Creativity Quote by Compay Segundo

There is a street-level urgency in Compay Segundo's plea: it sounds less like a manifesto and more like something said between songs, when the romance of Cuban music can no longer paper over what daily life looks like. The opening move, "Towns are suffering", deliberately goes wide. He doesn’t name an ideology, a party, or even a single enemy. He names a condition. That matters: it frames violence and hardship not as isolated crimes but as a shared atmosphere people are breathing in together.

The line "we should unite until we are all satisfied" is deceptively radical in its plainness. "Unite" is a familiar slogan, but "until we are all satisfied" smuggles in a standard of material dignity, not just symbolic togetherness. It suggests solidarity is not a posture; it’s a project with an end point measured in lived outcomes.

Then comes the rhetorical pivot: "man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals". He uses the oldest humanist boundary, culture versus animality, to shame violence without sermonizing. The subtext isn’t that animals are lesser; it’s that humans have no excuse. We have music, memory, ritual, neighborhood, the accumulated proof that we can live otherwise.

Calling violence "a lack of culture" is especially pointed coming from a musician whose entire career is built on culture as survival. In his mouth, culture isn’t museum stuff. It’s the everyday discipline that keeps a town from eating itself.