Quotes from Ruben Blades

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.

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

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

They're making a ton of money, and no one is getting a nickel.

Tortured characters are, I think, an actor's dream.

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

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.

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

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.

Yes, I was going to law school and it was closed in '69.

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.

People are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for being.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.