By Ronnald Rojas
After being sidelined from music for three years due to pulmonary fibrosis, Venezuelan singer José Luis Rodriguez, known as El Puma (Caracas, 76 years old), most frequently repeats these two phrases in 2017. As a result, in 2017.
El Puma resumed singing in defiance of all prognostication, including that of his own doctors.
This was done in Miami in May of this year for roughly three hours, and in several other countries throughout the continent up until a few days ago.
Today, he announces a new album and a tour that will bring him to Mexico at the end of February of the following year. He acknowledges that the operation was a miracle that saved his life and that he wants to take advantage of this second chance.
As a result, he named his new album Agradecido, on which he returns to singing about love, Venezuela, and the chance to "live once more."
Experiencing recovery was like experiencing death, he said. “I became a three-year-old child who was powerless to dress himself or take a shower”, on his own words.
During an interview with EL PAIS and other four media outlets in Mexico City, Rodriguez revealed that he had an oxygen cable that he used to move around his home.
After that, he gets upbeat and claims that the experience has changed his life: "I'm learning things that I had previously taken for granted.
In the past, there was a monologue-style act that went, "I came, I sang, and I left."
Because it takes three or four years to return to a city, I want to enjoy people to the fullest now because those periods of time no longer serve me.
“El Puma” wears pants that are fully enclosed and reveal its socks-free toes, as if it were an adolescent, this send us back to the 80s.
It still opens all the way to the third button on the shirt, just like it did in the 1980s when it first gained popularity as a soap actor after becoming a well-known singer throughout Latin America.
Rodriguez ponders, sits uneasy, and if given the chance, might even joke the subject.
Only a few gray hair, which can only be seen between his sideburns, and his insistence on admitting that he lives in a state of wonder and that he intends to make the most of the time that has been "granted" to him reveal his age and the operation he underwent three years ago.
Given the length of the performance, I doubted my ability to sing again.
The doctors told me I couldn't go back to the stage because I now had two functioning lungs, he says without pause, admitting that he spent several days in her home's solitude after the operation trying to regain her voice.
Then the tension is released: "Sometimes I think the guy who gave me the money was a singer."
Rodriguez received two lungs at the end of 2017 after suffering from pulmonary fibrosis from the year 2000, which causes a progressive decline in his respiratory capacity.
I know nothing about that person. I hope that someday the pain will subside and the family will be able to meet me, Rodriguez, whose illness left him on the verge of death, admits.
The singer spent one and a half years in rehabilitation before returning to the stage on May 11 in Miami.
Following that, he performed in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
On February 5 in Monterrey and on February 7 in the nation's capital, a presentation will take place in Mexico. It will first travel one more time through the United States.
"I'm living very intensely day by day, giving the body the joy that God gave me," he confesses before concluding, "Happiness is now."
It only sounds like him when he talks about his country. The musician who has been in Miami since the 1990s declares, "Claro that I will be singing in Venezuela again."
But only when it is free of those perverts, he clarifies in reference to Nicolas Maduro's government.
In February of last year, Rodriguez made a brief appearance in Cucuta, the Colombian city that borders Venezuela, as part of a concert series whose goal was to promote humanitarian aid to that country.
In an interview in April, he attempted to run for president in order to "help rebuild" his country. Today he doesn't mention anything; instead, he just continues to criticize Maduro’s government.
“They are like [the magician] David Copperfield, how do they destroy a country in twenty years and disappear a fortune?
They are compared to Bolivar, yet Bolivar liberated five nations in less than twenty years and a horse.
He acknowledges that his second opportunity came about during the many nights he spent recovering in the hospital.
"I Paid forgiveness and forgave”, he said. “I detox myself of memories, and that was very beneficial to me. Now I just want to enjoy the return to life," he also said, adding that he has 60 pages written for a potential autobiographical television series.





