San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Singer was troubadour of Cuba’s revolution
Pablo Milanés, a Cuban musician whose blend of folk idioms, pop influences and themes of love both personal and patriotic earned him a reputation as the Bob Dylan of Latin America, died Tuesday in Madrid. He was 79.
His son Fabien Pisani confirmed the death, in a hospital, and said the cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder.
Milanés, known to fans as Pablito, was a founding member of nueva trova, a musical movement that emerged in the late 1960s and infused traditional Cuban arrangements with social and political themes.
He wrote songs to accompany the dramatic changes sweeping across Cuba in the wake of the 1959 revolution, making him and the two other founders of nueva trova, Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola, its unofficial troubadours.
“The success of Silvio and Pablo is the success of the revolution,” Fidel Castro said during a reception for Rodríguez and Milanés in 1984.
Milanés’ influence spread beyond Cuba. As the revolutionary tides that swept over Latin America in the 1960s receded in the face of right-wing authoritarians in the 1970s, songs of his such as “Yo No Te Pido” and “Cuba Va” became anthems of the continental left, sung in dissident meetings and among exile communities.
“To millions of Latin Americans, Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés and their guitars are as much a symbol of Cuba and its revolution as Fidel Castro and his beard,” Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times in 1987.
With his gentle guitar work and a voice poised on the edge between tenor and baritone, Milanés performed songs that were not, on their surface at least, about class struggle and revolution, but instead about love, longing and the beauty of the Cuban countryside.
In 1970, he wrote one of his most famous songs, “Yolanda,” dedicated to his wife at the time, Yolanda Benet, after the birth of their daughter Lynn.
“This can’t be more than a song / I would like it to be a declaration of love,” he sang. “If you miss me I will not die / If I have to die I want it to be with you.”
Nevertheless, his close identification with the Cuban government made him a controversial figure among Cuban Americans. He recorded almost 60 albums, but until recently, they were hard to find in American record stores; those that made it north were often smuggled. He was largely unwelcome in Cuban exile communities, especially in Miami, and radio stations that played his music reported receiving threats afterward.
He toured the United States several times, coming and going with the fluctuations in U.S.-Cuban relations. At a 1987 appearance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in New York City, a particularly passionate fan mounted the stage mid-song, knelt before Milanés and placed a red rose at his feet.
“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker,” he told the Times after that show. “I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”
Pablo Milanés Arias was born under auspicious signs for a future revolutionary: His birthday, Feb. 24, 1943, was the 48th anniversary of the Grito de Baire, the declaration of Cuban independence against the Spanish in 1895, while his birthplace, Bayamo, in southeastern Cuba, was a cauldron of Cuban revolutionary sentiment.
His father, Angel Milanés Aguilera, was a saddler and leather craftsman for the Cuban army, and his mother, Caridad Arias Guerra, was a seamstress and dressmaker who traded one of her creations for Pablo’s first guitar.
His mother supported him in other ways: When he was still young, she moved the family to Havana, where she entered him in musical contests and sent him to the city’s Municipal Conservatory of Music to study piano.
When he was 12, he encountered a group of street musicians playing traditional Cuban music, and he persuaded his mother to let him leave school to start his career early.
Milanés was married five times. He is survived by his wife, Nancy Pérez, and their children, Rosa Parks Milanés Perez and Pablo; his daughter Lynn Milanés Benet and son Liam, both with his second wife, Yolanda Benet; his children Mauricio Blanco Álvarez, Fabien Pisani Álvarez and Haydée Milanés Álvarez, with his third wife, Zoe Álvarez; and his son Antonio, with his fourth wife, Sandra Perez. Another daughter with Benet, Suylén Milanés, died in January.
In 1965, Milanés released “Mi 22 Años” (“My 22 Years”), a dewy-eyed lament of a young man who has already seen so much: “Long ago, I longed to find eternal bliss,” he sang. Threaded with Cuban folk and American jazz, it is considered the first nueva trova song.
His international fame grew through the 1970s, alongside the promise and struggle of revolutionaries across the developing world who often looked to Cuba as their ideological lodestar. He sang to Cuban soldiers serving in Angola, and he toured the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
He won two Latin Grammys, both in 2006 — one for best singer-songwriter album, the other for best traditional tropical album.
His turn away from the Cuban government coincided with Castro’s decision to step down that year, to be succeeded by his brother, Raúl, who promised significant reforms. When those promises went unfulfilled, Milanés spoke out.
“When one thinks of the reforms, you think they’re going to come united with a series of freedoms, such as freedom of expression,” he said in an interview with El Nuevo Herald, a Miami newspaper, in 2011.
But he remained a devotee of the revolutionary fervor of his youth, and he never lost his legions of fans on the left.
When a reporter asked Michelle Bachelet, the left-leaning former president of Chile, in July about a proposed change to the Chilean Constitution, she said it reminded her of a line from one of Milanés’ songs.
“It’s not perfect,” she said, “but it’s close to what I always dreamed of.”