The Washington Post 
November 5, 1985

Ruben Blades & The Spirit of Salsa; 
The Activist Singer-Turned-Actor Harbors No 'Crossover
Dreams' of His Own 

By Paula Span, Washington Post Staff Writer 

DATELINE: NEW YORK 

Rube'n Blades is padding down the hallway of his
apartment building toward the incinerator with a sack
of garbage in each hand, just as if there weren't a
stack of film scripts on his desk from panting movie
makers who caught his film debut in "Crossover
Dreams." Salt of the earth. Just a regular guy. 

"Go in, make yourself comfortable," he calls over his
shoulder. He's wearing a T-shirt and shorts and white
sneakers with no discernible brand identification.
Blades is not about to get into "some pop idol thing"
just because he's one of the world's leading salsa
stars, his last album sold phenomenally (for a salsa
record in Spanish, anyway), and he's just played
Carnegie Hall. 

He is haunted by the notion, growing steadily more
plausible as he grows steadily better known to
English-speaking audiences, that he might himself
cross over, sell out, go Anglo. "There he goes,
pulling a Julio Iglesias, and we'll never see him
again," he imagines his loyalists complaining even if
he were to start singing in English -- let alone club
around with Mick. 

So he still lives here on the Upper West Side, the
neighborhood he's frequented since first coming to New
York 11 years ago, when it had more bodegas and fewer
mesquite grills. He still goes home to Panama two or
three times a year. And he makes sure that his album
notes and the messages on his phone-answering machine
are in Spanish (the latter with translation). 

He's just a down-to-earth, unassuming fellow with a
shiny, new master's in international law from Harvard
and a forthright ambition to be president of Panama,
who reads Orwell, sings duets with Linda Ronstadt and
thinks it entirely possible that he'll be gunned down
young, that's all. Just like anybody else. 

He says he's not really like Rudy Veloz, the salsa
singer he plays in "Crossover Dreams" (now playing at
area theaters).. Veloz is Blades' nightmare: a
musician willing to dump his girl, double-cross his
friend and compromise his music for the promise of a
spot on Billboard's top 20. It is Veloz and his like
whom Blades has in mind when he excoriates "people
that get into a certain position, social climb -- and
then it's difficult to look down. They don't want to
be reminded of what they escaped from." 

Yet for 20 years Rube'n Blades has been alternately
drawn to and repelled by the culture of this country,
home of Hollywood and Harvard, where any young Latin
boy can grow up to play stereotyped drug peddlers on
TV. It both patronizes ("Such an articulate fellow;
where did you learn English?" he mimics) and rewards
him. 

His father was a policeman, his mother an actress on
radio soap operas. But Rube'n grew up wanting to be
Frankie Lymon, harmonizing with the guys in
echo-chamber stairwells in Panama City. "He was big,
as big as anything has ever been there," Blades says,
reclining on a small couch in his rather Lonely Guy
apartment. Concert tours and law school have taken
priority over interior decoration. 

"There was a building called Audisio, a three-story
building. The second floor was great. Our parents
weren't exactly thrilled. They wanted us to be
somebody. 'Go to school! What are you doing singing in
hallways?' " 

The scenario is straight out of a black and white
movie starring Tuesday Weld. Blades saw those movies
too. "One thing North Americans fail to understand --
you're not aware of how much impact you have down
there," he explains. "We knew who Gene Vincent was.
'Heartbreak Hotel' hit earlier there than here.
Remember," he adds with some pride, "Panama is a port,
and things hit there first." 

Yet other messages were also trickling south. Blades
watched "Father Knows Best" ("Everyone was happy and
they had ice cream in the icebox all the time"), but
he also saw newspaper photographs of snarling police
dogs in Little Rock, Ark. By the early '60s, "people
began to perceive the ugly side of this culture we all
loved and wanted to be part of. At the same time, we
started looking at ourselves more." 

Riots in the Canal Zone in 1964, in which 21 died
after Americans refused to let high school students
raise the Panamanian flag alongside the Stars and
Stripes, foreclosed the prospects of a life in rock
'n' roll. "There were parents there with shotguns,"
Blades remembers. "Clubs, dogs. It ended up with the
U.S. Army attacking Panamanians. We couldn't justify
this. How would I feel as a Panamanian trying to act
as if nothing had happened, when something had?" 

So Blades left doo-wop behind, studied law at the
University of Panama and, when he had time, sang with
Afro-Cuban bands, always in Spanish. In the 20 albums
he has recorded since, he has never sung an English
lyric. 

He first came to New York in 1970, when unrest closed
the university and his brother, who was working for an
airline, got him a cheap ticket. "I just kind of
wandered around to see what I should do," he
remembers. He made an album that fizzled, was tempted
to stay on, then went home to finish law school. 

He ended up an attorney at the national bank, but
decided to give music another shot. Returning to New
York in 1974, he hooked up with the leading salsa
label, Fania Records -- though not in the capacity
he'd envisioned. "They wouldn't record me," he says.
"I had to push a cart full of mail from 57th and
Broadway to 52nd Street every day." 

Eventually, of course, he did make records, with
leading Latin bands and on his own, writing his own
songs, steadily shouldering aside the limits of the
salsa form. Blades' latest albums (he left Fania after
bitter disputes and now records for a mainstream
label, Elektra) lace salsa's insistent rhythms with
flavorings of rock and funk. 

"Every Afro-Cuban band sounds alike," he complains.
"The trumpet, the brass. Why do we have to copy what
was being done in 1940?" He's substituted vibes and
synthesizers; his numbers cook without steamrolling. 

But his lyrics are what really set him apart.
Precisely crafted portraits of lives in Central
America and in the barrio, they led People magazine to
call him a Latin cross between Randy Newman and Bruce
Springsteen -- and led radio stations in Panama and
Miami to ban some of his songs. 

Already a folk hero on the streets of Panama City and
East Harlem, his recent work has earned him exactly
the sort of wider audience Rudy Veloz sold his soul
for. And life, as a result, is growing more
complicated. 

Blades spent a recent afternoon lip-syncing a line for
the antiapartheid "Sun City" video with John Oates and
Lou Reed in Washington Square. In the process, he
"finally got to meet Bruce Springsteen," an event he
chats happily about until he realizes he's
subordinating politics to hero worship, and stops. His
new album, "Escen as," includes a duet with Linda
Ronstadt, whom Blades calls "refreshingly unaffected."
Meanwhile the film and television scripts continue to
arrive. 

Though Blades turns most down -- "Big films, big
names, but playing what? Some lowlife. You need a
heavy, get a Latin" -- he's intrigued despite himself.
He should, he says, be taking acting classes. 

He lights a cigarette. His mother back in Panama would
slap him if she knew. He'd been clean for years, but
Rudy Veloz smoked, so now Blades does too. 

"I understand how many young Latin Americans are
looking at what I'm doing, and I don't want to give
the impression of abandoning them," Blades says again.
And, "Panama is something that has never left me. I am
its child." 

He is going home one day, he has been saying for
years, to help lead his country. He used to say,
point-blank, that he wanted to be its president. He's
grown slightly more circumspect these days, talking
about "communication" instead of titles or agendas. "I
can bring both sides to the table, the students and
the working class, the private sector," he reasons.
"I'm probably one of the most recognized Panamanians,
after the president and the head of the military and
boxer Roberto Duran. I have access to the media. The
people know what I'm singing about and that I haven't
changed. 

"But I'm not just some dingbat musician trying to save
the world. I have credentials." 

He calls his education "an intellectual .45 you can
carry with you." Yet the Harvard degree he's counting
on to bolster his political credibility was hard-won.
When Blades arrived in Cambridge a year ago, after a
long hiatus from higher education, he'd never studied
in English. "The first few weeks I kept asking myself,
"What am I doing here? What am I trying to prove? Am I
trying to legitimize myself with this? Am I an
arrogant idiot?' . . . I felt like crying; I was just
scared." His mother went to Cambridge to watch him
graduate (he'd skipped his law-school commencement in
Panama); so did a British film crew doing a
documentary. 

He wants the visibility -- though he fears publicity's
toll -- to promote his point of view and his political
ambitions. So when Panama's censorship committee
banned one of the songs from his album "Buscando
America" (saying that "Decisiones," the ruminations of
a pregnant teen-ager, promoted abortion), Blades just
laughed. 

"It was headlines for two weeks," he crows. "The tapes
were everywhere. Buses played it, loud. I went there
to perform and 20,000 people came, the largest crowd
ever for a nonpolitical event. You ever hear 20,000
people singing a song? You think they didn't hear
'Decisiones'?" 

Being banned in Miami, that's another matter. Blades
is politically progressive but unaligned; he's never
joined a party. To have Latin radio programmers decide
that an anti-interventionist song called "Tiburo'n"
("The Shark") was a procommunist statement infuriated
him. 

"Some Cubans in Miami have a very particular view of
dictatorship," he fumes. "They attack Castro's but not
Duvalier's. They talk about political prisoners in
Cuba but not in Chile. They would applaud an invasion
of Nicaragua but remained conspicuously silent for
years about Somoza. They complain about the repressive
regime in Cuba, but they ban my records . . . And
anyone who points these things out is branded a
communist." He's pacing now. "I resent it with all my
heart." 

And, of course, things happen to Latin American
political activists who, rightly or wrongly, are
labeled communist. Panama has had a frightening
autumn: The president resigned under military
pressure; a prominent opponent of the military was
found decapitated; another activist was kidnaped. Life
is starting to sound eerily like a Rube'n Blades song.

"I'm going regardless," he insists. "You have certain
responsibilities. I think I can help clear issues,
bring people together; that's what I'm here for." Yet
he doesn't expect to grow old. He's felt this way
since he was a kid, which may be why he's never
married or fathered a child. 

"The way the world is today? Hijackings and senseless
killings? John Lennon getting shot by a fan? I'm not a
pessimist, but I'm not inventing these things. If
you're in Latin America and dealing with the
possibility of change, you don't know . . . They smell
communism and that's it for you, and you don't even
know who hit you." 

Then again, he adds, "I may leave and come again." His
grandmother believed that she had been, in other
lives, a slave in the Confederacy, a Roman soldier and
a French courtesan. "I just hope I don't come back as
Howard Cosell," Blades says, sounding more like
someone from Jersey City than from Panama City. 

Still, he remains so uneasy about crossing over that
when he finally gets around to recording an album in
English, he plans to invent another persona -- "Panama
Blades" -- to record it. He's attracted to "the
possibility of a Latin who breaks the stereotypes,
talks to Americans and Europeans in their own
language, not something exotic." But Panama won't look
or sound like Rube'n, who doesn't want to tour Latin
America with his band and be asked to sing in English.
"You create a very schizophrenic audience. It could
create some kind of friction," he says vaguely.
"There's this pride." 

So is it Rube'n Blades or Panama Blades who, after
discussing his correspondence with Gabriel Garcia
Marquez and his plan to write songs based on six
Marquez stories, politely asks if he might flick on
the television? "I hate the Cardinals because they
bombed the Mets," he mutters. 

He takes a Lonely Guy dinner -- something crimson in
an aluminum dish -- from his oven and pours a glass of
cranberry juice. "Salisbury steak, so it claims," he
says, poking a fork at the food. And, setting his meal
atop a script on the coffee table, he sits down to
watch the game.