Cuban singer Pablo Milanes performs on the Ciudad Deportiva Coliseo in Havana, Cuba, on June 21, 2022. Milanes, the Latin Grammy-winning balladeer who helped discovered Cuba’s “nueva trova” motion and toured the world as a cultural ambassador for Fidel Castro’s revolution, died early Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022, in Spain, the place he had been beneath therapy for blood most cancers.
Yamil Lage/AFP through Getty Pictures
cover caption
toggle caption
Yamil Lage/AFP through Getty Pictures
Cuban singer Pablo Milanes performs on the Ciudad Deportiva Coliseo in Havana, Cuba, on June 21, 2022. Milanes, the Latin Grammy-winning balladeer who helped discovered Cuba’s “nueva trova” motion and toured the world as a cultural ambassador for Fidel Castro’s revolution, died early Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022, in Spain, the place he had been beneath therapy for blood most cancers.
Yamil Lage/AFP through Getty Pictures
His followers all through Latin America knew him merely as Pablito. Identified for such hits as Yolanda and Yo Me Quedo, Pablo Milanés helped outline Nueva Trova, the style of music that emerged in Cuba within the Nineteen Seventies.
Milanés died in Madrid. He moved to Spain a number of years in the past to obtain therapy for most cancers. The Latin Grammy winner’s loss of life was introduced on his Fb web page:
“With nice ache and unhappiness, we remorse to report that Maestro Pablo Milanés has handed away this early morning on November 22 in Madrid. We deeply recognize all of the reveals of affection and help, to all his household and associates, on this very tough time. Might he relaxation within the love and peace he at all times transcended. He’ll stay endlessly in our reminiscence.”
In a 2019 interview together with his daughter Haydée Milanés, NPR’s Alt.Latino described Pablo as “one of the crucial revered singer-songwriters to emerge from a heady interval when politics, poetry and acoustic guitars flowed from Cuba within the type of nueva trova, or new track.”
Pablo Milanés (proper) and his daughter Haydée Milanés carry out collectively on the Kennedy Heart.
Jati Lindsay/Kennedy Heart
cover caption
toggle caption
Jati Lindsay/Kennedy Heart
Pablo Milanés (proper) and his daughter Haydée Milanés carry out collectively on the Kennedy Heart.
Jati Lindsay/Kennedy Heart
Pablo Milanés had a sophisticated relationship with the Cuban authorities over the a long time. He supported Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution however he was additionally a free thinker. Within the mid-Sixties, he was despatched to the Castro regime’s compelled labor camps referred to as Army Units of Manufacturing Assist (UMAP) the place, in keeping with El Pais, “clergymen, homosexuals and different ‘delinquent components’ had been interned beneath the pretext of obligatory navy service.”
“It was a focus camp and I spent a 12 months and a half of my life there,” Milanés instructed The Guardian in 1999. “It wasn’t that there was any bodily punishment, it was the very fact you had been shut away, with exhausting bodily labor, reducing sugar cane daybreak to nightfall.” He mentioned he wasn’t precisely positive why he was despatched there. “I used to be dwelling a bohemian way of life. . . who is aware of, the entire perspective of youth on the time.”
Cuban chief Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez tweeted that Milanés and his songs are an “inseparable voice of the soundtrack of our technology.”
Earlier this 12 months, Milanes introduced that he had signed the Cuban Civil Society Manifesto calling for social and financial modifications to the nation. In a Fb publish, he urged others to learn the doc and to make means for brand spanking new methods of pondering, “which declare new legal guidelines, new freedoms, new energetic participation inside as we speak’s society, which might lead us to a dialogue of peace.”
Among the many many tributes from fellow artists, Peruvian singer Tania Libertad wrote, “An important composer, fantastic singer and extraordinary buddy…We’ll miss you Expensive Pablo. Have a great journey. I’ll hug you and sing to you at all times.”
