Havana. – Pablo Milanés, as much a musician as a poet and singer, qualities difficult to combine, reached the end of his life this Monday with the privilege of transcending with a memorable legacy for Cuba and other countries that enjoyed his work.
His latest artistic tour “Days of Light” brought the mythical singer-songwriter relief by returning to singing and being in contact with the public, who received him joyfully at each concert and sang along to his usual songs along with the new releases he produced during the pandemic break.
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The last dates announced in Spain, Mexico, and Santo Domingo were postponed due to a worsening of various conditions linked to the health problems that had afflicted him for decades. Years ago, he had moved to Spain to treat an oncohematological disease.
“Music is everything to me, the best way I find to express myself, the best way to feel and even to think. I believe that musicians have another very special language, which allows us to communicate, that is something unique,” confessed the artist, born in Bayamo (east) on February 24, 1943.
In fact, he claimed that his best recitals, “the most open and spontaneous, occur before the audience of my island”.
In Havana
Last June, Havana hosted its last performance in Cuba. And it was quite an event.
Tickets for the first proposed venue, the National Theater, sold out quickly, and the protest from their fans, rising like a tide on social media, resulted in the concert being moved to the Sports City Coliseum, with a capacity four times greater.
The Cuban public then saw Milanés arrive at the set in a wheelchair, an image that for many was a premonition that the health problems he had been dragging for decades had worsened.
This visit to Havana also meant reuniting with his family on the island five months after the unexpected death of his daughter Suylén due to a stroke at the beginning of 2022.
Milanés resided from 2014 in Vigo (Spain), with his last wife and manager, the Galician historian Nancy Pérez, with whom he had two children.
29 times to the operating room
Throughout his life, Milanés entered the operating room 29 times, mainly due to chronic necrosis in the head of the femur, but also for a hernia and kidney failure, which led him to undergo a kidney transplant donated by his wife in 2014.
Added to this is his suffering from Dupuytren’s contracture, a disease that caused the progressive closing of his hand and prevented him from playing the guitar for several years.
In 2017, he moved to Spain to treat a type of cancer that affected his immunological response.
But the musician always prevailed over adversity and persisted in his will to continue his work. He composed more than 400 songs and published more than forty albums, in addition to composing music for seven feature films and more than thirty documentaries and television series.
Pablo and Politics
Founder of the Nueva Trova Cubana along with Silvio Rodríguez and the late Noel Nicola, a musical movement loaded with political overtones, Milanés was, during the last decades, one of the figures of Cuban culture most critical of the island’s political system.
“In 1992, I was convinced that the Cuban system had definitively failed and I denounced it,” he declared after the anti-government protests of July 11, 2021, on the island, the largest in decades.
The creator of “Para vivir”, “El breve espacio en que no estás” and “Amo esta isla”, then reiterated his confidence in the Cuban people “to seek the best possible system of coexistence and prosperity, with full freedoms and without repression”.
Last September, Pablo Milanés was part of the hundred of Cuban artists and intellectuals who signed a manifesto of civil society and spoke out on social media for the promotion of changes in their country “within a spirit of sovereignty, inclusion and respect for the human being, their dignity and most basic aspirations”.
Yolanda, her anthem song
Of all his songs, “Yolanda” has been the most sung by him throughout more than five decades of artistic career, to the point that it has come to be inscribed at the head of his repertoire as an anthem.
Yolanda Benet, his second wife and mother of his first three daughters -Lynn, Liam and Suylén- was the inspiring muse and according to her, the first time Pablo Milanés sang her the song “la paralizó” she was “paralyzed”.
It is undoubtedly his star song, the winner of the test imposed by the passage of time, a love song present in each of his concerts, sung by the audience verse by verse of the poet who owned a voice like a torrent, clear, special and unforgettable.
