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.
People are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for being.
We had something to say. Whenever we played, people didn't dance, they listened.
They're making a ton of money, and no one is getting a nickel.
There was no television, so the radio provided you with everything.
The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city.
So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.
So that in 1974, when I graduated as a lawyer, I figured I'm not going to be a lawyer under a military regime.
So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.
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.
So everything that ever happened, we knew about in Panama.
Rock is young music, it is youth oriented. It just speaks for a generation.
So that when I came to New York again, it was, I'm not too sure right now, but it was '74 or '75. I went to Miami in '74 and then I came to New York, I think, at the end of '74.
Yes, I was going to law school and it was closed in '69.