SERGIO RODRÍGUEZ GELFENSTEIN Silvio Rodríguez: 75 years ... and those that are missing

 Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein (bio), 24/11/2021

On November 29, Cuban singer-songwriter, guitarist and poet Silvio Rodríguez Domínguez turns 75 years. Here is a tribute full of memories to this giant of the Nueva Trova - FG, Tlaxcala

In 1980 Silvio Rodríguez's album “Rabo de Nube” appeared. One of his songs is "Testament." Contrary to tradition, in his will, Silvio does not speak about what he is going to leave behind, but about what he still has to do, which was a lot if you consider that by then he was not yet 35 years old. It is said that he wrote this topic because before his transfer to Angola in the midst of a military confrontation against colonialism and apartheid, a possible encounter with death was real and objective. 

More than 40 years have passed, life has continued to chart its course, the years realize that it is closer to the end than to the beginning. I am not a singer, I try to speak by writing and to that extent - paraphrasing Silvio - I must say that I owe him a chronicle at the time when I have also made my will about the things I still have to do.

I am writing it now a few days before Silvio turns 75. In fact, I should have done it five years ago when he began his eighth decade of life, but Fidel's untimely departure shook us - him and me. I told him so when we talked a few days later. He was very laconic: "We are not for celebrations." And so it was, the pain gnawed at us, paralyzing any creative effort. It is worth now, as a reminder, to relate some unknown anecdotes that portray the human being that I appreciate, intertwined with the composer and poet that everyone sees.

I met Silvio in the mid-70s when he was still living in the apartment of 23. Although we did not have frequent encounters, the times I did, there was intense debate about my “strange” job. Those were times when I made the first pines of my military training. The rarity was given by my condition as a foreigner who had access to the Cuban military academies.

In those early conversations, I was able to perceive the quality of an exceptional being. Although his music began to accompany me and has been present in my life from that moment until today, I do not think that I have approached him both because of his status as a unique musician and because of his human condition and his extraordinary sensitivity that makes him the possessor of a internationalist spirit, owner of a feeling of unwavering solidarity with those who fight "no matter where" because we are their brothers, as Camilo pointed out.

In the background, I could guess that Silvio healthy envied the possibilities that life had given me. I was very young, I was nobody (I am still nobody) and he was already SILVIO RODRÍGUEZ, like this with a capital letter although he was not interested at that time, nor is he interested now, to make anyone feel it. At that time he did not have the rhetorical capacity or the faculty of discernment that the years provide, but he could perceive that Silvio aspired to unleash that internationalist feeling with something more than the guitar. He says it precisely in his Testament:

"I owe a song to a bullet

A projectile that must have waited for me in a jungle.

I owe you a desperate song

Desperate for not being able to see her ”.

Later came the war and the revolution in Nicaragua. After the triumph of July 19, in September, a friend who at the time was working on the transformation of the disappeared "Radiodifusora Nacional" into "La Voz de Nicaragua", knowing that I would travel to Cuba, asked me to bring him records of the Island because it had been assigned the task of creating a musical newspaper library. When I got to Havana, I went to see Silvio and told him about the order I had. He asked me when I was returning to Managua and told me to stop by the day before. In doing so, he had given himself the job of recording on cassettes a wide compendium of Cuban music (not just his own), which were part of the first records that constituted the collection of the new radio station of Revolutionary Nicaragua.

By the way, the day I went to Silvio's house to get the cassettes, he was rehearsing and recording some songs on a modest computer at his house. I listened to him for a long time, almost at the end, when he was due to leave, he took the album out of the device and gave it to me. I kept that cassette - in which there were some songs still unreleased today - for 40 years, giving it back to him some time ago.

A few years later, in 1983 Silvio traveled to Nicaragua to participate in the II Festival of the New Latin American Song, also known as "Concert for Peace in Central America." For unknown reasons, he was staying in a small hotel at kilometer 9 of the southern highway in Managua. There I went to look for him several times to take him to the Las Mercedes hotel near the Sandino airport where most of the guests were. From the hand of Silvio I met great exponents of Latin American music such as Alí Primera, Amparo Ochoa, Gabino Palomares, Mercedes Sosa and Daniel Viglietti among others.

Silvio made me walk dazedly around the tables where they shared that host of artists committed to the peoples of America, whom he introduced me as a Latin American friend. Perhaps he could never have known the emotion that came to me to know closely that constellation of stars among which I went unnoticed despite my splendid olive green uniform as a young internationalist fighter. Those days together with Silvio I learned about the greatness and modesty of those who will be immortal in our history, not only for the glory of their music, much more for having put it at the service of the peoples, the humble and peace.

Finally, I want to relate a curious anecdote that perhaps portrays Silvio like no other. In March 1990, with the newly inaugurated democracy in Chile, he traveled to that country for the first time since 1972 during the government of Salvador Allende. By means of a mechanism that we had established, he let me know in advance, even asking my opinion about the situation in the country and the advisability of making this trip. I replied that it seemed very important to me that he do so because it would transmit a wave of popular freshness to the transition and would be a symbol of the return to Chile not only of him but of all of Cuba, making it known -in fact- that his country had always been with the Chilean people in the difficult moments of the dictatorship. Likewise, I allowed myself to ask him to evaluate the possibility that - without implying negative political consequences for him and for Cuba - he would go to jail and visit political prisoners convicted of fighting the dictatorship.

Silvio received the message. His only answer was that we wish we could see each other during his stay in Santiago. Although I was already legal and we had begun a process of negotiating our insertion into the democratic system with the new government of Patricio Aylwin, an important part of the organization continued to be clandestine. I let him know this, I sent him a contact form, but I told him to assess the real feasibility of meeting in without posing any risk to his integrity.

Unfortunately, when the day came, some setbacks arose due to security problems that led me to decide that it was not convenient to produce the meeting. But when I sent the information to Silvio via messenger, he had already left the hotel. According to the "instructions" that I sent him and that he followed to the letter, he had to leave the hotel in advance and fulfill a "walking plan" that would free him from the follow-up of journalists and fans who were waiting for him at the doors of the hotel, he had to go in and out of galleries and streets until he detected that he was not being followed, before heading to the meeting place: an apartment where an elderly couple lived with collaborators.

They were warned that they would receive a visitor whom they had to attend. They asked me who he was and I told them he was a person they would meet as soon as they saw him. Silvio's arrival almost gave them a heart attack. He had already informed them that I would not be able to attend and that they please explain it to him and offer him a drink. Silvio understood the situation, kindly agreed to have coffee with the surprised homeowners who could not get out of the surprise of having one of the most respected and admired artists in Latin America in their home. That's what they told me. The meeting did not take place, but I think that Silvio was able to savor for a few minutes the honeys of tension, emotion and passion with which the popular struggle faces in clandestine or semi-clandestine conditions, as was the case.

A few days before, Silvio had visited the Public Prison, where he shared with more than 400 political prisoners -some on hunger strike- singing for them in a concert that was perhaps one of the shortest and most improvised of his life, but that sowed in the minds and hearts of many combatants (including mine) infinite respect for those –like him- who in no condition fail to raise their commitment to those who fight, because “no matter where, they are our brothers ”.

Happy birthday dear brother, I wish that after reaching three quarters of a century, your life continues to be prosperous and pure as it has been up to now, that your unwavering love for Cuba and its people continue to be the flag of those of us who continue to believe that your homeland is the lighthouse. of the freedom of America. May your song last so that those who have doubts, overcome them, and those who believe, continue to do so. May the pedestal of friendship and solidarity that you have erected remain solid and indestructible. May your music and your poetry continue to sow the life, the soul, the conscience of being Latin American and Caribbean. May your illustrious Marti and Fidelista spirit transformed into song be an inspiration to all of us who respect and love you.

Receive all the affection of a fool for another fool. May you have health and life for many more years