I first heard of Silvio Rodriguez on a lonely afternoon in 1987 while in Mexico City. A young Mexican bohemian--clad in black beret, flowing poncho, and scruffy beard--had a blanket spread out in the Plaza de la Constitucion, peddling used cassettes by Silvio Rodriguez and Mercedes Sosa, books on Che and Fidel, and odd replicas of ancient Aztec sculpture. Noticing that I was unfamiliar with Latin American music, he urged me to try one of Silvio's tapes. Perhaps he thought that our similarity of taste in dress would carry over to our taste in music. He was right.
Mujeres, the Silvio Rodriguez cassette that I brought back to the United States with me (ignorant of the fact that the simple act of carrying a copy of music by a Cuban artist across the border meant I had single-handedly broken the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba!), changed the way that I thought about love, Latin America, and even life itself. The music was unabashedly romantic (though less in tune with the popular vision of romance than with that romance which I intuitively understood in my heart), deep and moving, and filled with the unfathomable mysteries of a life of love.
The recent release of Silvio's Canciones Urgentes, the first volume of a trilogy of Cuban music compiled by David Byrne and made possible by a recent law allowing limited "cultural" exchange with the island, provides the people of the United States with the first real opportunity to hear music that is already immensely well-known by young people throughout all of Latin America.
The music on this album bounces between hot Caribbean salsa and the more acoustically oriented folk songs that Rodriguez is traditionally known for. The songs range from the soaring, crisp, and clear-as-spring sounds of "Como Esperando Abril" ("As If Waiting For April To Come"), to the urgent, philosophically deep, and melancholy tune, "La Maza" ("The Hammer").
Several of the songs in this collection have the lightness and child-like simplicity of Cat Stevens' early recordings. It takes several hearings--and sometimes wading through several slightly over-orchestrated pieces--to really grasp the depth of soul and lyrical sophistication Silvio employs in his art. Like others of the singer/songwriter tradition, Silvio Rodriguez has been described as "a poet who sings."
Even to those who can't understand the Spanish lyrics, it is evident that something very subtle and profound is going on in this music. The English translations of his lyrics on the album jacket, beautifully done by Rina Benmayor and Felix Cortes, make this apparent to all.
SILVIO RODRIGUEZ is part of the "Nueva Trova" movement in Cuba which, like its counterpart in South and Central America, "Nueva Cancion," brings out the true hopes and aspirations of the pueblo and puts them to music that is popular in the truest sense of the word. The artists of the Nueva Trova movement show the uninitiated the evolution of music in Cuba after some 31 years of cultural estrangement, meeting us where the rumba and the cha-cha-cha left us a generation ago, when our only definition of the island's music was taken from the I Love Lucy show.
Within the revolutionary context of Cuba, Rodriguez and the "Nueva Trovadores" have sought to discard the alienating pre-revolutionary music of former dictator Fulgencio Batista's nightclubs and casinos and resurrect the music of the common people, the love songs that mothers sing to their children, that families sing among themselves, and that Cubans sing while walking.
Coming of age in the 1960s, when Fidel Castro and Che Guevera were transforming the Cuban youth into their idea of the "new man" [sic], Silvio's music was new wine for new wineskins. For years he has been employed by the Cuban government as their cultural avant-garde representative, touring countries throughout the Spanish-speaking world in support of the revolution. Much of his music is overtly political and revolutionary, containing images of Bolivar and Che, of Nicaragua Libre and Playa Giron (The Bay of Pigs).
But now that communism in much of the world has fallen to pieces, and Fidel Castro appears anachronistic, the followers of Nueva Trova, most notably the Miami-based Cuban exiles, have questioned whether the rich romanticism on the surface of Silvio Rodriguez' music is but an allegory for opposition to Castro's project in Cuba. Does it represent a longing for freedom, not for establishment of a socialist utopia or for the beauty of love between revolutionaries?
Such distinctions are perhaps too simplistic for an artist of such profundity. The music of Silvio Rodriguez goes beyond Cold War rhetoric and cuts right into the existential nature of the human experience.
In the song "Sueno Con Serpientes" ("I Dream of Serpents"), Silvio reinterprets, in surrealistic and poetic terms, the myth of Sisyphus, expressing over and over again the feelings of endless labor and struggle that many of us who work for social justice experience.
Like the young and comely shepherd David, who was called into the court by King Saul to drive away tormenting evil spirits and refresh his heart with the beauty of his harp (1 Samuel 16:14-23), Rodriguez is a troubadour employed by Fidel Castro and the Cuban government to praise the revolution and to soften the current hardships that the Cuban people feel by the grace of his song.
But as David's psalms comforted the distressed soul of Saul, they also heralded the beginning of the end for the king and his reign. The prophetic manifestation of the musician, revealing in song the sublime beauty and harmony of God's established order, revealed how out of touch the ruler was with his own nature and the reality of the day. We have yet to taste the fruit of Silvio and the Nueva Trova movement, and perhaps it is only then that we will know it.
Aaron McCarroll Gallegos was Outreach Assistant at Sojourners when this article appeared.
Canciones Urgentes: Los Grandes Exitos, Cuba Classics 1/Greatest Hits. By Silvio Rodriguez. Compiled by David Byrne. Luaka Bop/Warner Brothers. 1991.
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