Today I venture to quote a passage from Mario Benedetti makes a monograph of Silvio:
For many reasons, and even injustices, a singer Silvio Rodriguez is off the charts. Co-founder, with Pablo Milanés, Noel Nicola, Vicente Feliu, Eduardo Ramos, Sergio Vitier (and although no one knows who named it) of the Nueva Trova, has brought his undoubted prestige to a movement that revitalized the Cuban song catapulted the internationally. However, even within the nucleus as ferment, with whom he was always fully identified, Silvio is an unmistakable spirit.
Interestingly, his voice is not serious or particularly warm or seductive, but rather acute, an almost metallic timbre and yet fragile. When listening, one comes to fear that at any moment break it, and that risk (if not deliberately sought but rather takes it as something irremediable) is also part of its strange appeal. With features than any other singer would anticarismáticas, Silvio founded precisely its charm. Perhaps the secret lies in that it always transmits a great sincerity, honesty in every test, one does not pretend it is not, and in these times of manufactured reputations of monsters of the tiresome and mystifying advertising, that attitude, to which the public can access without intermediaries, means a breath of fresh air in an area, like the show, usually so speculative and artificial.
Except in exceptional cases, Silvio is the author of the lyrics and the music of their songs. As in the examples of Pablo Milanés, Chico Buarque. Viglietti, Serrat, Aute and not many more, this double authorship gives his productions an essential unity. Whether or not the result of a parallel development, words and music appear as twins (twins, say in Cuba), partners in the act of parturition. Basically, the lyrics of Silvio, especially those created from a hard-won maturity, have a textual level so lucky that (something not too common among popular singers) remain valid even without the basic policy of the music stand. Have I ever held, and his subsequent career confirms diagnosis or marginal, that Silvio is a poet who sings, and even more so: that is one of the most talented poets of his generation.
always remember how I met Silvio and Pablo in Havana, back in 1966. It was my first visit to Cuba. Some friends had invited me to dinner at his home and later told me that two singers come very young, still largely unknown. At last came with their guitars and sang five or six songs each. I had the strange sensation of attending a major shift of the Cuban song: on the one side was this troubadour tradition, and the other a proposal amazingly innovative, transforming, enriching, Legacy rhythms and lyrics inserted in a sense so communication such as the conversational poetry, then in full development in Latin America. Several years later, listening to new music texts and more stringent bill, I asked them to sing those lyrics primitive that they had heard in 66. But not remembered. The truth is that at that time had created such frantically new songs, that those initials, so important to me, had been covered by his own oblivion.
Joseba Sanz This book is invaluable: inserts the work of the singer in his life, follows a two step by step, verse to verse. It is not just a timeline extended, but a spiritual curriculum, an ephemeris of mood. For the first time may appraise Silvio listener a route not only artistic but also a life journey. You can check so the greater commitment (a word now so underestimated by the postmodernist neglect) Silvio is with life, which is not singing from afar but it stuck to the core. Participating in the literacy campaign, shipping to Africa in the fishing boat Playa Giron, holding a gun to defend their revolution, risking his life in Angola, singing of love from love, learning to deal on equal terms to women of life, growing children, Silvio path is the theme of his song, and when the public, loyal and fervent, any of the three worlds applaud him boldly and naturally, not only awarding her art, too its coherence, its allegiance to the Revolution itself and its ability to work and rigor, his human qualities. Silvio never be a myth, does not travel with its stand on his back. Their audiences know and maybe that's why they treat him like a sweet and simple companion, who sings and tells the joys and the sorrows that they also wanted to sing and say so dearly like him. Mario Benedetti
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