"Ruben was supposed to come tonight, but I guess Martin didn't let him," Castro cracked between songs.
He was referring to Panamanian President Martin Torrijos, who made Blades his tourism czar two years ago, elevating the singer and the post to his Cabinet. Blades hasn't performed publicly since he took the job, hoping to avoid criticism from political opponents.
By largely giving up his recording and acting careers, Blades is sending a signal that there's more to Panama than we may have thought.
And he's right.
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A booming place
TODAY, Panama doesn't seem at all like a banana republic. Visitors to Panama City will be instantly struck by the multimillion-dollar building boom that is transforming the capital's skyline with new office towers, hotels, condominiums and casinos.
They include developer Donald Trump's 65-story Trump Ocean Club, with its stunning tower shaped like a yacht sail, planned for Punta Pacifica on the northwestern side of the Bay of Panama. And the planned Museum of Biodiversity to be built on the Amador Causeway at the opposite side, with its own fanciful design by architect Frank Gehry, whose wife is Panamanian. Civic boosters hope it will do for Panama what Gehry's Guggenheim Museum did for the Spanish city of Bilbao.
It takes a little more effort -- and good local guides like Blades and his tourism staff -- to find first-class Latin music here. But that concert on the first night convinced me that, given time, Panama's artistic profile could match its surging economic stature.
In interviews during my visit, El Ministro, as Blades' staff respectfully calls him, reminisced about growing up in Panama's poorer barrios, about leaving for New York as a young man in the early '70s to pursue his career in music and film, and about his reason for giving all that up to come home, another repatriated artist brimming with aspirations for his homeland.
Toward the end of the Noriega dictatorship, Blades tried to capture what it meant to be Panamanian in his song "Patria," from his rootsy 1988 album "Antecedente." It's considered a second national anthem here, but I didn't really appreciate the song until I heard Castro and his group perform it.
Young vocalist Luis Arteaga closed his eyes, tapped his heart in rhythm with the clave, the essential beat of Afro-Cuban music, and sang the lyric with a soaring spirituality.
