Art & Creativity Quote by Ruben Blades

Blades is doing something slyly radical here: he frames musical history as infrastructure, not mythology. By talking about ferries between New Orleans and Cuba, he cuts through the romantic story we tell about genres springing up in isolation, as if jazz, son, and early salsa were sealed inside national borders. The image is almost mundane, even bureaucratic - boats running routes - and that’s the point. Culture doesn’t just “influence” culture; it travels because people travel, because commerce runs, because ports stay open and bodies move.

The intent is corrective. Blades has spent a career pushing back against shallow, U.S.-centric timelines that treat Latin music as an offshoot or novelty. He’s arguing for a shared Gulf and Caribbean soundscape where the traffic went both ways: rhythms, instruments, dance styles, and ideas circulating through working musicians, sailors, and migrants. The ferry detail grounds that exchange in material reality, implying something sturdier than a vague “fusion.” It suggests frequency, repetition, routine - enough contact to reshape what listeners later call “tradition.”

There’s subtext, too, about politics and memory. Those ferries evoke a pre-embargo era when proximity actually meant access, when Havana and New Orleans were connected nodes in a network rather than symbols on opposite sides of an ideological wall. Blades isn’t just mapping influence; he’s quietly critiquing the stories borders force us to tell after the fact.