Silvio Rodríguez: “How humanly useful we can be”

By Weekly Archive On Sep 19, 2012

By Mónica Rivero

One summer day a police officer knocked on Silvio Rodríguez’s home door.

“Silvio, I’m in charge of Prevention at “La Corbata” neighborhood. As you probably know we work in sensitive places where there are people who are ex-convicts and we try to help them reintegrate into society, since these are neighborhoods with certain problems, certain lack of resources. We also try to help people go straight, so that they don’t get into trouble. I’m here because when you went to Guamajal Prison I was working there, and I realized that you are somebody who is concerned about these things.”

Indeed, a little over a year before Silvio had not noticed then First Lieutenant José Antonio Álvarez, one of the officers at Guajamal Men’s Prison in Villa Clara. But after approximately one year after he toured several correctional facilities, he became interested in Álvarez’s concerns and the manner in which he handled them.

“I thought,” Silvio said, “Damn, here is somebody worth listening to; we’ve got to see what’s behind this.” It was then that he gave a concert at La Corbata.

“Once I had that first experience, I realized that it was something I had to keep doing. That experience puts you face to face with a reality that I didn’t know. I had no idea there was such complexity in society, that new neighborhoods had sprung up or the conditions in which they lived, which sometimes are very, very precarious.”

Unknowingly or unwittingly, Captain Álvarez provided a path. Silvio was receptive and converted it into a motive. That first concert was the onset of a new project: a tour through some 30 Havana neighborhoods. Because of its magnitude, it became a reason for this interview.

-How do you select a neighborhood for the tour?

Ana Lourdes Martínez, who coordinates the tour, has been meeting with the municipal authorities and with the Police’s Department of Prevention. Following the advice of those experts and also by popular requests of the neighbors we have programmed the tour. The main reason that has guided us is to make the presentations in the neediest places, where most problems have accumulated; there conditions are more critical, for whatever the reasons. Neighborhoods that grew around shelters that initially were going to be provisional for families that had lost their homes for different reasons. Some arrived as children and later grew up there and married, and now they have seen their own children grow up in the neighborhood. That’s the case of “Sexto Congreso”, which is on the other side of Lawton’s railroad tracks. Or Lugardita, which has been without running water for more than a year. Or “Bello Amanecer”, which has a name that makes you think of what it is not (Beautiful Dawn). But mind you, in all those neighborhoods kids go to school and all have shoes.

-Why a tour in these particular moments?

Cuba is immersed in a sensitive process of changes. It’s a necessary transformation, but one of its dangers is that some of the least favored sectors could become more impoverished. Being with them is one of the main reasons for the tour. Although it is also true that I’ve been doing these types of thing since I began.

In 1969, I went to the coast of West Africa, from one ship to another of the Cuban Fishing Fleet. That tour in the high seas was my first systematic experience. One of the inspirations was that the fishermen of the Youth Column of the Sea had the goal of sending fish to the country and at times they went for a whole year without calling at port. My mission consisted in contacting as many ships as I could and offer them my songs. I spent more than four months at sea.

Angola, where I went on two occasions between February 1976 and January 1977, was another place I thought I should be.

In early 1989, I made that other tour called “Through the Motherland”, together with the group Afrocuba. We began on January 28 on the top of Turquino Peak for 200 people; we wrapped it up in late March, at Revolution Square, for an audience of 200,000. In the late 1980s the Socialist block was falling apart. And it was obvious that it would affect us one way or the other. Those concerns motivated the tour.

In 2008, upon finishing my duty at the National Assembly, I thought once more that I should leave behind something useful. That’s why I talked about systematizing cultural work in prisons. I knew that spontaneously it had been done for some time, but I have always believed that organizing it could be a contribution toward reeducation. I talked about it and also on stressing the work being done by writers, artists, sportspeople and relatives of inmates. So we made that tour to prisons throughout the whole country that was much talked about, even internationally. We related with over 40,000 inmates.

The tour through the neighborhoods began because an officer working in Prevention, who had seen us in a concert on that tour, invited me to the neighborhood he was working in, “La Corbata”. And after that concert I realized that I had found another good road to travel.

Originally the tour was planned with some modesty, without much ballyhoo or publicity. I did not want to make a big show out of visiting people in their homes. Among other reasons because I believe that what we do is a natural thing, something that should be an everyday thing. I believe that art should go out of the theater and take it to citizens who can’t afford it, or to those who don’t have the habit of going to the theater, or because of the myth of class. People who are born in poor neighborhoods or are discriminated could be made to believe that certain forms of art are not for them and their families. Touring the neighborhoods is an act of justice toward people and also toward the arts themselves, offering a grain of sand for reparations and to break down prejudice.

-Which aspects of this tour, or its intention, are similar to others, such as the one in the prisons?

In the sense that arts and music are good for people, wherever they are. On the other hand, my team is practically the same. People from the Ministry of Culture’s tour department help us a lot. Technicians and musicians are my working companions of many years. We are a sort of family.

-What are you looking for in the neighborhoods’ audience?

I want to see the people, touch them, exchange humor with them, hear them express themselves in order to know the reality of the people, of my origins, to whom I have a duty. I also want to take to those places expressions that our media and the media of the world do not spread too widely. I want to love and be loved.

-And what do you find?

I find a rebirth. I know that someone may say that it is short lived. But while it lasts, we know that we are not alone or forgotten. We receive and we give. They feel it and we feel it. That remains in our memories, for all of us. Personally, I am thrilled when I see that, in spite of the predominance of what is in fashion, people in the neighborhoods sing my songs. That really impresses me, particularly coming from children and teenagers. It’s like a miracle.

-No doubt the concerts’ acceptance has been very favorable. What do you feel that you leave in those venues?

I leave what I ought to leave. Myself and other artists: bridges, intertwining lines that link us, light up at the same time, and show us how humanly useful we can be.