Rubén Blades: 1948—: Salsa Singer, Actor, Activist

Blades is active in many human rights campaigns regarding his native Panama, but he also backs international causes. He appeared with Bono of U2, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, and other socially conscious musicians in the anti-apartheid music video "Sun City" that debuted on MTV in 1988. In 1991 Blades traveled to Panama and founded the Movemiento Papa Egoró, which translates roughly as Mother Earth Party, or Motherland Party. The party vowed to fight hunger, unemployment, and drugs in Panama, and Blades ran for president of Panama on the party's ticket. He even wrote and recorded his own campaign song, "The Good Seed," which declares "change is coming." Though early polls favored him, Blades came in third in the election, a respectable showing for a non-politician. The Papa Egoró party, however, managed to win seven representational seats in the government.

There are some who have suggested Blades might have been more successful in his bid for president of Panama had he not moved to Hollywood and married a blonde, blue-eyed, North American actress, Lisa Lebenzon. As Blades has achieved more mainstream success and popularity, there have been many critics who have accused him of selling out. "Deep down, he [Blades] knows he's forgotten his friends, his people, his country, his music, and himself," Leon Ichaso, the director of Crossover Dreams, is quoted as saying in Rubén Blades. His supporters contend that while Blades has crossed over into the mainstream, he has taken his audiences with him, not left them behind.

Blades's later records became more world-inspired, exploring Celtic, Arabic, and Hindu influences in music. On Tiempos, released in 1999, Blades collaborated with the Costa Rican jazz group Editus to create a pan-Latin sound that he filled out with European classical music. He originally conceived of Mundos as a way to marry Irish and Latin sounds, but ended up making "a kind of map, where I began in the Northeast part of Africa, from Ethiopia, and I took that path to Asia Minor," he is quoted as saying in Billboard. "I crossed part of Turkey, what today are independent Russian republics. I crossed toward Europe and then I jumped to America. During that voyage, I integrated these sounds." Washington Post music critic Fernando Gonzalez wrote: "Blades crosses cultural borders to borrow whatever he feels he needs…. When it works, the sum effect is illuminating."