Creativity Quote by Ruben Blades

There’s a sly swagger in the claim, the kind that sounds like a throwaway line until you remember who’s saying it. Ruben Blades isn’t just a musician; he’s a reporter in melody, a Panamanian who watched the 20th century get routed through his country like a shipping lane. “So everything that ever happened” lands as exaggeration on purpose, a wink that doubles as accusation: don’t pretend Panama is some distant backwater. Empire runs cables everywhere, and Panama has always been one of the main junction boxes.

The line’s power comes from how it flips the usual geography of importance. In the standard story, news and history radiate outward from Washington, New York, London. Blades suggests the opposite: Panama is where the consequences show up first, where foreign policy becomes daily weather. The Canal isn’t just infrastructure; it’s surveillance, commerce, military posture, rumor. “We knew about” implies an intelligence network that isn’t official but is just as real: dockworkers, migrants, soldiers on leave, radio chatter, gossip moving faster than paperwork. Knowledge becomes a folk resource, built from proximity to power.

Underneath the bravado is fatigue. To “know” everything is to be unable to opt out. Small countries positioned at global chokepoints don’t get the luxury of innocence; they get front-row seats to other people’s ambitions. Blades compresses that history into a single casual sentence, making geopolitics sound like street talk, which is exactly the point: world events aren’t abstract when they’re happening in your neighborhood.