had just given birth, nursing, the fact that Pablo appeared with a song like that paralyzed her. But above all because he knew how to unite many codes and symbols that they had in common, and he transmitted all of that through a song that seemed so simple.

Let's unravel a bit this semiotic-amorous game. "Praying the creed you have taught me," which he quotes from "La ventana." "That was, is, and always will be, something of ours… here it remained forever".

They worked at Icaic, but with different schedules. They lived in the same neighborhood as work: El Vedado, on the 15th floor. There was a window, a secret space and, at the same time, exposed, that from afar communicated with them with clarity. "Here the light is wonderful and we could 'speak' to each other through the movements we made from one side of the street to the other and we formed phrases of love.

We counted the hours. He and I had an almost exact sense of our daily life and when I came back home he was already looking at me, he followed me in a certain way, with a very special ritual, then he started making signals with the window. Nobody understands that, but when I hear it I never cease to be amazed at the way, the capacity for synthesis that he found to say all of that within a verse".

"If ever I feel defeated

I give up seeing the sun every morning

Praying the creed you have taught me

I look at your face and I say in the window

Yolanda

Yolanda".

Popular imagination tells different versions about the codes of this memorable text. People fantasize and say that the verse "You undress me with seven reasons" refers to the seven days of the week. Is it so? "I could trust you with more and more things, but I have always avoided this, I don't want the mystery to be lost".

Something curious is that neither he nor she ever mentioned the possibility of recording it, it was intimate, a secret of both. The song began to transcend at Icaic, Pastor Vega premiered it in a documentary and Pablo began to sing it at concerts. In the early years it didn't have the repercussion it has today.

Yolanda has been sung everywhere in the world for almost forty years, by many singers, joining so many voices, Brazilian, Ibero-American, and even performers who have adapted it to other languages. It has more than a hundred recognized versions, not counting the bars, the streets, the subways where we have all heard it. The memorable duet with Silvio and the thousands of voices in the plazas, the guitars on the Malecón, and people humming it in the streets mark it as canonical in contemporary popular music.

"He always tells me that he has tried to remove it from his repertoire, he has new things, songs that could well take its place, but he has never been able to, because people won't let him." Yolanda and Yolanda harmonize in a space that is both personal and universal, the theme belongs to the aesthetic taste that she adored and that she always admired in Pablo. Before and after being together she dreamed of this type of works that drain your soul and at the same time return you to life with optimism. The curious thing is that Pablo took between 20 minutes and an hour to make this song, it seems very simple, but in art apparently simple things take on an unsuspected dimension.

"It went beyond all prediction, I don't think he thought that work was going to transcend so much and maintain its relevance despite the years it has, despite what we have both lived after. Because we did indeed make our later lives and we have each been happy in our own story".

Yolanda tells me that "Pablo is the father I always wanted for my daughters and even, if I went further, for myself. From the first time I saw him, in his approach with children, his tenderness, I liked it. I don't think I was mistaken." The couple had three daughters: Lynn, Liam, and Suylén, and seven grandchildren. All three studied music. Lynn is a flutist and also a professional singer. "A natural decorator, she transforms spaces very well, in that she resembles me a lot".

"Suylén sings when life inspires her." She has recorded several albums as a soloist on PM Records, but she is so intense that she can run a music company and produce a festival of the caliber of Proposiciones or Eyeife. Suylén has two children, Pablo and Camila, from her respective marriages to Mauricio Rentería and Camilo Guevara, son of Argentine-Cuban guerrilla fighter Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.

Liam graduated in Choral Direction and has preferred, because of her shyness, the business life in the world of music. "But she sings from time to time because she has a very nice voice." And the grandchildren are always together, because they founded a very close-knit family, also counting Pablo's other children.

Pablo and Yolanda have found a beautiful balance, that of being together whenever they can to enjoy the family they have created, through good times and bad, without missing a detail or neglecting the character and personality of each of the beings they love. I ask how she managed to rebuild her life beyond the myth, and she answers me: "By being eternally myself".

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