On Pablo, Nueva Trova,

and the politics of music in Cuba

Illuminating recent interview with Pablo from the Mexican newspaper Reforma (in Spanish)

*********************************

http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism@lists.panix.com/msg23270.html :

“Another seminal incident along the road to acceptance for Cuban gays occurred in 1996. Pablo Milanes, a Cuban nova trova singer who has achieved quasi-sainthood amongst the island's population, wrote a song about gay men entitled Original Sin (available on his CD entitled Origines), a song he dedicated to all Cuban homosexuals. Introduced at his annual holiday concert held in the vast Karl Marx Theater in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, El Pecado original took the audience and the country by storm and did much to advance the cause of gay acceptance.”

**********************************

Chicago Tribune April 19, 2001

Revolution grown old

By Achy Obejas. Tribune staff reporter. April 19, 2001

As soon as the curtains rustled on the stage at the sold-out House of Blues on Monday night, the crowd began to chant. At first, it was a murmur but then it segued into something smoother, more like a canticle: "Cuba, Cuba, Cuba."

Author of hundreds of songs, Pablo Milanes has written the scores for seven feature films and 30 documentaries, recorded 37 albums that have sold millions worldwide, and given thousands of concerts in Latin America, Europe and Africa. Though he has toured the world singing to hundreds of thousands of fans (last summer, there were more than 50,000 in attendance at one concert in Mexico City), his appearances in the U.S. have been few during his 30-year career and defined by travel restrictions and the political drama between Washington and Havana.

On Monday night, however, it was not Cubans chanting, but Argentines, Chileans, Venezuelans and hundreds of other Latin Americans, all reverently waiting for Milanes for more than an hour. They knew all the songs but sang them hushed, almost like church hymns.

That his fans sung out his birthplace rather than his name in welcome is part of his myth: Milanes, a singer-songwriter who could probably stand on the Magnificent Mile in total anonymity, is a towering figure in Latin American music but he is, more than anything, a personification of the Cuban revolution, with all its beauty, horror and contradiction.

That identification comes less from traditional patriotism than from the wellspring of idealism inspired by the early days of the Cuban revolution -- an idealism that took wing in countries far from the island, particularly in places such as Chile and Argentina, where military dictatorships brutally resisted the utopian dreams younger generations believed were coming true in Cuba and wanted to impose in their countries.

During those times -- the '60s and '70s -- Milanes helped nurture dual musical movements: Nueva Trova in Cuba and Nueva Canción throughout the Southern Hemisphere of the Americas. Both were folk-based genres, usually dependent on guitars and light percussion, with rich, romantic lyrics about love and heroism, solidarity and revolt.

Milanes' own palette has always been broader, exploring variations of the Cuban son, experimenting with the ballad-based filin style and making occasional excursions into jazz. His voice is a versatile tenor with a rare tenderness and a seemingly effortless way with a song. Milanes has always been vocally seductive, possibly the best male singer to come out of Cuba during revolutionary times.

At the peak of his powers, he not only wrote songs that have become standards but often took poems by others, especially Nicolas Guillen, the revolution's poet laureate, and made them popular songs, not just on the streets but sometimes, in Cuba-friendly countries such as Mexico, even occasional radio hits.

What was perhaps ironic 30 years ago, however, may seem cynical now. While standing atop a movement that portrayed itself as spontaneous and grassroots, Milanes was -- and remains -- an official singer of the Cuban revolution, both in terms of his nurturing as a member of various government-supported ensembles as well as his public posture. And his repertoire has been a reflection of Cuba's official concerns.

In other words, while Milanes has written about issues as far ranging as embracing Cubans in exile and acceptance of same-sex romance, he has done so less as a maverick than as a follower of the official Cuban line.

His apologia for homosexuality, "El Pecado Original," for example, came well after the Oscar-nominated Cuban film "Strawberry and Chocolate" made it possible to talk publicly about being gay in Cuba -- a subject that had certainly been closed before that to Milanes, a former inmate in the notorious labor camps in the mid-'60s which were set up to "re-educate" gays and other "social deviants."

At his Chicago show, Milanes' adherence to Cuba's variable official policies came into bold relief with two of the evening's most well-received songs: the beautiful "Exodo," a stunning call to reconciliation among Cubans from his new album, and the show finishing "Amo Esta Isla," a 20-year-old anthem that essentially condemned the wave of exiles who left the island in the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

At Monday's show, Milanes' repertoire played out Cuba's current ambivalence. Forced to turn inward and re-examine itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its patronage, Cuba gives Milanes his cue: His newer songs are about romantic love, loss and mortality.

The real exception is one called "Dias de Gloria" ("Days of Glory"), from the new album of the same name, in which the older, perhaps exhausted revolutionary sings (originally in Spanish): "The days of glory have passed me by/ I didn't notice/ Only memory reminds me of what once was/ I live with ghosts/ who feed my dreams/ and false promises/ that don't bring back/ the days of glory/ that I once had."

Like the revolution itself perhaps, Milanes on Monday night seemed more like a neutered house cat, remembering a life long ago as a lion or tiger, feral and fierce.