Top 35 Ruben Blades Quotes

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.

A lot of times you’re just conditioned by what’s around you.

You know, it was uncomfortable doing the same thing. I don’t like a rut.

Anywhere you had a commerce center, you had a lot of music.

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.

In general, both in Spanish and English, the quality of the entertainment media is horrible.

I’m planning to retire from salsa. I’m planning to do a farewell tour.

And music was a very important part of our lives. The radio was on all day.

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.

To fix Panama, you need more than charisma and records: you need a program of action.

The first time I played was in Buenos Aires – was in 1983. The dictatorship was in position.

I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.

It doesn’t make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law.

I collected the ‘Walking Dead’ comics.

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.

So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.

In those days the big U.S. labels didn’t have any particular interest in the Latin market.

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.

Not everybody goes to government to serve themselves and not their country.

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.

So that in 1974, when I graduated as a lawyer, I figured I’m not going to be a lawyer under a military regime.

Rock is young music, it is youth oriented. It just speaks for a generation.

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.

There’s something about the tango that brings even more emotion out of the lyrics.

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.

There was no television, so the radio provided you with everything.

I was born in Panama, the Republic of Panama, on July 16, 1948 in Panama City, in an area called San Felipe.

My mother never finished elementary school. My father didn’t, and that was a reality for many of us.

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.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

It was very interesting, and we went to Germany and we toured Germany like we were a German band in 1985.

I decided we should book ourselves, so I started booking the band.

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.

It’s almost as if people think that in Latin America we’re not hip to what’s happening here.

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.