[News] Silvio Rodríguez on his upcoming Puerto Rican and US tour

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Silvio Rodríguez on his upcoming Puerto Rican and US tour

Posted: 07 May 2010 10:35 PM PDT

Silvio Rodríguez on touring the United States: 
“It’s not only breaking the blockade that has motivated me
”

Interview with Silvio Rodríguez by Rosa Miriam 
Elizalde - 
<http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2010/05/07/silvio-rodriguez-de-gira-a-eeuu-entrevista-cubadebate/>Español

Translation: Machetera

Silvio Rodríguez will soon be touring Puerto Rico 
and the United States.  It’s not the first time 
that he’ll have visited both countries – refusing 
to view Puerto Rican territory as a North 
American estate – but this time the first hints 
about of the trip were muted until the Daily News 
in New York unearthed the news: the trova singer 
will perform in Carnegie Hall on June 4th.

The Daily News called Silvio a “Cuban music 
legend,” emphasizing that only living legends 
perform at Carnegie Hall.  And it’s no 
exaggeration.  Benny Goodman, Judy Garland, 
Shirley Bassey, James Gang, Nina Simone, Stevie 
Ray Vaughan
the Beatles in 1964
all have 
performed there.  When the U.S. music industry 
closed ranks under McCarthyism, the legendary 
band The Weavers, with whom Pete Seeger sang, 
found itself forced to break up in 1952.  The 
musicians from The Weavers reunited again at 
Carnegie Hall in 1955 and in 1980 they repeated 
the performance in the same theatre, something 
which served as the subject of the famous 
prizewinning documentary “Wasn’t that a time.”

With the tour to Carnegie Hall and Puerto Rico 
confirmed, his excellent performance in Segunda 
Cita (Second Date) and the fact that we haven’t 
seen him in concert for some time, it’s a scoop 
that summons the inevitable desire to ask 
questions: “I’ll answer them with pleasure, have 
at it.  Don’t delay,” Silvio answered via 
email.  The answers arrived a few hours later.

What is the program, who will accompany you and 
what repertory will you present?  Will it be Segunda Cita?

My compañeros from more than five years will 
accompany me: the trio  from Trovarroco, the 
drummer and percussionist Oliver Valdés, and 
Niurka González on flute and clarinet.  There 
will be moments in which I’ll also perform solo 
on guitar.  Out of necessity I’ll have to reprise 
all my eras because it’s been 13 years since I’ve 
been to Puerto Rico and 30 since I’ve been in the 
United States.  I decided to include three pieces 
from Segunda Cita: Sea señora, [Be a Woman] Carta 
a Violeta Parra [Letter to Violeta Parra] and 
Demasiado [Too Much]. The sound and production 
crew that always accompany me at my concerts will 
also go with us.  We’re rehearsing while we wait for the visa.

During your 1978 U.S. tour you wrote two songs, 
“Leyenda” [Legend] dedicated to the Antonio Maceo 
Brigade and “Tu imagen,” [Your Image] an 
evocation of absent love that all Silvio fans 
know by heart.  Why these songs there and not somewhere else?

The Antonio Maceo Brigade, made up of young 
emigrant Cubans, some of whom were victims of 
Operation Peter Pan, and the Venceremos Brigade 
made up of U.S. citizens, were responsible for 
that first visit of mine.  My closeness with the 
young really enthusiastic Cubans brought forth 
“Leyenda.”  It was the summer of 1978 in New 
York.  I spent those days in an apartment 
building on New York’s East Side, where my sister 
Maria lived, who at the time was married to our 
ambassador to the U.N., Raúl Roa Kourí.  Looking 
out of those windows onto the Hudson River I 
composed the two songs.  “Tu imagen” appeared one 
morning upon awakening, and it refers to the 
impossible history of those New York days.

What memories do you have of the trip you made 
with Pablo Milanés to that country in 1980?  Did 
you ever imagine that it would be three decades before  your return?

It was February and it was said at the time that 
it hadn’t snowed so much for fifty years.  I 
thought then that the same thing happens in cold 
countries as in hot ones: in Cuba you often hear 
that it has never been so hot since such and such 
a year.  But for sure, the night that we were 
going to sing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music 
(BAM) the snow set us back two hours.  At the 
University of Massachusetts where we were sharing 
the program with Duke Ellington’s band, it was 
dreadfully cold.  Same thing in Poughkeepsie, 
Pete Seeger’s hometown.  I remember too that we 
visited Orlando Letelier’s widow and 
children.  We also became acquainted with the 
children of the Rosenbergs, who continued to 
defend their parents’ dignity.  The open-air 
museum in Washington is marvelous.  And in New 
York, the Metropolitan and of course MOMA, where 
we saw Picasso’s Guernica and Lam’s La 
Jungla.  And just to make you laugh, Christopher 
Reeve in Superman which had just premiered; I saw 
it with a bag of popcorn in one hand and a 
Coca-Cola in the other.  Since I went twice 
nearly back to back to the United States (during 
the Carter years) I never imagined that the 
future would be so difficult.  And also 
considering that I was a lot more politically pointed then than now.

According to Joseba Sanz’s book*, the New York 
press picked up on your remarks regarding the 
reasons that brought you to the United States in 
1978.  “We helped to break the blockade, not just 
economic and commercial, but cultural, imposed by 
Washington on Cuba.”  What would you say today, 
32 years later, to the same question that provoked this response?

Now as much as then, it’s not only been breaking 
the blockade that has motivated me.  The United 
States is one of the most mythologized countries 
in the world, and what’s worse, we’re only 120 
kilometers away and as we know, it’s ever-present 
in our lives.  All that makes it plenty 
interesting, and I’m nothing more than a simple 
mortal.  On the other hand, more and more people 
believe that the blockade ought to end and 
everyone pushes a little where they can, from 
wherever they are.  It’s a push that happens from 
very diverse points of view but undoubtedly 
there’s a place where the underpinnings of 
political positions coincide.  I believe that the 
end of the blockade will mean well-being not only 
for Cubans but for the world, because the 
blockade continues to be one of the most 
inexplicable aggressions dragging on from the 
history of the last century.  And of course, I 
believe that U.S. leaders themselves will feel 
quite a bit of relief when at last they can rid 
themselves of this zone of their own intolerance.

There’s a well-known legend in New York that 
goes: “Whoever sings in Carnegie Hall stands in 
History, anchored by excellence.”  But this also 
reminds me of the phrase by Mario Benedetti: 
“Silvio was never a myth; he doesn’t travel with 
a pedestal on his back.”  How will you present yourself on that stage?

The first time I was in New York, I passed in 
front of Carnegie Hall.  There was a young 
flautist sitting on the front steps with a small 
music stand, playing what seemed to me like music 
from Mozart.  There was such a delicacy in the 
execution and sound that I thought, “This ought 
to be played inside there.”  Maybe he chose that 
spot so that pedestrians would think that, but 
nevertheless he was good.  For more than 30 
years, at times, I’ve wondered what became of 
that boy.  I hope he made it, I hope that all of 
us achieve what we deserve, by which I don’t mean 
to say that only prizewinners are 
worthy.  Whatever I am, on any stage you’ll see 
me busy with the same things: working so that we 
musicians hear each other well in order to be 
able to communicate well together, and so that 
the public hears what we hope they’ll hear.

You’ll find yourself in a United States shaken by 
Arizona’s Anti-Immigrant Law, by the pathetic Tea 
Party brotherhood, by a pretend bomb defused last 
week in Manhattan, by a Wall Street so weak that 
it practically collapsed this Thursday over a 
simple spelling error.  Aside from Lennon, how 
much of the utopia is definitively broken in that 
country and how much of its imagination?

What’s happening in Arizona has awakened 
universal revulsion, and for good 
reason.  Putting any kind of bomb in New York 
seems to me to be unacceptable savagery, just as 
I think of bombs in Baghdad, Moscow or in Havana. 
Certainly capitalism seems to be shuddering 
although those who know about economics like to 
say that it’ll still recover.  I don’t know if 
I’m saying something barbaric, but it seems that 
the non plus ultra of capitalism, stock market 
speculation, tends to develop into a kind of 
self-destructive cancer.  There is a Catalan 
economist, Santiago Niño-Becerra, who says that 
the system is worn out and without a doubt is going down.

Have you considered performing in Florida?  Would 
you accept an invitation to perform in Miami?

We might actually perform somewhere in Florida, 
although we’ve not planned on Miami.  I know that 
the majority of the Cubans who live there are not 
as they are portrayed in their media and I’m so sorry about that.

This tour will start in Puerto Rico, once again with Roy Brown?

Well, if Roy or another compañero wants to 
perform, as far as I’m concerned, they’re 
welcome.  Until now we’re prepared to fully 
produce the concerts but it’s not unthinkable 
that we’d add other voices.  For example, if we 
end up somewhere in Florida, I’d invite my old 
trova compañero Carlos Gómez, who lives and sings there.

You said that when you thought of Puerto Rico, 
you didn’t see an island, but something else.  What exactly?

I don’t remember that.  What I said recently is 
that in my letters I have Puerto Rico among the 
Latin American countries and the United States in its own place.

Among your unedited songs from the 1960’s which 
you published in Cancionero (2008), there’s an 
anguished secret contained within “Defensa del 
trovador” [A Troubadour’s Defense]: “
singing is 
difficult/because the truth must be wanted/much 
more than the song itself.”  Is it still 
difficult for Silvio Rodríguez to sing?

To begin with, singing is difficult because it 
means to do something that I consider 
exceptional, at least in my case.  The secret 
that you mention shows that early on I’d 
understood that I didn’t sing just for the sound 
of it but in order to say something.  Obviously 
that assumption has a cost.  The anguish comes 
because it suggests that there are consequences 
for singing that which may not be pleasing to 
hear.  This is a song that I wrote when I was 
22.  I won’t say that the trova I’ve done since 
then has been epic, but it has been risky.  Much 
more risky than that which any sixty-year old 
could manage with any success.  Those who find it 
difficult to sing today are guys like Los 
Aldeanos and Silvito el libre. Probably they need 
to go deeper in certain respects, but it seems 
essential to me to start by defending their right 
to express themselves.  That’s precisely because 
I identify with the Silvio of the ‘60’s.

*Joseba Sanz: Silvio: Memoria trovada de una Revolución (1991)

Machetera is a member of 
<http://www.tlaxcala.es/>Tlaxcala, the 
international network of translators for 
linguistic diversity. This translation may be 
reprinted as long as the content remains 
unaltered, and the author and translator are cited.




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