“Wherever I go, the Cuban community welcomes me and loves me”

MIAMI, United States. – Last week, a video broadcast live by Spanish musician Melendi in 2022 went viral, in which he talks about his relationship with Cubans and the welcome they gave him during his first concert in Miami, in the middle of the last decade.

“I have something with Cuba. There is something there, I don’t know what it is. I feel something there and I think they [los cubanos] “They also feel something,” the popular Spanish musician begins. “I knew that my father’s father had been born in Cuba, had lived in Cuba and had come [para España]; and here she had my father,” he also said.

At another point in his live broadcast, Melendi said: “Wherever I go, the Cuban community welcomes me and loves me.” In that sense, he recounted the experience of his first concert in Miami, the city that has historically welcomed the exiles from the Island: “The first time I went to Miami, I was amazed. I had never been there, we put The Fillmore on sale thinking that we were not going to sell a single ticket, and three weeks later the promoter called me and said ‘We have sold out The Fillmore.’ But, what? take…“How are we going to sell out The Fillmore?” the musician responded.

Melendi also said that the welcome from the Cubans began at the airport, when he arrived in Miami. “When I got there, already at the airport, I noticed something strange, I noticed that everyone stopped me, and it was the Cuban community,” he said.

At another point in his live broadcast, he said that “someday” he would like to visit Cuba. “I would like to go, but, if I am honest, I would like to go with my wife, with a friend, as a backpacker, and get to know Cuba to see if I feel something. I would not like it to be mediatized, I would not like it to be politicized. I would like to go myself to see what I feel. And I would love to go and give a free concert for all the people there,” he said.

In 2023, during another tour that took him to Miami, Melendi spoke with The Americas Newspaper about his relationship with the island. “My grandfather was Cuban, from Camagüey, but I never met him,” he said. “My father was born in Asturias and so was I, but I grew up in an Indian house. There, that is what they call houses that are built the same as those in Cuba, but that we have in the north of Spain,” he explained.

He also confessed that time: “I have been coming to Miami for years. And since I set foot here, I noticed that something was happening with Cuba. In theory it is not tangible to the senses, however, it is something that is there.”

At that time the song had already been released Bread for Yolanda alongside Cuban singer Aymée Nuviola. “This song is an island because it is not part of any project. It came about more than six months ago when I came to Miami to work,” he said.

Regarding the tribute that the song makes to Pablo Milanés, the Spanish singer-songwriter told Las Americas Newspaper: “After the premiere, his manager (Milanés’s manager) contacted a mutual friend and told me that he had really liked it, and thanked me. And the truth is that when I heard the news of his death, I felt a heavy feeling inside, because I admired him as an artist.”