Dear Pablo your admirers will sing you eternally

November 22, 2022

From the FB of Norge Espinosa Mendoza

PABLO MILANÉS, OUR LIFE THROUGH HIS SONGS

As happens with artists who over several decades manage to draw a precise image of the country to which they dedicate their works, the songs of Pablo Milanés are a precise chronicle of our collective memory, expanding in them both the most intimate and the most public.

Since he signed "Tú, mi desengaño" in 1963, he was creating an arc of powerful resonances in which the echoes of tradition and the new air that his generation brought to our already rich musical landscape flowed together with fluidity.

Endowed with a prodigious voice, the native of Bayamo born in 1943 whose death now pains us so much, was capable of intoning both an old tune of popular origin and verses by Martí or by Guillén, or a bolero or a song that we repeated in chorus at his concerts, like a throat in which several generations fit.

Part of a fundamental zone of this process that began in 1959, Pablo Milanés added to his repertoire songs of his own and others that also reflected the backlighting and contradictions of this evolution, bequeathing to us an album through which the history of the country, and its citizens, can be read, in a sort of review parallel to that which, through grand phrases and postures frozen in an epic not always functional, other hands have written, and through which that other gaze filters, that tremor that his death makes us feel in a deeper way.

After his time with Los Bucaneros and the Cuarteto del Rey, where he trained in dialogue with the fashionable rhythms and felt the influence of Michel Legrand, among others, Pablo responded to the teachings of Luis Carbonell and other masters with his first creations.

Bridge between the filín movement and the need to capture the frenzy of those first years of the 60s, he ended up protected by the mantle of the Casa de las Américas and the ICAIC upon joining the Nueva Trova Movement, which is now celebrating its 50 years of being founded.

His songs were recorded by Elena Burke and other bold figures before his first solo album appeared in 1975, setting verses by Martí to music. A decade had passed since his time in the Military Units for Production Assistance, where the envy and mistrust that many suffered in that era took him. He would take time to speak of that passage in his life, because there are pains that even time heals very slowly.

From Nueva Trova, Pablo, Silvio, Noel, Sara, Eduardo..., and many more, with the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora, recorded themes that little by little allowed them to become recognized and that were integrated into the choir which, from Argentina, Chile and other countries of the continent bore witness to new urgencies.

The second half of the 1970s found him in maturity, and from there come classics like "Yolanda," which embodied an idea of Cuba, of its sentimental history in that event that aimed to change everything, and which together with other creations by his GES companions still serve as clear references to those discoveries and heartbreaks.

Albums and concerts, tours and creations for cinema, are part of that promising period that extended well into the 80s and of which his double album Querido Pablo, launched and conceived on a scale rarely granted to a Cuban artist from the Island at that moment, is proof.

With the arrival of the 90s, that also changed. The birth of the Fundación Pablo Milanés would be the axis of a larger conflict that ended in crisis after its closure and a controversy with the Minister of Culture, Armando Hart, which marked the beginning of a long series of disagreements.

Despite this, Pablo never stopped returning to Cuba, nor stopped recording here nor offering his songs to television series or programs. One would have to add the controversies of the previous decade during his tenure as director of the International Festival of Varadero, or his brief stint on television as the protagonist of Proposiciones, a title that repeated the magazine of his defunct Foundation. These are episodes that probably will not now be evoked from the official notes that lament his loss, but through them the chronology of many other clashes that we other Cuban creators lived in different dimensions can be recomposed.

Going back and forth from Spain to Cuba, Pablo Milanés always had the gesture of recognizing other creators, novices or established, having them accompany him at his concerts and albums, as proof of a generosity not very abundant in the field.

When he was awarded the Grammy for artistic excellence in 2015, he was already a continental classic, with the virtues and dangers that such a term entails. During these last years he offered critical statements, demanding changes in his country, which his work continued to portray indelibly. This cost him veiled or direct attacks that unfortunately, through voices that did not reach half his stature, pursued him until his final days.

Fortunately, that figure is too undeniable, and above those silences and those insults, it was impossible to deny him altogether. He sang in Miami, and also survived that intense surge of applause and shouts that his presence unleashed there.

His farewell concert (as many of us sensed) of this year at the Ciudad Deportiva was also part of that controversy that he embodied in the sight of officials and bureaucrats, which was resolved with that multitude that filled the Coliseo, reaffirming how he and his songs were a single essence through which we also reinvented our lives in the harsh present of the country.

Through his biography and his albums that life is told in another way. The young people who went a year ago to the Ministry of Culture in search of a new dialogue, intoned his songs there. The broadcast of a telenovela produced 30 years ago returns to us in the afternoons his voice, fresh and full of lyricism, despite whom it may displease, singing themes of traditional Trova (before which he bowed by recording Años, the record series that rescued that legacy long before the Buena Vista Social Club effect), and themes that still sound as if they had been created yesterday.

Pablo Milanés belongs to us as part of our lives, because in the manner of a mirror inhabited by words and chords, we can also recognize our individual joys and losses through them, as a coherent stroke of words, questions and ideas that tell how intense it all has been, and persist in reminding both his enemies and his faithful that we should learn something from all of that.

That the pursuit of beauty has its price. That life is worth nothing, that it has not been easy, that in the brief space in which we are or are no longer, the truth we defend identifies us, and that truth, sometimes, can be as memorable and as brief as the melody in which today, to recognize ourselves, we seek ourselves in his infinite voice, which is that of Cuba.