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ablo Milanés, the singer and guitarist, who has died aged 79, was a pioneer of the Cuban Nueva Trova Cubana movement, combining balladry with social and political commentary; he became a Grammy-winning superstar across the Latin-American world.

Pablo Milanés in 1988© Provided by The Telegraph

Nueva Trova emerged in the late 1960s under the patronage of the “barbudos” – Fidel Castro and his bearded followers who led the Cuban revolution in 1959. The style combines the traditional folk idioms of “trova”, the music of the 19th century trovadores, itinerant musicians who earned their living by singing and playing the guitar, with socially “progressive” and often politicised lyrics.

Milanés, affectionately known as Pablito, was close to the regime – one of his daughters married the son of Che Guevara, and for a time he served as a delegate to Cuba’s National Assembly – and there were some, Cuban exiles in particular, who regarded him as a stooge.

Yet his relationship with the regime was not always easy, and it did not prevent him becoming extremely popular with exiles in Miami, as well as across Latin America, Spain – and further afield (he made his UK debut in 1999 at a Festival of Cuban arts at the Barbican), in the process bringing in much-needed foreign currency. 

The youngest of five children of working-class parents, Pablo Milanés was born on February 24 1943 in the eastern city of Bayamo and as a child won singing contests on television and radio.

He studied for a time at the Havana Musical Conservatory during the 1950s and supported the 1959 Cuban Revolution, becoming active in bohemian musical circles in the Cuban capital.

But as Castro’s embrace of Soviet economic support brought dogmatic cultural values to the fore, Milanés (who sported an Afro haircut), and his friends found themselves targeted by the authorities and he spent a year and a half on “special military service” – a euphemism for forced labour camps. “But somehow I came out of that,” Milanés told The Guardian in 1999, “and I stayed a revolutionary.”

His songs became more overtly political, though he continued to compose and record gentle mid-tempo sentimental ballads, his Yolanda (1970), a love song dedicated to his then wife Yolanda Benet, becoming a perennial favourite all over the Hispanic world.

For many years, until an unexplained falling-out, he toured internationally with his fellow Nueva Trova pioneer Silvio Rodríguez, including giving the first major concert in Argentina to mark the end of military dictatorship after the Falklands War.

Although Milanés mostly abided by Fidel Castro’s 1961 dictum “Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing,” and kept whatever misgivings he might have had about the regime to himself, from 2004, when he moved to Vigo in Spain after his marriage to Nancy Pérez, a Spanish historian, he became more publicly critical while claiming to be true to the Cuban Revolution.

In 2006 he contributed the song Exodo, about Cubans who had fled the country, to a compilation album of songs about migration by US and Latin American artists, and in 2010 he gave his support to a Cuban hunger striker who was demanding the release of political prisoners. In 2021, after widespread protests in Cuba, he signed a “Manifesto of Cuban Civil Society” calling for social and economic reforms.

Milanés recorded some 40 albums and won numerous Latin Grammy awards, including a lifetime achievement prize in 2015.

Milanés is reported to have been married five times, firstly to the daughter of a captain of Castro’s police. With his second wife, Yolanda Benet, he had three daughters, one of whom predeceased him; with his third wife, Zóe Álvarez, he had a daughter; with his fourth, Sandra Pérez, he had a son, and with his fifth, Nancy Perez, he had two sons.

Pablo Milanés, born February 24 1943, died November 22 2022

Reference: Story by Telegraph Obituaries