I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.
Ruben Blades
So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.
The first time I played was in Buenos Aires - was in 1983. The dictatorship was in position.
I don't accept ideologies that are not a product of consensus. I don't have an ideology, but I do have a sense of what's right and what's wrong.
So everything that ever happened, we knew about in Panama.
To fix Panama, you need more than charisma and records: you need a program of action.
Rock is young music, it is youth oriented. It just speaks for a generation.
Anywhere you had a commerce center, you had a lot of music.
It's almost as if people think that in Latin America we're not hip to what's happening here.
And, he'd seen me in Panama, and he talked about maybe doing something in New York so I hooked it up when I came here and I recorded in 1969 my first album with Pete Rodriguez.
It was very interesting, and we went to Germany and we toured Germany like we were a German band in 1985.
I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.
My mother never finished elementary school. My father didn't, and that was a reality for many of us.
A lot of times you're just conditioned by what's around you.
What is interesting in this is the exchange of music that occurred between New Orleans and Cuba, I mean, they had ferries that would go from one port to another.
I think being born in Panama was a blessing because Panama is a port city. It's a really - the mentality is that - I remember that of admitting things in. You know, ports, ideas come in and out all the time.
You know, it was uncomfortable doing the same thing. I don't like a rut.
There's something about the tango that brings even more emotion out of the lyrics.
But, when I was about thirteen, I began to sort of sing in my neighborhood.
In general, both in Spanish and English, the quality of the entertainment media is horrible.
I was always interested in trying to find how different genres would affect the lyrics that I'd written. Salsa is where most of my songs have been recorded, the genre of salsa. It's very frenetic, fast-paced. And I felt that the lyrics sometimes were being lost.
Yes, I was going to law school and it was closed in '69.
I really think that music itself, being one of the greatest possible vehicles for mass communication, should be probed to its extremes, to see how effective it can actually become, which is one of the reasons why I became also interested in presenting political points of view.
People are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for being.
I didn't do drugs, I never did do drugs. Never. I don't have any story of drugs, you know, to speak of. Never did drugs, never was interested in drugs and then I wasn't interested in the people around the drugs.
At a certain point, people in Panama thought that everything was going to be solved as soon as Noriega was gone. Of course, the disappointment was huge.
Not everybody goes to government to serve themselves and not their country.
I collected the 'Walking Dead' comics.
And music was a very important part of our lives. The radio was on all day.
It doesn't make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law.
I was born in Panama, the Republic of Panama, on July 16, 1948 in Panama City, in an area called San Felipe.
There was no television, so the radio provided you with everything.
So that when I came to New York again, it was, I'm not too sure right now, but it was '74 or '75. I went to Miami in '74 and then I came to New York, I think, at the end of '74.
So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.
So that in 1974, when I graduated as a lawyer, I figured I'm not going to be a lawyer under a military regime.
So I went to Miami in '74 with my family and while I was there it became obvious that we needed money and we needed to do something, because my family, we left without anything really, and we didn't have any money to begin with.
What I do not accept is the fact that so many people's talents were ripped off.
They're making a ton of money, and no one is getting a nickel.
In those days the big U.S. labels didn't have any particular interest in the Latin market.
Every band had their own distinctive sound, but it was pretty much dancing music and rhythmic music with a tremendous emphasis on copying the Cuban models.
I was the first person to come into New York with a Latin American point of view which was also very much influenced by political happenings in Latin America.
The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city.
I decided we should book ourselves, so I started booking the band.
We had something to say. Whenever we played, people didn't dance, they listened.
I think in New York we had respect and we would pretty much fill up the places where we went, but I never got the sense that we really were Number 1 here in New York among the Latin crowds.
Everyone has a black guy inside them. Mine is a Cuban sonero who is 80-something years old and sings better than I do. His name is Medoro Madera. Medoro has been recording since 1997.
I'm planning to retire from salsa. I'm planning to do a farewell tour.
Tango was very popular in Panama at the time when I was growing up. In the Fifties in Panama, the radio stations played all types of music.
I was never particularly a part of the following of tango; I just liked it... most of all, I recognized that the urban content and the approach seemed very familiar and very connected to the songs that I was doing, the kind of songs that I wanted to write - the songs about the street.
Basically, I would like to be considered for roles that are well-written. I think that part of the problem that we've had as actors is that they insist on looking at us as Latino actors and not as actors, period.
