The MiraculousNovember 2023Music
53. 1960s and later, Panama City, New York City
Word count: 389
Paragraphs: 3
On weekends, a law student in Panama has fun and makes extra money by singing at private parties with a band called Los Salvajes del Ritmo. This arrangement comes to a stop when one of his professors witnesses one of his performances and reports him to the school’s dean, who insists that he must choose between music and law school. Accordingly, he abandons singing, but a little while later a friend begs him to help out for just one day in getting a recording studio up and running. He agrees. To his surprise, a big New York producer is present and is impressed with the law student’s singing. “If you ever come to New York, call me,” the producer says. Not long after, the nation’s military launches a coup and the university is shut down. Afraid that her son will become involved in violent resistance to the coup, his mother sends him to New York for prolonged vacation. Of course, he calls up the record producer, who gets him into the studio to make an album, but when the university reopens, he returns home, completes his law degree and takes a job the national bank. All is fine until his father is accused by the government of working for the CIA. After the rest of his family flees to Miami, the young lawyer stays at his bank job for a year before deciding to join them to help support his out-of-work father and three younger brothers. When Florida refuses to honor his Panamanian law degree, he travels to New York to offer his services as a singer and songwriter to the biggest salsa record label. They pass on this offer but give him a job in the mailroom shipping out records. One day a bandleader whose singer has just quit hears that a guy in the mailroom is a pretty good singer. Thus begins the young man’s rise to fame, which eventually encompasses the biggest selling salsa record in the history of the genre, as well as starring roles in Hollywood movies, a degree in international law from Harvard, a bid to become president of Panama, four years as the country’s Minister of Tourism and a spectacular musical career that is still continuing into his 70s.
(Rubén Blades, Pancho Cristal, Ray Barretto)
Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.