• The Evole The night Yolanda Díaz broke her smile

Last week when Lo de Évole ended the interview with Yolanda Díaz, Jordi Évole tweeted: "It's our Freddie Mercury, our Gloria Fuertes, our Dylan and Mocedades. He's a star and we're lucky he exists." The journalist was putting honey on his lips to announce who was going to be his guest this Sunday: Rodrigo Cuevas. And surely many would think inwardly, who is Rodrigo Cuevas? Today there will be few who do not know. Rodrigo Cuevas is free and he tells anyone who has to say it, even to Miguel Bosé himself. He doesn't hurt clothes.

Rodrigo Cuevas is a diva, "a folkloric diva", a lover, the lover of folklore, of tradition, of what we now call the Emptied Spain, of getting up in the morning and taking the first piss looking at a landscape with which many dream, that others yearn, that many do not know. If last night was the first time you heard and saw Rodrigo Vázquez, it will be difficult for you to forget him.

It happened to Jordi Évole's parents. In the middle of the pandemic, in one of the video calls that the journalist made every day to his parents, they, hallucinated and excited, told him that they had been watching videos of a boy who sang copla. "Rodrigo Cueva?" asked Evole. "That one, that one, that one!"

Probably last night the one who saw Lo de Évole and for the first time placed Rodrigo Cuevas on the map would happen the same as Jordi Évole's parents. Or, perhaps, the opposite would happen to him. What is clear is that Rodrigo Cuevas never leaves anyone indifferent when you see him on stage and also when you listen to him.

Rodrigo Cuevas is a "diva of folklore". He is an artist who fills concerts in Miami, in Paris, in his land, in his town... She is the diva who as a child only lived free in the town of her grandfather, who did not know what it was to be a "faggot", who in Oviedo, where she grew up, did not see a gay until she was 19 years old: "I thought that gays had not arrived in Asturias. I didn't know he was gay. Pthought it was like you won the lottery, but badly."

That he endured the bullying of his classmates and that today he lives "free" in a small town in Asturias, in Piloña. There he lives with his garden, his donkeys, his neighbors, his theater, the one he is reforming, La Benéfica, because "all the time there is talk of depopulation and the answer is always to demand infrastructure, but what we need are ideas, that young people say 'I do not lose anything by living here'. Give a collective self-esteem to the people and that young people say that living in a village is very cool. The coolest thing here is not its roundabouts. The emotional bond of a place goes through fun, through culture."

It's what he does in Piloña, but also what he does every time he gets on stage. Unite the traditional with the modern, folklore with the mainstream, the usual with the new. That's why, every time he speaks, each of his sentences is a couplet. He always has them in his mouth. He sings Suspiros de España and serves you coffee – the usual coffee, not the Nespresso – in a "" shaped jug. "I like to sweep on the outside," he acknowledged last night to Jordi Évole. And it desbarra, of course it desbarra.

"We lack a lot of collective self-esteem. It seems that wanting Spain is putting on the bracelet and covering everything bad. To want a place, to love Spain, is to recognize mistakes and correct them. The more you want a site, the more you want to improve it." Each phrase of Rodrigo Cuevas is nailed, because without shouting, without insulting, without disrespect, without entering the so fashionable 'and you more' or in the 'and you less' he says what many keep silent, but think.

He is clear because he lives in a council in the eastern part of the Principality of Asturias that does not reach 7,000 inhabitants. Because for Rodrigo Cuevas that is life, because for Rodrigo Cuevas there is nothing like drinking the milk you milk, eating the meat you raise, drinking the potted coffee. And, above all, because Rodrigo Cuevas is the demonstration that it is possible: "Older people are more reasonable, understanding, more open-minded. I never feel threatened. It's like gays have a chip in their head that jumps in your head where you can be free and where you can't. Here I am."

"Older people have given me pretty much everything," he continues. Older people are the ones who teach me my songs, they taught me a way to know and read the world. They know a lot of things and use their memory a lot. Folklore is a very poetic way of knowing things and I try to teach it to young people, but it doesn't enter them." Rodrigo Cuevas is 37 years old.

Like his art and that his music doesn't fit with what we think should always fit. He is not a young man like those of now, as the older ones would say, nor is his music like that of now nor does it seem to have anything to do with what is now. And maybe that's why whoever sees him gets hooked.

He does not like technology because it "destroys", but he needs it and what he does is a kind of symbiosis, which shows that it is possible, that the two things can be united, that you can live from both things, that Rodrigo Cuevas is a fusion of those two things: "The people who work with folklore take advantage of something that we did not do, of something that has no owner, but it does have an owner that is its people. There is no SGAE for the peoples. The idea of La Benéfica is to give something back to my people because part of what I enrich myself with is from others."

He says that he is no longer in the market, but he goes to Maribel's bar on a Thursday and each one fulfills "his social function". "It doesn't matter what you think or who you are. Nothing doesn't matter here. At such a party we are all equal. Here inside it doesn't matter. That's mortar. Today someone fucks here."

But to get there, Rodrigo Cuevas has had to go through what many have gone through. But there is no rancor in his words, far from it, quite the opposite. In his words there is truth and many balls. Those of saying things as they think them and as they think they are, stings those who sting, but without any intention of biting.

Because Rodrigo Cuevas still tells you that there is "a lot of folkloric faggot", that young people do not know how to flirt because "they do not know poetry", like that "man always has that thing that you do not dance that you look like a faggot, do not move the hand that you look like a faggot and they shoehorned it into us". They were other times, Rodrigo Cuevas also lived them. And, perhaps, because he lived them, he has a lot to say to those who now have their mouths full saying that "before there was more freedom". More than one should listen to him, for example, Miguel Bosé.

"Lie. Before there was no more freedom. I heard Miguel Bosé say in El Hormiguero that in La Transición we had more freedom than now. Boy, how did you not come out 40 years ago and not now? If all those you tell about your family, when you were caught, that your father forced you to kill a deer, did that seem more freedom to you than normally educating a child in true freedom? That they saw it with more freedom because they did not care what was happening around, because with youth that happens, does not mean that there was more freedom. It them that suddenly there are people who have said 'so far, you're not going to laugh at me anymore, you're not going to be able to make a joke like the one Tuesday and Thirteen made about a battered woman'. Of course not, it's not laughter." And in an instant, in half a minute, he put many in their place.

And I don't think it was precisely Rodrigo Cuevas' intention to put anyone in his place, but it's Rodrigo Cuevas' basta. What need does this diva of folklore have to get into any 'fregao'? Because I wasn't looking for that, I was looking for reality.

Perhaps when Jordi Évole thought of dedicating one of his programs to Rodrigo Cuevas, he only thought that people would know him because it is worth knowing him. And yet, what Rodrigo Cuevas discovered is that you can live free, you can live as you want and the rest are Chinese tales.

"The day Rodrigo was born

Which planet would reign

Everywhere you go

From the village to the music hall

Good star guides him."

  • Jordi Evole
  • The Sixth
  • HBPR

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