 So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami. |
| What I do not accept is the fact that so many people's talents were ripped off. |
| 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. |
| Every band had their own distinctive sound, but it was pretty much dancing music and rhythmic music with a tremendous emphasis on copying the Cuban models. |
| 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. |
| People are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for being. |
| So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America. |
| We had something to say. Whenever we played, people didn't dance, they listened. |
| I was born in Panama, the Republic of Panama, on July 16, 1948 in Panama City, in an area called San Felipe. |
| It doesn't make sense for me to be a lawyer in a place where there is no law. |
| I didn't do drugs, I never did do drugs. Never. I don't have any story of drugs, you know, to speak of. Never did drugs, never was interested in drugs and then I wasn't interested in the people around the drugs. |
| I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance. |
| But, when I was about thirteen, I began to sort of sing in my neighborhood. |
