Legendary Cuban singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés has passed away at the age of 79 in Madrid, Spain.
“With great pain and sadness, we regret to inform you that the maestro Pablo Milanés has passed away this morning of November 22 in Madrid,” the artist’s official Facebook page reported on Monday night.
Milanés, one of the founders and most prominent exponents of the Nueva Trova Cubana, had been admitted to a Madrid hospital since November 12 for “recurring infections,” according to his artistic office.
The artist, who in recent years has lived in the Spanish capital, he was in poor health and suffered from, among other ailments, a kidney disorder for which he received a kidney transplant in 2014.
In recent months, the interpreter of classic songs such as “Yolanda”, “The brief space that you are not” or “I will step on the streets once more” had had to cancel several performances on his Días de Luz tour.
On June 21, he offered his last concert in Havanawhere he performed for thousands of people in a sports arena.
One of the first reactions on Twitter to the death of Milanés was from Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, who called him an “inseparable voice from the soundtrack of our generation.
On that social network, many of Milanés’s followers fired him with phrases from his songs, especially the one dedicated to Yolanda: “If you missed me, I’m not going to die, if I have to die, I want it to be with you.”
Milanés (second from the left) with Joan Manuel Serrat, Luis Eduardo Aute, Kiko Veneno and Silvio Rodríguez in Madrid in 1983.
Born in Bayamo (eastern Cuba) in 1943, Pablo Milanés moved with his parents to Havana as a child, where he studied music at the conservatory and acquired influences from traditional music and the Cuban genre “filin” (from feeling) .
After participating in television programs and vocal groups in the 1950s, she began to stand out as a singer in the following decade, marked by the beginning of the communist system imposed on the island by Fidel Castro following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Pablo Milanés composed some of his first songs, such as “You, my disappointment” and “My twenty-two years.”
Despite declaring himself a revolutionary, in the middle of that decade he was confined in a Military Production Aid Unit (UMAP) at only 23 years of age.
The UMAPs were forced labor camps to which the government of Fidel Castro sent artists, intellectuals, religious and homosexuals for supposedly deviating from the values of the revolution.
Milanés was sent there for expressing dissenting ideas with the ruling party, as he later recounted in interviews in which criticized the government for not having apologized for this episode.
Nueva Trova and stardom
In 1968 he gave his first concert with Silvio Rodriguez. The two singer-songwriters founded, together with Noel Nicola, the New Cuban Trova in the early 1970s.
Nueva Trova combined popular rhythms from the island with political content similar to the ideas of the left-wing movements of the time.
In 1985 he recorded one of the most famous albums of his career, “Querido Pablo”, in which musicians close to Milanés such as Silvio Rodríguez, Joan Manuel Serrat, Víctor Manuel, Ana Belén, Luis Eduardo Aute and Mercedes Sosa participated.
Milanés, in a concert last January in Barcelona (Spain).
Milanés’s music spanned various genres and styles, from the Cuban son and the protest song to compositions for movies.
One of his most famous protest songs was “I will step on the streets once more”, a letter denouncing the Chilean coup of 1973. The musician did not set foot in Chile for 26 years, until in 1998 General Augusto Pinochet left his post as army chief,
Considered one of the most important artists in Latin America, he carried out numerous tours and projects around the world throughout his career.
In more than five decades of his career, he has collaborated with important and varied artists, from Joaquín Sabina to Los Van Van, Ricardo Arjona or Maná, among many others.
In the last years of his life, Pablo Milanés became one of the critical voices of the Cuban government, whom he pointed out as a source of “repression” and “hunger”, and he was in favor of a political change in the country.
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