Rubén Blades, the legend, appears without a hat, despising his iconography and asserting instead the authenticity that he gives off through his skin and voice. The day he received us, he had just been awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts and he wanted to walk around Madrid before returning to the United States. But first he wanted to talk to
El País Semanal
and tell us that at 72 years of age he is stuck in a memoir to comply with the advice that Gabriel García Márquez gave him: "Rubén, clarify the pods," he said. Also that he thought of running for the last elections in Panama in 2019, but that he finally rejected it; that it continues to support young groups, such as the Spanish Stay Homas; that Trump, he says, "is an idiot", but that there was a silenced North America that was not heard, and that the king of salsa and Latin dance built some of his greatest successes, such as
Pedro Navaja
, applying jazz concepts so that people would stop dancing, break their rhythm and listen to the lyrics.
Vigorous, friendly, open and transparent, Rubén Blades, genius and figure in the universal Hispanic scene, music history, lawyer and politician, is a gallery of experiences and life in all those areas and also in the cinema or now in the series television with the seventh season of
Fear The Walking Dead
as it continues to be in Latin music, where it still sets the trend with albums like
Salswing
, released last April.
Question
.
He thought about running for the Panama elections in 2019, finally he did not.
What happened?
Answer
. It didn't seem feasible to me. There are things that I do not understand, the traditional political parties in Panama have shown an overwhelming level of corruption and mediocrity. I don't understand how people join them… We are a country of four million inhabitants and a very high percentage of them join them, which for me are the root of the problem. I didn't see the votes there. On the other hand, the risk now is different from the time before, when I showed up in 1994. People don't believe anyone; Some, if we awaken trust, it is for other reasons.
Pablo Pueblo
, the character of my song, works as a man who perceives the changes.
If you are going to participate in a democratic process, you need support not to govern alone.
You need patience to see that the process of change is not immediate, but generational.
And now there is no such patience.
P
.
He talks about
Pablo Pueblo
and makes me remember how Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela, when you criticized him, blamed him that he had left aside the ideal of that song.
R.
It is extraordinary.
Look at him and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
It is a shame for the left that they are considered part of the argument.
Those two don't do socialism.
Please!
P
.
What can we call it?
R
.
Ineptitude.
Mediocrity.
A tyranny in fact even if they want to dress it in law.
The law obeys a hermeneutic.
Suddenly a rule says that only left-handed people can vote and this is promulgated by an assembly.
Law and justice are not the same, as we know.
The jurist Hans Kelsen already said it when talking about Hitler: Who has told you that the law has to be rational?
P.
In just a moment, the politician Rubén Blades, the jurist and the musician have appeared in these first questions.
Who of all is more you?
R.
I am the son of Anoland and Rubén.
The conditions with which you nourish yourself: my grandmother, my parents, my neighborhood, my teachers ... Panama nurtured me, which reached one million inhabitants in the sixties, when I grew up.
There was a sense of community, solidarity, belonging, the shame had not died, the conditions were in place that allowed me to survive later in New York, with all the deviations and temptations that come your way.
It helped me deal with fame, which is a place where I don't live, but which I visit sometimes and it's nice.
I do not need it.
What made me survive that nonsense was the old thing.
Q.
Did it give you a healthy background?
R
.
With my grandmother, for example, who was my tutor and who had studies in a country where women were only allowed to have male children and know how to cook.
He spoke to me every day and answered all my questions as a child like a rational person.
He explained what death was like while passing a funeral procession.
He stopped as a sign of respect after we left the theater with the loudest air conditioning in the entire Western Hemisphere and where they were serving some really good hot dogs.
"I'm going to die and you too, asshole," he told me.
P
.
Well.
R
.
So again, I asked him if we were poor.
He replied that why was I asking him that and I said: "Well, because I see that there are things that we do not have and cannot buy."
And she told me: "No, look, we are not poor, what happens is that we do not have money."
And I: "Well, isn't it the same?"
“No, it is not the same”, he told me, “poor is he who has neither intellect nor spirit, poor is he who is ignorant.
An idiot wins the lottery tomorrow and does not stop being poor for that.
There are people who are poor because the only thing they have is money.
Don't be thinking about that.
A fucking lesson!
I did not forget as a foundation.
We lived in neighborhoods where families all share that invincible hope of the loser.
P
.
What was your grandmother's name?
R.
Emma Bosque Aizpuru.
And my great-grandmother, Adela Aizpuru Aizpuru, a woman I never saw smile.
If he did, it was alone.
Very rude to hugs.
Rubén Blades, Javier Salas
P
.
In that armor he went to New York.
R
.
I left because my father had a problem with Noriega in 1973, I finished my studies and left.
The myth that exists in Panama is that I finished my studies to please my mother.
And it is not like that.
That is what people who do not know what it is to study five years of law among others with professors like Camilo Pérez, a sadist, who in an exam of 175 students only passed 8. Nobody goes through that martyrdom to satisfy his beloved mother. .
And I approved.
If my dad hadn't had that problem in Panama, who knows if I hadn't been a musician or an actor, nor would we be talking here now.
But I did not want to practice in a country ruled by a tyrant.
P
.
A cursed lineage of dictators in Latin America.
R
.
And largely they succeed because of something common, with the same root.
Q.
What?
R
.
Civic indifference.
P
.
More even than imperialism or an authoritarian heritage?
A.
No, no, no, no ... Indifference is the problem.
In Panama, Noriega could not have had the power he had with a guard of 15,000 people.
You gather 100,000 and those guys run away.
Some are going to die, all right.
Why?
Because it happens.
Dictatorships occur and are perpetuated by the tacit support of the people.
There are lost countries of corruption with assemblies full of members that we have put there with the vote.
Whose fault is it?
From the gringos?
How long are we going to continue blaming them or colonialism in Latin America?
Noriega fell in 1989 and in 31 years we have had more corruption emanating from the civil power than ever.
Tell me, whose fault is it?
P
.
In his career he has revolutionized salsa by applying social conscience and protest dyes.
Do you think it made sense?
R
.
I am optimistic, I am completely sure that they are processes.
I don't think the universe was created for evil.
There is too much beauty in a flower, in the colors of a bird to believe that all this is going to be taken away by the devil.
I do not see it.
It is true that the problem we have now is the extremes.
There are people who believe that there have been no changes, and that is completely false.
Slowly.
If you tell me in 1974 that a black man would see the president of the United States ...
P
.
Which was followed by a nightmare target.
R
.
Democracy is not infallible.
Nobody imagined that asshole Trump was going to win.
But we live in bubbles that prevent us from seeing reality.
Many sectors felt marginalized around an elite and that type was chosen by people who were brave and felt anger.
P.
Without realizing that they were voting for the elite that really oppresses?
R
.
That is populism, the same old story.
P.
Hitler, Mussolini ...
A.
It has always been like this.
And we, you see, are largely to blame.
By human indifference.
But the changes come, they occur, as a slow process.
There are still places in the southern United States where people will not accept a five dollar bill because it has the image of Abraham Lincoln.
And that does not mean that there are no changes.
Q.
But so many that it makes sense to fight as you fight them?
R
.
Yes, because it puts you, I think, on the right side of the story.
Yes, you have to be patient.
In Panama you call a demonstration against corruption and four people go.
You organize another against homosexuals and thousands go.
Why?
If a homosexual has never robbed me ... You add to the stupidity, but some of us say: No!
P
.
When you came to the United States in 1974, did you really not dream of making a living as a musician?
R
.
No, not really.
I went to Miami, where my parents were.
My biggest concern was finding work to help my family.
In the midst of everything, as I had some contact with La Fania thanks to a record I had recorded in Panama, I called the company to offer my services as a songwriter and they said no.
They had only one post at the post office: to send records.
They paid $ 125 a week and that was better than nothing.
That is how I came to La Fania ...
P
.
Yeah, but then he became the king of it.
R.
Well, I had my guitar, I was sure that it would not be possible for me to find work as a singer.
My main concern was to send the money to my mother.
That was what mattered to me.
I paid 100 dollars for the room, I sent 200 to her and the rest for expenses.
Q.
What did you eat?
R
. What I got. But I didn't feel poor, I walked instead of taking the subway, thus saving me $ 21 a month. I never learned to drive, I never wanted a car, I drive in the movies and my friends die laughing. That didn't last long, it was short. I do not believe that luck exists, but opportunity, to which fortune is added at the given moment. Ray Barretto's band broke, Tito Allen left and they gave me the opportunity. That guy who goes in the mail sings and writes ... They tried me with a couple of things and they chose me. But I did not give up the mail. With music I could not yet live. They paid very badly. If there was work, he made about $ 35. Monkeys don't let go of the branch until they have another one in hand… Then, two years later, Willie Colón arrived.
P
.
By then you were already writing lyrics with a social charge?
P.
Pablo Pueblo
is from 1968. I already hit on that.
As García Márquez, El Gabo, used to tell me: "What you are is a chronicler."
What I do are short stories.
Everything comes from Jongo Trio and his songs like
Terra de ninguém
… Also from Chico Buarque with
A banda,
or Piero in Argentina.
With those influences I had already been writing these chronicles.
In New York I focused on that because when I was studying at university in Panama, I had left out of music.
P
.
With García Márquez, what relationship did you have?
R.
I had read to him
The Litter
or
Story of a Shipwrecked Man
, which I told him was the best thing he had written in his life ... We met before he won the Nobel Prize.
We talked often.
Once they told me that he said that what he would have liked is to write
Pedro Navaja
.
I considered that a monumental exaggeration.
Until once they confirmed it to me.
P.
Apart from a chronicle,
Pedro Navaja
is the perfect synthesis between jazz, Latin music and cabaret.
From Kurt Weill to ...
R
.
From Kurt Weill I noticed that he wanted to make enveloping and circular music so that people would stop dancing and notice the lyrics.
I did that with Disappearances.
When we created
Pedro Navaja,
I told Luis Perico Ortiz, the arranger: "Bankrupt the key."
This was anathema.
When you listen to the mambo of the song, there comes a moment when the key is crossed and what happens?
Well, whoever dances has to stop.
It is as if you are walking and you see an accident, what happens?
You have to stop.
It's not just for dancing, it's for you to pay attention.
They are jazz lines.
Rubén Blades, Javier Salas
P
.
That seemed sacrilege to many.
R
.
Many believe that salsa should not get involved in politics and all that, but the one who best defined what musicians should do in that regard was Pau Casals, the cellist.
He believed that the bad effects of bad politics have consequences on artists.
My solution is that, although they lie to my mother, if they don't like it, they shouldn't hear it.
There are a lot of people who hate you because you did it.
There is a percentage of humanity that is against trying something for the first time.
P
.
For evasion, what you do in
Fear The Walking Dead.
R
.
But it is an evasion that makes you think, and more so now with the pandemic.
What it raises is what we would do if normality disappeared, what the world would be like, that is what that pod raises and look at what has happened with the covid.
The only ones in a position to survive an apocalypse now are the Cubans, who have been in the disaster for decades.
P
.
How about reggaeton?
R
.
Well, as in everything, there are very good people.
René [Resident], for example, it's not that he's just good, it's that he's going to survive: everything he does is extraordinary because he places great importance on lyrics.
What I do think is that reggaeton artists are interested in salsa as an influence, and I know that because I meet them at my concerts with their parents, like Bad Bunny.
If I did a song with that guy and it became a hit, I'd pay the mortgage!
P
.
How does it take to be the legend that everyone wants to collaborate with?
R
.
Well, I understand it as what happened to me with a stream of people, with Lou Reed or Bob Dylan, for example, with whom I started talking on a topic, we spent five hours commenting nonsense and we never finished the song ... You have to help to anyone who can help, either collaborating or commenting on it on the networks, as I did now with a very young and very good Spanish group called Stay Homas.
We are here to help, it's that simple.
Now I am writing a book.
P
.
From memories?
A.
Yes, to follow a piece of advice Gabo gave me: "Look, Rubén, rinse the pods."
And that enters from how my last name is pronounced, Blades, like this, with all the letters and how my grandfather liked it, and not in English.
Or how my name goes with an accent on the "e" and not on the "u", as Michael Jackson used to tell me.
A very professional guy to whom I wrote a song that he sang very well, yes sir, but when he asked me to make a record for him I told him I didn't have time.
Things like that.
"Rubén," he would tell me, "come to Australia."
And I: “Do you know how many pods I have to do?
I'm not going ”.
Or how I got into the cinema and how I approach singing.
Q.
How?
R
.
In melodic terms, like a trumpet, and in rhythmic terms, like a camber, tumbadora.
Q.
And when do you write?
As a chronicler, nothing more?
R
.
Completely, like a journalist describing events.
Very devoted to Gabo, who never despised the work that we did.
P.
Far from poetry too?
R
.
No, not either, there must be something of poetry, but without trying to be a poet.