Cuban poet and composer Silvio Rodríguez on Tuesday paid tribute to late singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés with the publication of an unpublished song he dedicated to the composer in 1969.
Havana, Cuba.- “I met you tearing the chest of death one day; you didn’t know anything and it was you that was holding its hand,” reads the first verse of ‘Pablo,’ a song that Rodríguez posted on his blog.
Both musicians and Noel Nicola were pioneers and founders of what would later be known as the Cuban Nueva Trova (New Song Movement).
Pablo Milanés was born in Bayamo, eastern Cuba, on February 24, 1943. He was being treated at a hospital in Madrid, Spain, due to an oncological-hematological disease that he had suffered for several years.
Considered one of the key exponents of Spanish-language singers and songwriters, Milanés compiled a significant work for Cubans on the island and in other Latin American nations, with a repertoire of more than 400 songs.
Winner of two Latin Grammy Awards in 2006 and a statuette for Musical Excellence in 2015, he combined a mixture of genres and sonorities in the continent, which ranged between tradition and modernity.
His discography comprised filing, jazz, rumba, son, and bolero, deployed in 50 albums.
Milanés gave his last concert to thousands of people at Havana’s Ciudad Deportiva Stadium, where sang iconic songs and others from his latest album Días de Luz (Days of Light), whose promotional tour took him to stages in the United States and Spain.
SPAIN PAYS TRIBUTE TO PABLO MILANÉS AND CONDOLENCES OVER HIS DEATH
Madrid.- Spanish President Pedro Sánchez, many musicians, and mainstream media on Tuesday joined the tribute to Cuban singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés.
Although Milanes died in a hospital in Madrid on early Tuesday, successive messages of tribute and condolences to the author of “Yolanda” and “Yo no te pido” have been published.
“We will take to the streets again and mourn the absence on your behalf. The music of Pablo Milanés will always be with us. He gave a voice to the life and feelings of an entire generation,” Pedro Sánchez tweeted.
“Eternally in our memory,” the Spanish president wrote.
For her part, Yolanda Díaz, second vice-president and minister of Labor, emotionally expressed her feelings on Twitter.
“Pablo Milanés has composed, verse by verse, the song of our lives. A singer-songwriter of beauty, the memory of all loves. His transparent, free voice left us with poetics and an ethics of the essential and the small. Today, Pablo, you fly from your beloved island to our hearts forever,” Diaz commented.
The spokesman in Congress for Esquerra Republicana Catalunya, Gabriel Rufián, also dedicated a few words to the artist who shared stages and made records with Spanish singers Víctor Manuel, Ana Belén and Luis Eduardo Aute, and Argentinean singer Mercedes Sosa.
“How beautiful he wrote and how beautiful he sang,” Rufián tweeted, and the career of this iconic Cuban singer-songwriter was largely covered in newspapers such as País, El Mundo, the radio channels SER and COPE, and the main television stations and the news agencies Europa Press and EFE. (PL)