By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on October 9, 2025
Silvio, fotos: Bill Hackwell
“Silvio in concert or something similar is a good place to start… his songs make me think…” These verses from “Sábado corto,” Pablo Milanés’ ballad popularized in the 1980s, were the mantra of my generation: going out into Havana at night, meeting friends and Silvio Rodríguez in some neighborhood to savor the literary dignity of a part of Cuban popular music that has struggled to make poetry with song lyrics.
The troubadour had not performed in Latin America, outside of Cuba, since 2022, when he closed his regional tour with a massive concert in Mexico City’s Zócalo in front of more than 100,000 people. Now he returns to the south of the continent, on a tour that began at the University of Havana, continued in Santiago de Chile, and continues next Saturday in Buenos Aires, with the first of three concerts at the Movistar Arena—the same stage where Javier Milei “barked” at will a few days ago. He will also perform in Uruguay, Peru, and Colombia. He shares his latest album, Quería saber, and previews some tracks from his upcoming album, Cualquiera que nace en Cuba, along with emblematic works from his already well-known repertoire.
Millions of Latin Americans learned more about the history and, above all, the sensibility of our countries by listening to Silvio’s songs than from the texts of the great historians of the complex labyrinth of culture. Many of us listen to music to find someone or to have our own lives told to us. Silvio’s music has that dual virtue. When you are under 20—as I was when I discovered him—the first may end up being a certainty, but what about the second? It requires great power of synthesis, imagination, and the magical flow of music and words that only a very exceptional troubadour can achieve. Only a few have succeeded: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Chico Buarque, a few others, and Silvio, of course.
During the years when social media did not exist, when the dictatorships of the Southern Cone censored left and right, Silvio’s music traveled on cassettes that circulated from hand to hand as an act of resistance. Those clandestine anthems are part of the secret soundtrack of a generation. That is why one of the most moving moments of this tour took place in Chile when he performed “Te recuerdo, Amanda” by Víctor Jara, who was murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship.
For several generations of Cubans, it has been the most normal thing in the world to find Silvio at concerts, performances at the Casa de las Américas, or gatherings—I remember those in the courtyard of the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Havana during my student years—to hear him sing live those songs with a torrent of always lyrical images and intimate music that is constantly renewed. His voice has not changed. He sings and describes with a nasal but also magnetic tone, capable of narrating a thousand stories from far away or close by that sometimes do not end well, to create images that belong to him: a universe that he furnishes with what we cannot express.
Those of us with our hearts on the left, “duly condemned as heretics,” as his friend, the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, to whom he dedicated “Unicornio,” used to say, have been moved by Silvio for years. We have interpreted his verses as we pleased: mysterious, symbolic, epic, surreal, sensual. We have incorporated them into our daily lives, into common speech, into what we suffer and enjoy, into what we imagine and what we lack. Silvio is Silvio for millions: in our loneliness and in our joy, in our desires to survive and change the world, in silence and in the open square.
The “apprentice,” the ‘fool’ who recognizes himself as part of a revolution—the Cuban revolution—is on tour in Latin America. “He is an ambassador of the left and of hope,” a friend told me, still moved by the concert on the steps of the University of Havana at the end of September, where this tour began, attracting people of all ages, especially young people. Yes: a left that has managed to distance itself from propaganda and draw a subtle line between political discourse and love, between protest and personal integrity.
Silvio in concert, a few days before his 79th birthday, continues to be a luxury of music and poetry, a wealth that never runs dry in its surprises and nuances, in the variety of songs he sings and that we continue to discover as new releases.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English