Pablo Milanés, the best singer of life and love, has died. He died outside his beloved Cuba – I love this island / I’m from the Caribbean / I could never set foot on land / because it inhibits me – which says much more than it might seem since Milanés has been almost a myth for decades , a hero who set music to the Castro Revolution as a great figure of the Cuban Nueva Trova. In recent times, however, for many supporters of the regime he has been a treacherous worm for having criticized the excesses of the ruling party and for having demanded political changes, without ceasing to consider himself a revolutionary. Curiosity led me to scrutinize the Cuban media – owners: the only ones – to see how calmly they treated the death of the troubadour. Predictable, bureaucratically routine, almost lazy. In conclusion: unworthy. Destiny would have it that the disappearance of Pablo Milanés caught none other than the president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz Canel, on a visit to Russia, making verbal fellatio and immodest genuflections to Putin. Not a reference to the Ukraine, the Russian invasion, the war, the bombs, the thousands of civilians murdered. No word for peace. Only clamor and thanks to Russia, to its greatness and generosity in its help to Cuba, both in meetings with Putin and with Dimitri Medvedev or Patriarch Kirill. One of the things that struck me the most about Pablo Milanés’s “criticism” of Castroism was his torn confession that in his youth he was one of the tens of thousands of boys who were locked up in re-education centers, real concentration camps created between 1959 and 1968 in the Cuban paradise to purify revolutionary villains, including, of course, homosexuals, where they were locked up and abused and tried to brainwash them “simply because they thought freely, not even because they thought differently, but because they were freethinkers And they had opinions. Pablo Milanés was a great revolutionary: he loved life, peace, music and freedom.
