By Rose Miriam Elizalde on October 8, 2026
The Cuban troubadour in concert at the Movistar Arena in Madrid. Photo by Kaloian Santos Cabrera
Life pours down a deluge of worries and sorrows. We are now in the midst of such a downpour, soaked to the bone by the miseries of mankind. Because of Donald Trump’s dangerous audacity, which does nothing but conjure up the old ghosts of war and hatred; because of the political mafias—both visible and hidden—within the State Department; because of the horror of sanctions that leave millions in Cuba without electricity, food, or medicine.
There are nightmares in the world that I find hard to name. Like Gaza, where human hell is raging once again, with at least 21,700 children killed from October 7, 2023, through June 2026, according to the latest statistics from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Or Minab, in Iran, where a U.S. airstrike on a school killed 120 students—most of them first-graders—and a pregnant woman.
I think of the Cuban children and some of my friends who are also dying silently because their treatments have been interrupted, amid a health crisis that has worsened this year to unprecedented levels due to the U.S. blockade. And there’s more.
Not all deaths come with the roar of a bomb—a reality that, taken as a whole, is even more sinister, because we know it could very well be prevented.
But at no point in history—not even in the most catastrophic and darkest times—has the longing for beauty ceased to beat within us, a fact I was reminded of yesterday while watching on YouTube the magnificent concert by Silvio Rodríguez at the Movistar Arena in Madrid, reconstructed from afar using video clips that viewers have been uploading to that platform.
Niurka González, foto: Bill Hackwell
They have managed to convey something as fragile as the airy melody of Niurka González’s flute—a voice that, at nearly 80 years old, sounds just as it did in her 20s—and the 12,000 souls singing “I hope something happens that erases you suddenly / a blinding light, / a burst of snow” in fleeting moments of beauty.
It is that seemingly useless beauty that reminds us that we humans can be decent and good, that the dream of a world where we could all live with dignity endures. And perhaps because we know this, the arrogance of power hurts us all the more.
Simone Weil said that one of the vital needs of workers is beauty, because without it there is no social justice, and that it is not a mere matter of taste or a superficial adornment, but rather the harmony between the blind necessity of the universe and the law of the good.
Or as the Cuban poet and philosopher Cintio Vitier, an admirer of Simone, recalled in a memorable essay: “Only in action can we experience beauty; we can, in a certain sense, be beauty.”
What Silvio has reminded us of with this tour is that while the ugliness of life rains down upon us, the marvelous also exists and might even endure. He will continue his concert series in Mexico in April 2027. He will perform in Monterrey, Guadalajara, Puebla, and at the National Auditorium in the capital, where he will surely include—as he has done in his performances this year in Latin America and Spain—the poem “Halt!” by Wichy Nogueras. The “best poet of my generation,” as the Cuban troubadour often introduces him, visited Auschwitz when news was circulating about Israeli bombings of Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon in the early 1970s. From that experience came these verses, which remain terribly relevant today: “I think of you / and cannot fathom / how / you forgot so quickly / the heat of hell.”
All of this is captured in those shaky YouTube videos, but the most moving one is the one in which Silvio appears singing while standing, accompanied only by his wife on the flute and his daughter Malva on the piano, with the Movistar Arena on the edge of their seats and Luis Eduardo Aute’s song blaring at full volume in the Cuban’s voice: “I champion the mirage / of trying to be oneself, / that journey toward nothingness / that consists of the certainty / of finding beauty / in your gaze.”
It was to be expected that the entire audience would rise to its feet when Aute’s verse “Long live the revolution!” came, reaffirming that beauty emerges even in the most degrading and murky circumstances, because humanity has also been capable of turning beauty into a heroic act.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English