A biography for Ruben Bladeshasn’t been written yet.
“We had something to say. Whenever we played, people didn't dance, they listened.”
“But, when I was about thirteen, I began to sort of sing in my neighborhood.”
“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.”
“I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.”
“My mother never finished elementary school. My father didn't, and that was a reality for many of us.”
“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.”
“I was a kid, and I remember my mother singing. She was also a radio soap opera actress, but my mother sang.”
“So everything that ever happened, we knew about in Panama.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“And music was a very important part of our lives. The radio was on all day.”
“Tortured characters are, I think, an actor's dream.”
“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.”
“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 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 collected the 'Walking Dead' comics.”
“It's almost as if people think that in Latin America we're not hip to what's happening here.”
“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.”