THE recent death in Spain of the Cuban singer and songwriter Pablo Milanes at the age of 79 represents a great loss to the world of music and song. He was not only revered in Cuba but throughout Latin America and beyond.

Milanes Arias was born in the east Cuban city of Bayamo in 1943, the youngest of five siblings born to working-class parents.

His musical talents were apparent early on. Aged six, he started entering, and often winning, singing competitions on local TV and radio stations, and later studied at the Municipal Conservatoire in Havana. However, he credited the musicians of his local neighbourhood as the real inspiration for his music.

After the guerillas, led by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and their comrades, overthrew the dictatorship of Batista in 1959, there emerged a cultural flowering, rooted in the ideas of socialism.

Working with colleagues like Silvio Rodriguez and Noel Nicola, and supported by the revolutionary government’s cultural policy, he co-founded the Nueva Trova movement (from 19th-century trovadores/troubadours) – a revitalised traditional and popular musical movement in tune with the new revolutionary era.

The New York Times wrote that Rodriguez and Milanes were “as much a symbol of Cuba and its revolution as Fidel Castro and his beard,” while Castro himself said in 1984: “The success of Silvio and Pablo is the success of the revolution.”

Milanes’s reputation grew as Nueva Trova was more overtly political than its predecessor and focused on embracing socialism as well as a rejection of colonialism and racism.

“I am a worker who labours with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker,” he once told the New York Times.

Milanes, guitar in hand, played together in 1968 in Havana with Silvio Rodriguez in a blockbuster concert that marked the beginning of his world renown. “If Silvio Rodriguez and I got together, the rum was always there,” Milanes reminisced to El Pais in 2003. “We were always three, never two.”

Well-known songs including numbers like Yo Pisare Las Calles Nuevamente / I Will Walk These Streets Again, Yolanda — a tribute to his wife, Soledad/Solitude, among others, quickly gained fans and travelled the world.

Cuba va!/Cuba Goes! composed with Noel Nicola and Silvio Rodriguez was a great hit at the time: “Say it: Carry on Cuba! / Even if our machete / Gets tangled in the undergrowth, / Or some nights / The stars don’t come out. / But no matter what, no matter what / Cuba will carry on, carry on Cuba!

In 1973 he put to music poems by Cuban independence hero Jose Marti — resulting in the album Versos Sencillos/Simple Verses.

He won multiple Latin Grammy Awards, including one for Musical Excellence in 2015 to honour a lifetime of dedication to his art. While the subject matter of his songs was wide-ranging, it was always less overtly political than those of some of his colleagues.

Milanes was a lifelong crusader for social justice causes and had early run-ins with the new government in Havana, shortly after the success of the revolution in 1959 but remained a staunch supporter of the process.

However, he became more critical in recent years and shortly after protests in July 2021, Milanes signed a document entitled Manifesto of Cuban Civil Society calling for urgent social and economic reforms in Cuba.

“Our country, united, needs to give way to new voices and new ways of thinking, that are demanding new laws and new freedoms,” Milanes said as he signed the document.

His last concert took place in Havana in June 2022. That concert, which brought tears to the eyes of many of his fans, was dedicated to music, rather than politics.