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" 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. "

Ruben Blades

Think

Ideas

City

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" I didn't do drugs, I never did do drugs. Never. I don't have any story of drugs, you know, to speak of. Never did drugs, never was interested in drugs and then I wasn't interested in the people around the drugs. "

" And, he'd seen me in Panama, and he talked about maybe doing something in New York so I hooked it up when I came here and I recorded in 1969 my first album with Pete Rodriguez. "

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" Anywhere you had a commerce center, you had a lot of music. "

" The first time I played was in Buenos Aires - was in 1983. The dictatorship was in position. "

" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" They're making a ton of money, and no one is getting a nickel. "

" 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. "

" A lot of times you're just conditioned by what's around you. "

" I was always interested in trying to find how different genres would affect the lyrics that I'd written. Salsa is where most of my songs have been recorded, the genre of salsa. It's very frenetic, fast-paced. And I felt that the lyrics sometimes were being lost. "

" Not everybody goes to government to serve themselves and not their country. "

" So everything that ever happened, we knew about in Panama. "

" You know, it was uncomfortable doing the same thing. I don't like a rut. "

Ruben Blades

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" But, when I was about thirteen, I began to sort of sing in my neighborhood. "

" We had something to say. Whenever we played, people didn't dance, they listened. "

" And music was a very important part of our lives. The radio was on all day. "

" Tango was very popular in Panama at the time when I was growing up. In the Fifties in Panama, the radio stations played all types of music. "

" So that in 1974, when I graduated as a lawyer, I figured I'm not going to be a lawyer under a military regime. "

" In general, both in Spanish and English, the quality of the entertainment media is horrible. "

" It doesn't make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law. "

" I decided we should book ourselves, so I started booking the band. "

" There's something about the tango that brings even more emotion out of the lyrics. "

" People are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for being. "

" 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. "