Panamanian musician and singer Rubén Blades denounced the 'revival' experienced on social media by supporters of Nicolás Maduro's regime of a false controversy with Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez.
"Trolls, bloggers, and the dictator Maduro's call centers have revived false information attributed to the Cuban musician and poet Silvio Rodríguez, in which he supposedly attacks me for my opinion on Maduro," Blades denounced this Friday on his social media.
The singer did not mention the social media accounts that replicated the content labeled as false, nor did he share the posts that supposedly echoed what he termed as fake news.
"To clarify the lie of the spokespeople of the Venezuelan dictatorship, I reproduce this article that I published in Apuntes desde la Esquina, which explains and refutes, with quotes from Silvio himself, the falsehood from 2014, the one from 2019, and now in 2024 the same people are trying to revive it to confuse and discredit my position," said Blades on his blog, linking to a publication from February 2019, when news of a false controversy between the two musicians spread.
The issue has been ongoing since 2014, months after the elections held on April 14, 2013, in which the National Electoral Council of Venezuela (CNE) awarded victory to Maduro over the opposition candidate Henrique Capriles.
In a 2019 post on his blog, Blades explained that media and social media profiles aligned with chavismo had distorted Silvio's words and created a false controversy between the two musicians based on the publication in the troubadour's blog (Segunda Cita) of a letter from the Panamanian to the dictator Maduro.
That letter was answered in the comments of the blog by the Cuban writer and academic Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera. However, certain media outlets took Rodríguez Rivera's words as if they were Silvio's response to Blades.
As Blades clarified in 2019, on March 5, 2014, Silvio denied to Noticieros Televisa "that there was any feud between Rubén Blades and him regarding the political and social instability that Venezuela is experiencing."
"I have no exchange with Rubén Blades, the press claims that I responded to him, but I only reproduced the letter on my blog, the epistle that Blades wrote to President Maduro. Guillermo Rodríguez Rivera, a professor at the University of Cuba, poet, and art critic, was the one who responded to Rubén," the troubadour clarified then.
The media manipulation by pro-Chavismo outlets once again used that false controversy after the 2019 elections, prompting another publication from Blades alerting to its falseness and writing to the real Silvio Rodríguez in respectful terms to express his regret over such fabrications. Additionally, the Panamanian singer and activist sarcastically criticized the Cuban ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel for echoing the fake news.
"Now they have resumed that same false theme, repeating the same lie from 2014... I am very clear that what Prensa Latina publishes, taken from a Venezuelan radio, is false and I will not allow them to use me against you, nor will I let them entangle us in their irrationality," the Panamanian singer stated in his 2019 post.
Followers of Joseph Goebbels' motto (the ideologist of German Nazism) that "a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth," media aligned with Nicolás Maduro's regime have once again spread the ashes of the false controversy of 2014 and 2019, attempting to legitimize the fraud of these elections with the supposed moral authority of the Cuban songwriter.
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