oy 0o
Hip Hop
and Raced Citizenship
in Neoliberal Cuba
MARC D. PERRY


Negro Soy Yo


Refiguring
American
Music
Series Editors
Ronald Radano
Josh Kun
Charles McGovern


Negro
Soy Yo
Marc D. Perry

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2016


© 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved Printed in the United
States of America on acid-free paper o
Designed by Natalie F. Smith
Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Copperline
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perry, Marc D., [date] - author. Negro soy yo : hip hop
and raced citizenship in neoliberal Cuba / Marc D. Perry.
pages cm-(Refiguring American music)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8223-5985-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8223-5885-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8223-7495-4 (e-book)
i. Hip-hop-Political aspects-Cuba.
2. Blacks-Cuba-Social conditions.
3. Cuba-Race relations.
I. Title. II. Series: Refiguring American music.
ML3486.C82P47 2015
782.421649089'9607291-dc23
2015020930
Cover art: Ariel Fernandez Diaz.
Photo by Steve Marcus.


For my parents,
Morton and Margie Perry,
and my dear aunt,
Susan Ribner



Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1.
Raced Neoliberalism: Groundings for Hip Hop 29
Chapter 2.
Hip Hop Cubano: An Emergent Site of Black Life 57
Chapter 3.
New Revolutionary Horizons 91
Chapter 4.
Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 135
Chapter 5.
Racial Challenges and the State 171
Chapter 6.
Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 199
Postscript 235
Notes 239
References 255
Index 273



Acknowledgments
This book has been a long-awaited endeavor, as many can attest. All said,
there are numerous individuals who have lent collaborative time, intellect,
guidance, and political investment to bringing this book to fruition, and I
am deeply grateful and indebted to them for this. First and foremost are my
friends, colleagues, and others in Cuba whose lives, work, and art inspired
this project and for whom this book is ultimately dedicated. In Havana these
include artists Magia Lopez (and her family, especially her mother, Cari-
dad), Alexey Rodriguez (and his parents, Celso and Maria), Sekou Yosmel
Sarrias and Kokino Entenza, Soandres del Rio and Alexis Cantero, Randy
Acosta and Jessel Saladriga, Odaymara Cuesta, Odalys Cuesta, and Olivia
Prendes, Yrak Saenz and Edgar Gonzilez, Magyori Martinez, Yanelis Valdez,
and Yaribey Collia, Julio Cardenas, Michael Oramas and the EPG&B crew,
the Diez y Diecinueve posse, Edrey Riveri and 100% Original, Reyas de la
Calle, Roger Martinez, Papo Record, and Telmary Diaz. Other instrumen-
tal individuals within this broader community include Pablo Herrera, Ariel
Fernandez Diaz, Alexis "D'Boys" Rodriguez, Rodolfo Rensoli, Balesy Riv-
ero, Yelandy Blaya, Javier Esteban, and Mateus Da Silva. In Santiago de Cuba
I would like to thank Luis Gonzales, Ruben Cuesta Palomo, Omar Planos
Cordovi, Aristey Guibert, Cafe Mezclado, Chucho SHS, Antonio, and Eu-
genio for their involvements.


Other Havana-based interlocutors with whom I am also humbly indebted
are Roberto Zurbano, Tomis Fernandez Robaina, Nehanda Abiodun, Assata
Shakur, Gisela Arandia, Grizel Hernandez Baguer, Norma Guillard Limonta,
Rogelio Martinez Fur6, Gloria Rolando, Yesenia S6lier, Joseph Mutti, Elvira
Rodriguez Puerto, Rita, Mario, Ernesto, Lisnida, Amilcar, Delmaris, Guil-
lermo, and Delbis Gomez. Additional Cuban or Cuba-related individuals
who have contributed important form to this book include Tonel (aka Anto-
nio Eligio Fernandez), Sue Herrod, Catherine Murphy, Baye Adofo Wilson,
Vanessa Diaz, Antonio (Tony) Reyes, Lisandro Perez-Rey, Danny Hoch, Ma-
rinieves Alba, Kahlil and Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi, Dana Kaplan, Javier Mach-
ado Leyva, Ariel Arias, Sahily Borrero, Steve Marcus, Sarah Siebold, Ybp
Banderas, David Downs, Teresa Konechne, Lou "Piensa" Dufieux, Juliette
Barker Dufieux, Vox Sambu, Warda Br6dy, Diegal Leger, and the whole No-
madic Massive posse.
The formative stages of this project occurred at the University of Texas,
Austin. I would like to thank my advisor Ted Gordon and committee mem-
bers Charles Hale, Joao Costa Vargas, Craig S. Watkins, and Jafari Allen who
was also an important compadre in the field, for their intellectual guidance
and support. Here I would also like to thank Aline Helg, Shelia Walker, Stu-
art Guzman, Bob and BJ Fernea, Deborah Kapchan, Isar Godreau, and Asale
Ajani for their early support and engagements. My appreciation goes to my
peers who encouraged and intellectually challenged me during this period:
Jennifer Goett, Ben Chappell, Keisha-Khan Perry, Kia Lilly Caldwell, Mark
Anderson, Peggy Brunache, Lynn Selby, Julio Tavares, Saheed Adejumobi,
Denni Blum, Dana Maya, Courtney Johnson, Chantal Tetreault, Elana Zil-
berg, Vania Cardoso, Scott Head, and David Lynch.
I would also like to thank my colleagues at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign: Arlene Torres, Gilberto Rosas, Ellen Moodie, Matti
Bunzl, Alejandro Lugo, Martin Manalansan, Charles Rosemam, Erik Mc-
Duffie, Jessica Millward, Tage Biswalo, Fanon Wilkins, Diane Pindergrass,
Merle Bowen, David Roediger, Lisa Nakamura, Christian Sandvig, Cristobal
Valencia, Anthony Jerry, and Maritza Quinones. I extend my gratitude to
my colleagues while completing this project at Tulane University (2010-15):
Laura Rosanne Adderley, Christopher Dunn, Mariana Mora, Felipe Smith,
Olanike Orie, Joao Felipe Gongalves, Allison Truitt, Michael Cunningham,
Beretta Smith-Shomade, TR Johnson, and Justin Wolfe for their intellectual
engagement and much appreciated support.

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I additionally would like to thank the following individuals for their support
and varying involvements during the course of this project: Deborah Thomas,
Faye Harrison, Mark Anthony Neil, Ariana Hernandez Reguant, Lisa Maya
Knauer, Frank Guridy, Ruth Behar, Henry Taylor, Ivor Miller, Robin Moore,
Ron Radano, Tejumola Olaniyan, Frances Aparicio, Steven Gregory, Nita-
sha Sharma, Arlene Davila, Mark Sawyer, Novian Whitsitt, Emily Maguire,
Bakari Kitwana, Laurie Frederik Meer, Nadine Fernandez, Karen Morrison,
Katherine Gordy, Ned Sublette, Umi Vaughn, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Jed
Tucker, Sherwin Bryant, Karine Poulin, Marietta Fernandez Lopez, Antonia
Chabebe, Kristin Kalangis, Francoise Grossmann, Joseph Tolton, Jean Co-
hen, Virginia Miller, and Rosalyn Baxandall. Iwould like to thank Janet Dixon
Keller for her keen editorial eye, and India Cooper and Cyndy Brown for their
copyediting. My appreciations to Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press for
his patient shepherding of the project as well as to the four anonymous re-
viewers who provided valuable feedback in bringing this book to final form.
The following institutions provided generous support during the re-
search and writing of this book: the John L. Warfield Center for African and
African American Studies and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin
American Studies at the University of Texas, Luther College and the Con-
sortium for a Strong Minority Presence in Liberal Arts Colleges' Minority
Scholar-in-Residence Program, The Ford Foundation Diversity Dissertation
and Postdoctoral Fellowship Programs, the Illinois Program for Research
in the Humanities at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the
Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at
Tulane. Lastly I would like to thank my partner Maria Hinds for her sharp
eye, love, and generous support through the final stages of this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XI



Introduction
Siento odio profundo por tu racismo
Ya no me confundo con tu ironia
Y lloro sin que sepas que el llanto mio
tiene lagrimas negras como mi vida
I feel profound hatred for your racism
I am now no longer confused by your irony
And I cry without you knowing that my cry
has black tears like my life
-"Ligrimas negras," Hermanos de Causa
In "Lagrimas negras" (Black tears) by the Havana-based hip hop duo Her-
manos de Causa (Brothers of the cause), the artists Soandres and Pelon pro-
vide a biting critique of the racialized hardships they, as young black men,
encounter in the Cuban everyday. Borrowing the title from the classic bolero-
son first popularized in the 1930s by the celebrated Cuban composer Miguel
Matamoros, Hermanos de Causa poetically refigure the terms of "Lagrimas
negras" by placing black life amid Cuba's evolving social malaise at its nar-
rative center. Where the original composition offered a ballad of romantic
sorrow, Hermanos de Causa speak of "black tears" of racial marginalization,
criminalized gazes, and the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility that


has come to mark Afro-Cuban life following the island's post-Soviet eco-
nomic crisis of the early 1990s. The artists in this sense offer a poignant play
on blackness that reflects a shifting Cuban complexity of race and nation-
hood, while foregrounding the salience of black subjectivity itself as a site
of political life and contest.
Cut to a humid July evening in 2006 during a party I attended at a rooftop
flat in Regla, a residential barrio a quick ferry ride across the harbor from
the tourist-laden district of Habana Vieja. Atop the narrow staircase leading
to the apartment, one is greeted by a large portrait of Toussaint L'Ouverture,
the heroic patriarch of the Haitian Revolution, poised in military garb with
his foot pressed triumphantly upon the head of a hissing snake. A photo of
Malcolm X sits prominently amid other images garnishing the living room
walls, as a large spray-painted figure of an afro-adorned man sits affixed to
an outside wall of the flat's rooftop patio. The evening's hosts, Alexey Rodri-
guez and Magia Lopez of the hip hop duo Obsesion, had invited a collection
of local MCs and members of a visiting Canadian hip hop delegation for an
informal gathering of food, music, and rum.
As guests assembled, a few clustered casually around an old Soviet tele-
vision in Alexey's parents' bedroom to view the nightly state-run newscast
when it was announced that there would be a notice of national importance
within an hour's time. Given the newscaster's tone, word quickly spread
through the party. A milling crowd had gathered in front of the television
for the impending news when it was announced that President Fidel Castro
had undergone intestinal surgery for an unspecified ailment. Governance,
we were told, would be temporarily transferred to Fidel's younger brother,
Raul, and a handful of state confidants. The terms of the transfer were read
aloud from a statement apparently authenticated by Fidel Castro's dated,
frail-looking signature. A pensive mood settled over the gathering as many
expressed concern about Fidel's health, as well as the uncertainties regard-
ing the ultimate significance of this news. Despite all, the party continued,
albeit with a tangibly more subdued energy.
Meanwhile, throughout the night U.S. news broadcasts were in a frenzy,
airing images of euphoric crowds of Cuban Americans in the streets of Miami
celebrating the news of Fidel Castro's illness and speculating on his immi-
nent if not presumed death. In the days following, Washington was awash
with predictions of chaos, mass hysteria, and explosive retaliation, as "liber-
ated" Cubans were now expected to take their turn in the streets. Statements

2 INTRODUCTION


from the Bush administration vacillated between "support" for a "democratic
transition" coupled with veiled threats to those who might hinder the move
to "a free Cuba," and urgent calls for calm to counter the potential threat
of a mass Cuban exodus fleeing for U.S. shores. The morning following the
announcement, however, Havana's two million residents awoke and went
about business largely as usual. In short, daily life continued in Cuba, though
clearly not without a new set of ambiguities. While Miami's largely white
Cuban American establishment overwhelmingly cheered the development,
many among the island's Afro-Cuban population-including Magia's and
Alexey's families-shared a more ambivalent relationship to the news, given
levels of identification with Cuba's revolutionary past.
The announcement of Fidel Castro's retirement and succession to Raul,
while unquestionably historic, did not in the end lead to a popular uprising
or a collapse of the Cuban state as prophesized by some. Indeed, the only
ensuing hysteria seemed to have occurred among invested parties to the
north. The significance and historical complexities of the Cuban Revolu-
tion could not in the end be reduced simply to the figure of Fidel Castro.
Such would require erasure of over fifty years of mobilization and sacrifice
among everyday Cubans in working toward and imagining, in all its lived
incongruencies, a socialist future. Negated would be Cubans' own histori-
cal presence and agency, not to mention alternative lines of revolutionarily
informed subjectivity (M. Perry 2008a). Rather than a singularly disjunctive
event, Fidel Castro's passage from central stage should be viewed within
a broader ongoing narrative of national transformation as revolutionary
Cuba has struggled to navigate its entry into global capitalism following the
1989 collapse of the Soviet bloc. Social flux and its attendant frictions have
therefore long been defining facets of Cuban society, ones through which
the Cuban state and ordinary Cubans continue to navigate-in varying and
frequently competing ways-without abandoning all historical continuity.
I juxtapose the party vignette with Hermanos de Causa's "Lagrimas ne-
gras" to underscore a key tension that has shaped and come to define Cuba's
movimiento de hip hop (hip hop movement). At one end are rapidly eroding na-
tional narratives of revolutionary struggle, lore, and utopic promise within
which Cuban raperos (rappers or MCs) live as members of a generation com-
ing of age in a period of prodigious social change. However, on the waning
periphery, these young people remain inheritors of the island's revolution-
ary history and as such both live with and embody those same tensions that

INTRODUCTION 3


mark Cuba's evolving condition and uncertainties. They are at one time a
part of and yet critically apart from a previous moment, in essence betwixt
and between two Cubas-one of a receding past and one in process of be-
coming. Such liminality offers this generation of artists a privileged vantage
point as chroniclers of revolutionary decline, if not potential custodians of
its utopic call.
It is also vital to note that for many core and founding members of Cu-
ba's hip hop movement, race-through its varying confluences with gender,
class, and sexuality-has served as a politically meaningful lens through
which the incongruencies of a shifting national typography have been most
saliently lived and mediated anew. Indeed, Hermanos de Causa's testament
to life as young black men speaks to a raced materiality of Cuban citizenship
vis-n-vis the island's emerging market economy, one that stands in fraught
tension with enduring claims to the contrary rooted in Cuba's nonracial
national foundations and elaborated upon during the post-1959 revolution-
ary period. It is precisely this "irony" to which Soandres and Pelon speak,
and whose mystification they proclaim "no longer confuses." Embedded in
Hermanos de Causa's read on race and racism then are those disjunctures
between the ideological claims and the everyday practice of revolutionary
socialism in today's Cuba-a critique suggesting a certain disenfranchise-
ment of Afro-Cubans from the revolutionary national promise in ways that
may implicate the Cuban state itself.
This book thus explores questions of social maneuver within the shift-
ing, often frictive fields of global-local interface that mark Cuban life today.
At its center is an inquiry into the rise of Cuban hip hop in relation to on-
going elaborations of race and class following the island's post-Soviet-era
trauma of the early 199os. Here I focus on the ways young self-identified
black Cubans who comprise a pioneering core ofraperos and their followers
not only give voice to the lived quotidians of race, but also craft new under-
standings of black Cuban selfhood and forms of racial citizenship by way of
rap music and the broader global imagine of hip hop culture.
Through this twofold sense of articulation-at one time a performative
voicing and productive crafting of self-these artists can be seen as moving
in strategically flexible, globally attuned ways (Ong 1999) in response to the
particular urgencies of Cuba's unfolding economy at the millennium's turn.
Amid an era increasingly brokered by market liberalizations, a withering so-
cialist state, deepening social stratification, and-significantly-resurgent

4 INTRODUCTION


levels of racial inequality, how might such black self-fashionings compli-
cate Cuban legacies of nonracial exceptionalism while advancing alternative
citizenship claims both within and beyond the nation? With these queries
I seek to consider hip hop's rise within Cuba's historical arc and enduring
dilemmas of race and nationhood, while locating it as a social phenomenon
of a particularly fluid moment of neoliberal flux and transformation.
The everyday contours and social complexities of this history are borne
out in the lives and work of a collection of Havana-based rap artists, pro-
ducers, and DJs who have contributed collective voice and social form to
Cuba's hip hop community. Beyond realms of music, many embrace hip hop
as an alternative mode of identity, in effect a whole way of life that transcends
national and temporal boundedness through a quest for global membership
and black cosmopolitan belonging. I explore the ways these evolving social
imaginaries thus operate both within and beyond Cuban fields of vision by
challenging national prescriptions of race and their obfuscating effects,
while embodying multiple claims to citizenship as contemporary Afro-
Cubans. Those involved range generally in age from their early twenties to
midthirties and are largely drawn from working-class barrios with sizable
Afro-Cuban populations.
The book's narrative lines emerge in conversation with these individ-
uals and through engagement with those places where raperos fashion
community by way of music concerts and festivals, recording sessions,
organizational meetings and colloquia, informal classes, and more inti-
mate spaces of home and everyday life. The bulk of ethnographic material
is drawn from research conducted between 1999 and 2006, a period that in
many ways marked the movement's apogee of racial politics. The book's
concluding chapter carries the conversation into the present by addressing
recent developments both in and beyond Cuba. Taken as such, Negro Soy
Yo offers a longitudinal and indeed historicized perspective on the evolv-
ing story of Cuban hip hop amid ongoing negotiations of a transformative
present.
A critical facet in this mix has been the revolutionary state's varying po-
sitions on, and shifting efforts to manage, raperos' emergent voicings and
embedded challenges. Equally instrumental have been raperos' involve-
ments with two important, at times overlapping communities of outside
interlocutors. The first of these entails a range of intergenerational engage-
ments with an older cohort of Afro-Cuban intellectuals and family mem-

INTRODUCTION 5


bers, along with a select few African American political exiles on the island.
Many among this older generation have been drawn to hip hop for what is
seen as raperos' vanguardist position vis-n-vis the island's current spectrum
of racial politics. An additional set of dialogues has occurred by way of the
transnational, enabling Cuban affirmations of black selfhood at the conflu-
ence of nation and diasporic geographies of blackness.
Amid the mix, the now hyperglobal field of hip hop continues to be an im-
portant cultural space through which cosmopolitan understandings of con-
temporary black belonging can be marshaled in challenging local conditions
of racial subjugation (M. Perry 2008b). Such agencies illuminate the workings
of diaspora as a lived social formation, one constituted through certain kinds
of identity practice in the making and moving of diaspora in a mobilized
sense (Edwards 2003). Here hip hop offers extranational routes (Gilroy 1993)
through which some young Afro-Cubans not only envision black alterities
but in fact engage in the active "crafting of selves" (Kondo 199o) as globally
conscious subjects. Cuban hip hop in this sense evokes what Josh Kun has
termed an audiotopic sensibility offering, in this instance, not only "new maps
for re-imagining the present social world" (Kun 2005: 23), but innovative ways
of revisioning both being and moving in the world as well.
What I propose, then, by way of the cultural politics and poetics of Cuban
hip hop, is an effort to think through the quotidian play of shifting govern-
mentalities and evolving practices of race as they unfold under the expanding
global reach of neoliberal capital. Attending to what Wendy Brown identifies
as the political rationalities ofneoliberalism (Brown 2003; see also Kingfisher
and Maskovsky 2008), the emphasis here is on regulatory effects of neolib-
eral logics as they impact the social terrain of imagination and practice, if
not subjectivity itself. In its broadest sense this approach seeks a historicized
understanding of hip hop's ascendance in Cuba as one intimately tied to the
island's own ambivalences of neoliberal condition. Here I suggest it is in-
deed no coincidence that hip hop Cubano has evolved precisely during Cuba's
recent period of historic flux. Although the early roots of rap music on the
island can be traced back to the mid-198os, it was not until the national crisis
of the early to mid-199os that hip hop as a self-defined movimiento began to
take conscious Cuban form. Cuban hip hop is thus born and acutely reflective
of this ongoing moment of national rupture and reformation.
What then are the historical terms that have shaped this particular junc-
ture? Beyond a musing query, it is precisely these terms and their fault lines

6 INTRODUCTION


upon which many raperos and aligned others maneuver in fashioning alter-
native black Cuban claims to national legitimacy, musically and otherwise.
By way of Afro-Atlantic analogy, then, what does it indeed mean in an en-
during Du Boisian sense to embody a "two-ness" of being at one time both
black and Cuban at the millennial turn (Du Bois [1903] 1989)? Such frictions
remain poignant grounds of struggle for many Cuban raperos through both
life and art.
Dilemmas of Racial Disenfranchisement
The economic crisis of the early 1990s in the wake of the Eastern bloc's col-
lapse and subsequent suspension of Soviet subsidies unquestionably engen-
dered profound realignments within Cuba's social landscape, revolutionary
trajectory, and broader national narrative. Efforts to preserve the salience of
state socialism in the face of deepening market realities have exposed, exac-
erbated, and in many ways elaborated upon a set of historical tensions laid
progressively bare in the current everyday. The most immediate of these has
been widening social inequality tied to differing levels and means of access
within the island's increasingly monetized economy. Amid this flux, a once
revolutionary call for la lucha-that collective national "struggle" to build a
socialist Cuba-in today's parlance is associated more with the daily hustle
for the island's globally pegged currency now so essential to Cuban life.
In addition to urgencies of class, racial difference has emerged as a crit-
ical, largely correlative factor in shaping social position and play within Cu-
ba's shifting economic terrain. This reality, in turn, presents a set of fraught
complexities for Cuba where the dismantling of racial discrimination is
touted as a key triumph of the Cuban Revolution in its professed realization
of a racially egalitarian, if not ultimately postracial, socialist society. Indeed,
claims to a nonracial exceptionalism have in fact been historically instru-
mental to Cuba's very formation as a modern nation.
It was of course sugar, that brutal irony of "sweetness and power" (Mintz
1986), that gave rise to the island's inherent entanglements of race and na-
tionhood as colonial Cuba became the Caribbean's largest sugar producer
following the collapse of Saint-Domingue's sugar industry at the onset of
the Haitian Revolution. Cuba's groundings in modernity were thus born of
that very "machine" of plantation-based slavery reiterated throughout the
Caribbean region (Benitez-Rojo 1992).

INTRODUCTION 7


Yet Africans and their descendants were far from simply fodder for a co-
lonial idiom of raced capitalism. Numerous slave revolts occurred during
the eighteenth century, with the first large-scale expression unfolding in
1812 in a series of uprisings known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion in
which an alliance of enslaved and free people of color, inspired by the recent
triumph of the Haitian Revolution, mobilized in shared pursuit of slavery's
end (Childs 2006; Fischer 2004). Although violently crushed, the rebellion
instilled a deep fear among white elites of a black Haitian-style revolt, set-
ting the stage for the La Escalera massacre of 1844, which resulted in the
execution and imprisonment of thousands of enslaved and free people of
color in response to an alleged conspiracy to end slavery and colonial rule
(Paquette 1988).' In both moments state-sanctioned terror as a technology
of raced subjugation was leveled at African descendants seeking human
freedom, inscribing, in turn, the early parameters of black Cuban subjectiv-
ity in the most material of terms.
A foundational confluence of black freedom, citizenship, and national
liberation emerged in Cuba's late nineteenth-century wars of independence
in which upward of 7o percent of the voluntary rank and file of the indepen-
dence army were men of color. Many were inspired through manumission
along with the independence movement's broader associations with slav-
ery's abolition and a future promise of a racially just Cuba. Instrumental in
the mix was General Antonio Maceo-a free mulato and leading commander
in the independence army who, following the larger movement's refusal to
emancipate enslaved blacks en masse, organized plantation raids encour-
aging liberated blacks to join the anticolonial struggle.
Although killed in battle two years before national independence, Ma-
ceo's symbolism as heroic liberator of both black Cubans and the Cuban
nation remains complex. Under Maceo and other black commanders' leader-
ship, the centrality of blacks in the nationalist struggle posed a radical chal-
lenge to those who sought the exclusion of Afro-descendants from equal
participation in a newly liberated Cuba (Helg 1995). Indeed, for many for-
merly enslaved Cubans, Maceo represented the martyred embodiment of
black Cuban citizenship. Among white criollo elite, however, regard for Ma-
ceo was tempered by fear of a black caudillo (leader) ushering a "black" Cuba
into being (Duharte Jimenez 1993; Ferrer 1998a). Subsequent efforts to ex-
punge Maceo's raced significance reflect early interests in purging blackness

8 INTRODUCTION


from Cuba's mythic foundations and narratives of national identity (Kapcia
2000: 200-201; cf. Trouillot 1995)-2
Appeals to a deracialized Cuba were in fact ideologically integral to the
independence movement itself. Jos6 Marti-the criollo intellectual, prom-
inent independence figure, and celebrated father of Cuban nationalism-
recognized racial difference as an obstacle to a unified nationalist front, ad-
vancing calls for a nonracial Cuba with lasting resonance into the revolution-
ary present. Marti's advocacy of a racially transcendent liberation struggle-
and by extension an envisioned nation-was also aimed at appeasing white
fears of an unleashed black population coming to power on the eve of in-
dependence (Ferrer 1998a; P6rez 1999).3 While blacks may have redeployed
Marti's advocacy of nonracialism to justify entitlement to full citizenship
(de la Fuente 1999; Ferrer 1998a), the same postracial logic impeded politi-
cal redress to racially lived inequality. By juxtaposing "race" against "nation"
in this way, racial identification (if not subjectivity itself) was ultimately
cast as counternational (Marti [1893] 1975). Within this postracial script-
ing, claiming one's blackness (or whiteness) was akin to antipatriotism, one
ultimately treasonous with respect to the nonracial solvency of the Cuban
nation itself.
The rise of the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of
Color) in 1908 posed an intrinsic challenge to early Cuba's conflictive and
otherwise unfulfilled profession of nonracial equality.4 Drawing the bulk of
its membership from former combatants of the independence wars disil-
lusioned with black Cubans' continued confinement to the lower working
and peasant classes, the Partido pressed demands for political redress (Helg
1995). While the Partido called for the full enfranchisement of blacks as
equal citizens within the Cuban nation, its appeal to racial solidarity threat-
ened the early republic's efforts to silence race through a nonracial status
quo. In response to legislation prohibiting political parties organized along
racial lines that effectively banned the Partido, members staged a 1912
Havana protest in which former independence fighters reportedly carried
arms. Beyond symbols of violent threat, Partido members may have alter-
nately displayed arms as testimonials of citizenship rooted in their status as
national combatants.
Regardless of terms, the protest was brutally crushed by the Cuban army,
decimating the Partido's ranks and agenda as more than three thousand

INTRODUCTION 9


blacks were massacred during an ensuing island-wide reign of terror. The
events of 1912 thus stood as a poignant reminder of the disciplining use
of state violence in forging and policing national parameters of a regula-
tory nonracialism.5 Although its significance was long obscured by official
accounts of an infamous "Race War" of 1912, the Partido's challenge and
subsequent massacre remain poignant moments of historical memory and
recovery within rapero circles.
While 1912 ended overtly political forms of mobilization as Afro-Cubans
alternatively sought redress through existing political parties and trade
unions (de la Fuente 2001), this did not translate to the demise of all autono-
mous spheres of black social practice. Black Cubans continued to organize
around religious and cultural life forged under enslavement and given insti-
tutional form through cabildos de naci6n (ethnic-based social welfare societ-
ies) and later sociedades de color of the early twentieth century. As mutual-aid
and leisure associations drawn from professional urban classes of color, the
sociedades laid claims to a black cosmopolitanism nourished in important
part through engagement with black communities and political struggle be-
yond the national (Guridy 2010; see also Fernandez Robaina 1998).
With the triumph ofthe Cuban Revolution in 1959, the soon-to-be-declared
socialist state took up the elimination of racial discrimination as a center-
piece of its early revolutionary program. While black intellectuals were re-
portedly active in pushing for public debate on the issue (de la Fuente 2001),
the challenge of promoting interracial fraternity toward a nationalist front,
in this case revolutionary socialism, was once again paramount. During one
of two notable speeches on race in 1959, a recently victorious Fidel Castro
evoked Jose Marti and his nonracial ideals in declaring: "We have to up-
root the last colonial vestiges, conscious of making that phase of Marti's a
reality. He said it before, we have to repeat it now: that the Cuban is more
than white, more than black, we are Cuban."6 A ban on racial discrimination
in employment and public spheres of education and recreation followed,
while a broader approach held that residual forms of racism would even-
tually disappear with the purging of the class-based foundations of racial
inequality. An implicit limitation of this latter facet is that while race, as the
late Stuart Hall cogently notes, may operate as a modality through which
class is historically lived (1980), the particularity of raced power, practice,
and subjectivity cannot, in turn, be reduced simply to an epiphenomenon
of class.

10 INTRODUCTION


This formulation, moreover, tends to posit a false dichotomy between
institutional and ideological expressions of racialized power (Essed 2002;
Goldberg 1993; Hall 1980; Harrison 1995; Omi and Winant1994). Such fram-
ing finds popular expression in today's Cuban parlance, one that often priv-
ileges the individualizing prejuicio (prejudice) over more structural racismo
(racism) when referencing Cuba's enduring racial challenges. The common
Cuban refrain "Hay prejuicio pero no hay racismo" (There is prejudice but
no racism), for instance, limits the exercise of raced power to that of indi-
vidual practice, thereby restricting calls that would challenge the broader
systemics of racial exclusion and privilege. Rather than recognizing racism
as a complexly dynamic and reproductive social process, its workings in this
sense are rendered obfuscated through a discursive silencing.
Indeed, within three short years of 1959, racism was officially declared
eliminated from Cuban society. From that point on discussions of raced
power and/or politics of any form in a now ostensibly postracial Cuba were
deemed subversive given demands for a united front to build socialism.7
Reminiscent of earlier moments, race was again juxtaposed to nation, and
racial forms of identification were ultimately rendered counterrevolutionary
if not counternational. Black Cubans thus concerned with the persistence of
racial inequalities found themselves in a dilemma. If they chose to organize
around racially associated grievances, they risked being labeled counter-
revolutionary; if they did not, they chanced complacency in their own sub-
jugation.' Such silencings were institutionalized by state bannings of black
social organizations including sociedades de color (Guridy 2010), along
with reported suppression of Afro-Cuban religious communities and or-
ganizations (C. Moore 1989). At the very level of the ontological, any enun-
ciation of a black, subjectively lived racial difference was in the end marked
suspect, echoing again a raced disenfranchisement of Afro-Cubans from
full voice and belonging within purports of a nonracial nation.9
Critiques and limitations notwithstanding, it is vital to underscore that
black Cubans did in large part benefit from the social gains of the revolu-
tion. Although race-responsive efforts were never undertaken, black and
darker-skinned Cubans-historically among the poorest and most marginal
populations-gained considerably from the revolution's efforts to build a
more egalitarian society through state socialism. Expansions of low-income
housing, for instance, significantly impacted the black urban poor, many of
whom lived in shanty-like conditions prior to 1959 (de la Fuente 2001), while

INTRODUCTION II


the revolution's socialization of medicine increased health care access and
improved outcomes for poorer black and darker-skinned Cubans.
Additional interventions occurred within spheres of education, where
the eradication of private schools in 1961(most ofwhich were racially segre-
gated) and the massive nationwide literacy campaign initiated the same year
launched a national educational system radically more inclusive of black Cu-
bans. Accompanying shifts toward professional training in areas like medi-
cine and engineering, moreover, dramatically expanded black professional
ranks. Participation in this history engendered levels of Afro-Cuban revolu-
tionary affinity in noted contrast to the waves of wealthier white compatri-
ots who fled the island at the onset of the revolutionary period given threats
(both real and perceived) to lines of racial and class privilege. Legacies of
these achievements, as we shall see, carry meaningful, if often conflicted,
resonance among Havana-area raperos.
The disjoint between the instrumentality of race in the ongoing mak-
ing of Cuban nationhood and official odes to a nonracial nationalism have
been sharply exacerbated by market shifts and a concurrent retreat of state
socialism since the early 199os. Governmental efforts to regulate and po-
lice the incongruencies introduced by what amounted to a Cuban neoliberal
turn have compounded, at times significantly, the racial marginalization of
black and darker-skinned Cubans. Neoliberal reworkings of the social via
overlapping lines of racial and class difference have in this sense further
complicated the utopic claims of the revolutionary project and Cuba's
broader national promise. It is precisely amid these cleavages and their at-
tendant incoherencies that Cuban hip hop emerged and moves.
Yet this neoliberal Cuban condition to which I refer is a deeply ambiv-
alent one. Unlike much of the Global South compelled to accommodate
neoliberal reforms by way of international lending agencies and regional
free-trade agreements, Cuba's socialist leadership has long renounced par-
ticipation within such accords. These efforts notwithstanding, it is clear
that more informal modes of economic liberalization undertaken by the
revolutionary state since the collapse of the Soviet bloc set in motion de-
velopments that have increasingly aligned with global workings of market
capital. Comparable in this sense with Katherine Verdery's insights into
postsocialist change in Romania, this movement has generally been one
characterized by a transformative dynamism rather than a linear or teleo-

12 INTRODUCTION


logic transition to neoliberal marketization (Verdery 1996). Reminiscent of
a collapsing Romanian socialism, Cuba's evolving condition is a similarly
fluid and contingent one, marked by uncertainty and struggle over the fu-
ture terms of a postsocialist Cuba. Indeed, given evolving gestures toward a
Cuban-U.S. thaw, such market elaborations and their unpredictabilities are
surely to intensify in the near term.
In light of such ambiguities, Aihwa Ong's notion of neoliberalism "as
exception" (Ong 2006) is productive for considering the ways market ratio-
nales have permeated to Cuban society as state-induced "exceptions" in the
face of ongoing claims to preserve revolutionary socialism, engendering a
deeply fraught ambivalence of the neoliberal condition the island presently
occupies. Ong's work, moreover, points toward how such neoliberal devia-
tions often produce areas of exclusion as well as inform alternative modes
of social practice fashioned at the confluence of national and transnational
social geographies. Regarding Cuban hip hop, this framing is particularly
helpful when considering the reciprocally raced nature of socioeconomic
marginalization on one hand, and raperos' multivalent claims to national/
transnational belonging (or, in effect, citizenship) on the other within an
unfolding neoliberal moment.
As has been similarly documented in the Caribbean and broader Latin
American region (Babb 2004; Desforges 2000; Gregory 2006; Klak and My-
ers 1998; Scher 2011), Cuba's expansion of foreign tourism emerged as a
pivotal postcrisis facet of the island's neoliberal shift. In addition to generat-
ing its own logics of class and racially marked exclusion that articulate with
other aspects of Cuba's new monetized economy, the tourism industry has
enabled a commodification and vending of Afro-Cuban cultural forms for
consumption by foreign tourists and the Cuban state alike.
While illuminating interrelated dimensions of racial inequality and neo-
liberal modes of multicultural packaging, tourism's racial currents have
also encouraged an enterprising range of racially coded strategies-often
gendered and frequently sexualized-that some black and darker-skinned
Cubans have adopted to access an expanding marketplace from which they
are otherwise often excluded. In many instances these efforts are medi-
ated through the varying ways "blackness" is performed in light of globally
tied, locally articulated economies of consumption and desire. It is thus
within the evolving folds of neoliberalization that darker-skinned Cubans

INTRODUCTION 13


find themselves disenfranchised from full participation within Cuba's new
economy (if not new market-entitled realms of citizenship), while simulta-
neously managing creative maneuver through alternative spheres of racial
space.
Mobilizing Blackness
Amid such shifting typographies of race, class, capital, and nationhood it-
self, some black and darker-skinned young people have turned to hip hop to
craft new understandings of black selves born of the racial materiality of a
particular moment and tension of local-global convergence. Cuban raperos,
in this sense, similarly navigate racialized realms of exclusion and possibil-
ity, ones in which the active field of maneuver is identity. In exploring these
complexities, my approach builds upon recognition of how grammars of ra-
cial subject-making are often negotiated through webs of social power that
interpellate subalternly raced subjects as such (Du Bois [1903] 1989; Fanon
[1952] 1967; see also Althusser 1971; Foucault 1979). And yet it is the space of
identity, that outwardly conscious and self-aware expression of subjectivity,
that serves as the performative intermediary in the movement from racial-
ized subjects to racially self-aware social actors.
Here, Stuart Hall's emphasis on an analytics of identification (rather than
identity per se) is informative in underscoring the operative, self-positioning
act of identifying with others as the foundational basis for forging and main-
taining group identities (Hall 1996). As historically variable as such collec-
tive solidarities of recognition may indeed be, they are the very terra firma
upon which social groups act and move in corporately invested ways, be they
indigenous social movements or Tea Party activists. The salient question
therefore is ultimately one of positioned actors and political ends.
Regarding identity claims among black and darker-skinned raperos, affin-
ities of blackness-at one time nationally moored and globally expansive-
are for many instrumental in the crafting of both music and selves. Indeed,
as these young men and women navigate Cuba's new monetized landscape,
racial status has increasingly come to mark economic location and realms
of social mobility. Race in this sense, to borrow again from Stuart Hall, has
assumed added importance as a key social idiom through which class is cur-
rently lived in Cuba. Hall's framing, moreover, suggests a rethinking ofwhat
constitutes a social class per se, particularly in light of Afro-descendant

14 INTRODUCTION


communities whose raciality is grounded in the very class edifice intrinsic
to the formation of the modern Western world (James [1963] 1989; E. Wil-
liams [1944] 1994). While historically contingent and mediated by way of
other axes of social difference, race for these communities has frequently
served as one of the more enduring lenses through which inequality is in-
deed most tangibly "lived."
To evoke Marx's oft-cited distinction between a class-in-itself versus a
class-for-itself, Hall's proposition encourages recognition of the ways racial
identity may serve as a socially salient and therefore politically productive
mode of collective (i.e., "class") organization and action (cf. Gilroy 1991).10
This materiality of race-or for the sake of this discussion, "blackness" it-
self-has thus the capacity to be generative of communal ontologies of be-
ing as well as collaborative strategies of practice. For many racially marked
raperos, the globally conversant space of hip hop has proved instrumental
precisely in this sense by enabling new Cuban grammars of both black being
and doing.
By illuminating the narrative lines of such black self-fashionings, I ex-
plore a nexus of alliances between raperos and a constellation of interlocu-
tors that have contributed important shape to Cuba's evolving hip hop
movement. Key among these have been ongoing histories of exchange with
visiting hip hop artists, producers, and cultural activists, primarily from
North America, who have provided discursive and material support for
raperos. Yet many key figures in Havana's hip hop community also share
a cogent set of relationships with two local circles of individuals who have
contributed to the movement's trajectory in meaningful ways. The first is an
established (as well as an emerging) generation of Afro-Cuban intellectuals
who have encouraged formative dialogues around Cuban questions of race,
history, and contemporary culture. The second involves two Havana-based
African American political exiles who have, through varying and sometimes
intimate ways, impacted lives and broader ideological conversations within
the community. By way of mentorship and other engagements, these exiles
have been influential in expanding transnational understandings among
raperos, while facilitating alliances with African American hip hop artists
and activists-in effect, elaborating routes of black internationalism within
the movimiento.
Arising in part through these varying involvements, many black and
darker-skinned raperos tie themselves via their music and everyday lives to

INTRODUCTION 15


reclaimed histories of Afro-Cuban radicality, while simultaneously marking
their belonging to Afro-hemispheric traditions of black political life and
struggle. In doing so, these artists lay claim as contemporary Afro-Cubans
to multiple notions of citizenship both critically within, and decidedly be-
yond, Cuba's nonracial national imaginary.
Of equal gravitas, I examine the shifting interplay between hip hop Cu-
bano as an ascendant social phenomenon and the Cuban state as it has
sought to mediate and contain hip hop's emergent voicings and antiracist
challenges. From willful neglect, to institutionalizing efforts, to more re-
cent curtailment of governmental support, the revolutionary state has long
been a key interlocutor, albeit ambivalently positioned, with island raperos.
Despite (or perhaps precisely through) such labors, hip hop arose as an im-
portant site of social analysis and critique by pushing accounts of racial and
class dynamics into highly regulated realms of Cuban public discourse.
Cuban hip hop in this sense emerged as a kind of disruptive black spec-
tacle, rendering realties of race both visible and acutely audible. As I have
argued, these artists have become significant actors within a nascent coun-
terpublic sphere predicated on black political difference and antiracist ad-
vocacy in an ostensibly postracial Cuba (M. Perry 2004, 2008b; see also de
la Fuente 2008, 2010; Fernandes and Stanyek 2007; Saunders 2009). While
dialogues between Cuban MCs and a current range of black-identified in-
tellectuals and cultural producers have given rise to new spaces and routes
of racial self-articulation, they have also evolved in conversation with in-
termittent state openings to public address and Cuba's expanding market
economy.
Raced Ethnography
It has, however, been suggested that scholarly emphasis on an analytics of
race vis-n-vis hip hop Cubano has been a largely misplaced enterprise. A di-
verse field of commentators on contemporary Cuba, including Sujatha Fer-
nandes (2003, 2006; Fernandes and Stanyek 2007), Alan West-Durin (2004),
Ronni Armstead (2007), Tanya Saunders (2009, 2010), and Alejandro de la
Fuente (2008, 2010), have varyingly foregrounded the role of racial identity
within Havana's hip hop community as an integral facet of the movement's
politics and social coherence. While my work (M. Perry 2004, 2008a, 2008b)
is in dialogue with this scholarship, my intervention is directed at providing

16 INTRODUCTION


an ethnographically grounded and historicized analysis of Cuban hip hop
as a multivalent site of racial maneuver in an emerging neoliberal moment.
By contrast, the British ethnomusicologist Geoffrey Baker is highly critical
of such approaches, taking particular issue with my work and what he views
as its "race agenda" and "overarching race-based narrative" regarding Cuban
hip hop (Baker 2011: 268-69). Drawing upon field data conducted just sub-
sequent to my own, Baker suggests raperos' (self-)racialization was a gradual
one, peaking in the early 2000s precisely during my primary research period.
While broadly accurate, where Baker and I differ concerns the terms, contrib-
uting factors, and political nature of such black self-fashionings. In the spirit
of intellectual exchange, I offer the following thoughts regarding the core
issues and limitations his critiques raise, while providing the opportunity
to further situate my analytical approach and ethnographic positionality in
the field.
A central contention of Baker involves the suggestion that outside enti-
ties, from U.S.-based hip hop artists and activists to North American scholars
like myself, introduced "Americanized" conceptions of race to Cuba, thereby
imposing a foreign racial construct upon an otherwise autochthonously
nonracial social landscape (Baker 2011: 267). Once these foreign influences
dissipated, he argues, racial currents of identification waned, reverting back
to a more "traditional Cuban style [of hip hop], focused on the presence of
people of different skin colors [who] identified hip hop spaces as racially
mixed" (285). While levels of black identification among raperos may indeed
have lessened in recent years for various factors I will later discuss, to sug-
gest that this shift is reducible to the fading of imposed ideas from "outside"
risks not only decoupling the conjunctural circumstances of the moment,
but also devaluing these artists'-and, in a wider sense, Afro-Cubans'-
historical agency in forging understandings of self and ways of being alter-
native to dominant national prescriptions.
One familiar with standing scholarship on mestizaje in the Caribbean
and broader Latin American region, of which Cuba's nonracial foundations
are a variant, is cognizant of the ways national constructions of racial neu-
trality more often than not obscure the raced workings of marginalization
and subordination affecting communities of African descent (see Godreau
2006; Hanchard 1998; Lilly Caldwell 2007; Martinez-Echazabal 1998; Safa
1998; Sagas 2000; Wade 1995; Whitten and Torres 1998). Similar conclusions
have been drawn by scholars of Cuba and its history (de la Fuente 2001;

INTRODUCTION 17


N. Fernandez 2010; Fernandez Robaina 1990; Ferrer 1998a, 1999; R. Moore
1994, 1997; Perez Sarduy and Stubbs 2000; Sawyer 2005).
As has been chronicled of various moments, moreover, Afro-Cubans
have long engaged extranationally with other Afro-descended populations
in making and mobilizing notions of black Cuban alterity toward antiracist
and/or liberatory-directed ends (Brock and Fuertes et al. 1998; Childs 2006;
Ellis 1998; Garcia 2006; Guridy 2010; C. Moore 1989; Palmi6 2002; Schwartz
1998; Sublette 2007). Such agencies were operative in the 1812 Aponte Re-
bellion by way of the Haitian Revolution, as they were with the poet Nicolas
Guillen's decades-long intellectual rapport with Langston Hughes, with the
journalist Gustavo Urrutia's affinities with the NAACP and Booker T. Wash-
ington, and, as I argue, with black-identified raperos in crafting political
imaginaries beyond the national. All are variations on a theme, yet ones
responsive to the complexities of their own historical present. Historiciza-
tion, therefore, is critical.
Identity claims among raperos can be viewed yet more broadly in con-
versation with the rise of identity-centered social movements throughout
the Latin American region involving indigenous as well as Afro-descended
populations, many of them marshaled around a politics of antiracism (Alva-
rez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Anderson 2009; Hale 1997; Ng'weno 2007;
Wade 1995; Warren 2001). Such mobilizations of difference, moreover, have
often articulated with the expansion of neoliberal policies and related state
turns toward multiculturalist positions, displacing mestizaje as a domi-
nant national paradigm (Hale 2002; Laurie and Bonnett 2002; Postero 2005;
Sieder 2002; Wade 1999). As I have similarly suggested here, a comparable
mix of identity politics, market transformation, and an ever fluid national
landscape are also in dynamic play in Cuba today. Locating Cuban hip hop
within such regional shifts may therefore yield analytic perspectives that
provide broader contextualization and nuances of understanding regarding
its racial undercurrents.
A central focus for Baker's analysis is the U.S.-based Black August collec-
tive that participated in a series of annual Cuban hip hop festivals between
1998 and 2003. Among other commitments, the collective organized per-
formances by African American and Nuyorican hip hop artists and related
involvements ofU.S. cultural activists. Like Baker, I recognize the instrumen-
tality of Black August in animating transnational conversations that have
been important in framing notions of blackness within Havana's hip hop

18 INTRODUCTION


community. Yet while I identify the collective as one among various actors
and/or factors, Black August figures in Baker's analysis as a primary progen-
itor of racial thinking among raperos. Dimensions of black identity within
this formulation ultimately begin and end with Black August. Along similar
lines, Baker critiques my work and that of other North American scholars ex-
ploring racial poetics within Cuban hip hop for "describ [ing] and analyz[ing]
Cuban culture using terms and theoretical constructs derived from people
of color in the United States" (Baker 2011: 286)." It is implied that through
engagements with island hop hip via scholarship and other involvements,
we (largely scholars of color), much like Black August, have imposed foreign
modes of racial thinking upon hip hop artists and their followers.
Such critiques are reminiscent of a set of challenges leveled by Pierre
Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant against, among others, the political scientist
Michael Hanchard and his work Orpheus and Power (1998), which examines
Brazil's movimento negro. In their article "On the Cunning of Imperialist Rea-
son," Bourdieu and Wacquant take Hanchard to task in arguing:
By applying North American racial categories to the Brazilian situation,
this book makes the particular history of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement
into the universal standard for the struggle of all groups oppressed on
grounds of colour (or caste). Instead of dissecting the constitution of
the Brazilian ethnoracial order according to its own logic, such inqui-
ries are most often content to replace wholesale the national myth of
"racial democracy" . . . by the myth according to which all societies are
"racist," including those within which "race" relations seem at first sight
to be less distant and hostile. From being an analytic tool, the concept
of racism becomes a mere instrument of accusation; under the guise of
science, it is the logic of the trial which asserts itself. (Bourdieu and Wac-
quant 1999: 44)
Hanchard in this light is seen as a black U.S. scholar extending a racial-
izing gaze onto Brazil's otherwise alien "ethnoracial order," thereby ad-
vancing an imperialist projection of North American power and cultural
hegemony into historically differentiated realms of the Global South. In his
defense, Hanchard suggests:
Their critique relies on presumptions and critical analytical methods
which privilege the nation-state and "national" culture as the sole object

INTRODUCTION 19


for comparative analysis, and as a consequence ignore how Afro-Brazilian
politics, the U.S. civil rights movements in particular and transnational
black politics more generally problematize the facile, even superficial,
distinctions between imperialist and anti-imperialist nation-states....
Bourdieu and Wacquant ignore the complexity and specificity of black
agency in both Brazil and the United States, which leads them to equate
black transnationalism with imperialism and U.S. foreign policy. In their
version of political ethnocentrism, the politics of nation-states are privi-
leged and the mobilizations of non-state actors are neglected and, when
identified, poorly understood. (Hanchard 2003: 6-7)
Numerous scholars have subsequently waded into the debate from U.S.
(Lilly Caldwell 2007; French 2003; Stam and Shohat 2012; Telles 2002) and
Brazilian (Costa 2002; Pinho and Figueiredo 2002; Santos 2002) vantage
points, calling into question the premise of externally imposed racial para-
digms of analysis and attendant dismissals of transnational histories of ra-
cial thought and practice.
My raced positionality as a black North American scholar is indeed in-
formative-and unapologetically so-of my scholarship and, I would add,
embodied position in the Cuban field. This is to suggest that in an imme-
diate sense, my subjectivity as African American is an unquestionable loca-
tion from which I move and engage intellectually and socially in the world.
Notions of a neutral ethnographic objectivity have long been challenged
in the field of anthropology (Abu-Lughod 1991; Clifford 1986; Sanjek 1990;
Scheper-Hughes 1992) and ultimately undermined by the unveiling of power
in the production of all knowledge claims (Foucault [1969] 2002; Haraway
1991; Said 1979). Researchers and scholars all therefore move as situated
subjects seeking to understand through interpretive means-positivist
claims notwithstanding-the social world. My racial as well as gendered,
classed, sexual, and national orientations thus collectively inform the ways
I come to approach and engage my research and interlocutors.
Regarding the Cuban field, my experience as a racially marked nonwhite
subject navigating the streets of Havana, where I was commonly read as a
black or varyingly mulato Cuban, unquestionably shaped the ethnographic
nature of my query into the ways race is currently lived in Cuba. My at times
daily experience of being stopped by Cuban police and asked for my carnet de
identidad, or national identification card, exposed me, like many of my rap-

20 INTRODUCTION


ero peers, to a quotidian consequence of being black, male, and (relatively)
young within the context of Cuba's new racially charged and policed social
landscape. My inability to enter tourist hotels without being challenged
by male security personnel was yet another expression of my gendered ra-
cialization within the island's expanding market logics. Yet if I presented
the questioning officer the tattered photocopy of my U.S. passport I had
become conditioned to carry, or spoke my accented Spanish (or better yet
English!) to hotel security guards, I would often be permitted to pass with-
out further consequence. In the latter case, I would be free to indulge in the
hotel's restricted currency zone otherwise long off-limits to most Cubans.
Thus, though I was "black," my positionality as a foreign national clearly
remained one of marked privilege.
At the same time, my racial situatedness served as an important site of
engagement with my Cuban peers, where the space of blackness, through
both its sameness and difference, became an initiating ground of dialogue.
Again, I speak here of black peers in reference to those individuals within
Cuba's hip hop community who politically self-identify as black regardless
of how they might be externally labeled within Cuba's graduated racial sys-
tem.12 Such political identifications, particularly as they find articulation
through the nationally expansive lens of hip hop, became a vital point of
entry through which my ethnographic engagement with raperos moves. My
project is thus positioned within ongoing conversations around advancing
transnational fields of dialogue toward antiracist and broader social justice
ends. This book is therefore in part an exploration into the possibilities-
and potential limitations-of "blackness" as a methodological framework
through which to conduct comparative, cross-national racial analyses
among Afro-descendant communities at this current juncture of frenetic
geospatial interconnectivity.
I am of course far from the first to travel this path within an ethnographic
context. The pioneering work of Katherine Dunham, for one, stands as an
example extraordinaire of this kind of transnational intervention. For Dun-
ham, realms of dance provided an embodied medium for diasporic dialogue
and translation (Dunham [1969] 1994; see also Aschenbrenner 2002). Zora
Neale Hurston's earlier ethnographic forays into the Caribbean (Hurston
[1935] 1990, [1937] 1990) are also illustrative of such dialogic pioneering ef-
forts. A later generation of African American anthropologists such as Lynn
Bolles (1996), Irma McClaurin (1996), Faye Harrison (1997), Edmund Gor-

INTRODUCTION 21


don (1998), and Angela Gilliam (Gilliam and Gilliam 1999), among others,
have varyingly approached the question of black transnationality as an eth-
nographic practice of the field.
In her piece "When Black Is Not Enough," Josephine Beoku-Betts invokes
Patricia Hill Collins's notion of the "outsider within" (1990) to think about
the locality of Afrodiasporic ethnographers working among differentiated
black communities (Beoku-Betts 1994). Rather than present an unproblema-
tized celebration, Beoku-Betts underscores the complexities of raced outsid-
ers doing cross-national research. As a British anthropologist of Nigerian
descent working with Gullah women of the South Carolinian Sea Islands,
her status as a "black" insider was far from given, but rather an ambiguous
one necessitating ongoing negotiation. Analogously, the Haitian American
ethnographer Gina Ulysse evokes her position as a "regional native/local
outsider" in the context of her work with Jamaican market women in Kings-
ton (Ulysse 2008). Embracing a transnational black feminist methodology,
Ulysse underscores the challenges, tensions, and limitations as well as the
analytic insights afforded through such transnational race-work. In their
respective scholarship on black women's organizing in Brazil, the African
American ethnographers Kia Lilly Caldwell (2007) and Keisha-Khan Perry
(2012) similarly evoke black feminist epistemologies as a mediated language
of Afro-hemispheric encounter and ethnography.
What these overlapping conversations and debates unveil is the central-
ity of power in shaping the relative positionality of researcher vis-n-vis the
"researched"-relationalities in which race among other social vectors can
serve as a differentiating, though far from politically transcendent, factor.
Indeed, far from claiming that racial semblances elide difference, such ap-
proaches elaborate a particular space or standpoint from which to initiate
conversation among and between black-identified communities of African
descent. Diasporic populations are of course by definition formed in dif-
ference, but a difference situated within broader shared understandings of
sociohistorical, cultural, and often political forms of affinity. Such recogni-
tion in no way elides questions of power and privilege, but instead works to
mediate some collective grounding of blackness through dialogic intercambio
(exchange), in essence putting blackness reflexively to work toward an af-
fective politics of affinity.
Hip hop today, by its very globalized and dialogically resonant nature, is
all about the transnationally affective (M. Perry 2008b; see also Fernandes

22 INTRODUCTION


2011; Mitchell et al. 2002; Sharma 2010). How and where, then, do I enter
this conversation? Raised for the early part of my childhood on Manhat-
tan's Lower East Side, I recall being dragged by my teenage babysitter to
local "street jams" in the neighboring Baruch and Jacob Riis public housing
projects in the mid-1970s where youth, almost exclusively African American
and Puerto Rican, gathered on summer afternoons to indulge in the music
of local DJs via makeshift audio equipment powered by way of illicit taps
into city streetlamps. Although unaware at the time that what was unfold-
ing around me throughout patchworks of public housing projects would
soon give rise to an urban cultural phenomenon, I would come into budding
awareness of self amid the formative period of hip hop's early ascendance
during the 1980s.
It was during later travels, however, that I became cognizant of how hip
hop, once a collaborative expression of postindustrial cultural improvisa-
tion among African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian inner-city
youth, was now being refashioned transnationally by other marginalized
youth to give critical voice to their own subjective experience and sense of
selfhood. In the interim a onetime marginal youth culture encompassing
expressive elements of music, verbal lyricism, dance, graffiti art, and fash-
ion had evolved into a multibillion-dollar global industry. I became fasci-
nated with the apparent tension between hip hop as a global site of cor-
porate commodification and simultaneously one of utopic yearnings and
their possibilities. My Cuban foray thus springs in important part from this
history.
While my work seeks to enter within and build upon currents of Afro-
diasporic interchange, scholarly and otherwise, such efforts are certainly
not without their challenges. Beyond questions of race, another methodo-
logically related issue pertains to the at times vexed politics of conducting
fieldwork in Cuba as a U.S. national. Given the highly charged nature of
Cuban-U.S. relations resulting from legacies of Cold War tension and an-
tagonistic posturing by successive U.S. administrations, the most enduring
of which is the ongoing U.S. trade embargo, navigating this divide as a U.S.
researcher can be a complex undertaking, recent thaws notwithstanding.
An immediate challenge for one sympathetic to many of the egalitar-
ian ideals of the Cuban Revolution, along with its internationalist commit-
ments to anticolonial/anti-imperialist histories of struggle, has been how to
develop analyses that address the limitations, contradictions, and very real

INTRODUCTION 23


autocratic tendencies of the revolutionary project without risking misappro-
priations of such conclusions by interests bent on undermining that same
project for deleterious gain. In this sense I find myself in a position some-
what analogous to that of many within Havana's hip hop community regard-
ing how to engage critique without playing into, or at least compounding,
injurious designs out of Miami or Washington. The obvious distinction be-
tween me and my rapero peers is that my analysis is voiced from a location
of a national outsider, a distinction further complicated by the particular-
ities of a U.S. vantage point and ongoing legacies of empire. The realities
of these chasms came into rather stark focus during an informal meeting
I helped organize in 2001 involving a prominent collection of Havana-area
raperos and others in which I was accused by one well-positioned Cuban of
being a CIA informant. There was a long-standing and intricate set of dy-
namics at play that meeting day-some personal, some professional-and
while the individual voicing the concern and I later made amends, my loca-
tion as a U.S. researcher was rendered hypervisible, if potentially suspect.
Yet would such anxieties have been beyond consideration? Some months
prior, a close rapero friend expressed concern that Cuban hip hop could
offer an opportune site for infiltration and provocateur work by those seek-
ing to debilitate the revolutionary state. Nadine Fernandez suggests Cuba's
leadership has indeed long been concerned that the race question in partic-
ular could be manipulated by adversaries of the state who would exploit the
issue as a nationally divisive tactic (N. Fernandez 2001: 119). Given recent
revelations involving covert U.S. efforts through the auspices of USAID to
ferment provocateurism within Cuban hip hop (see chapter 6), such con-
cerns were far from folly. During my research Cuban MCs were acutely aware
of the political stakes as socially engaged artists in a globally complex era of
geopolitics. Raperos in fact repeatedly saw their words and lyrics manipu-
lated by U.S. journalists in order to fit reductive readings of Cuban hip hop
as a site of counterrevolutionary dissent rather than one largely committed
to critical engagements within conceptions (albeit expansive) of the revo-
lutionary process itself. Such were among the broader implications of the
field that necessitated nuanced sensitivity on my part, ones that also carried
their own interpellating force and potential costs.
As one invested in black transnationalism as a strategic paradigm in com-
bating globalized forms of racial subjugation, Cuban hip hop was for me a
consequential site for both mapping and perusing such Afro-hemispheric

24 INTRODUCTION


commitments. Raperos' own transnationally expansive understandings of
black-selfhood in this sense enabled a space of dialogue, one within which
I could critically engage as a black "outsider within," complexities and con-
tractions notwithstanding. Such conjoining practices of blackness, I would
offer, are potentially generative of alternative political vistas themselves.
Throughout this book's narrative I have chosen to largely forgo the com-
mon ethnographic practice of using pseudonyms. The immediate reason is
that many of the artists, intellectuals, and other hip-hop-affiliated individu-
als ofwhom I mostly write are outspoken public figures. It is thus imperative
that I give proper recognition to the art, work, and lives of these individuals
as they have contributed to the evolving lines of hip hop's rise in Cuba. Yet
by acknowledging the majority of my Cuban interlocutors I assume added
levels of responsibility and accountability to them and their histories. Over
my years of involvement in Havana, countless Cuban friends and colleagues
have lent a tremendous amount of their own time, intellect, and political
commitment to this project. I consider many in this sense collaborators
who have a long-awaited invested stake in this book and its outcome. I thus
feel, in vintage hip hop vernacular, a deep indebted responsibility to repre-
sent(!) this history to the best of my ability and positioned understanding.
Narrative Layout
Situating hip hop's Cuban ascent within the immediacies of the island's
ongoing transformation, chapter 1 opens with my introduction to Havana
in 1998 and the fraught complexities of race and class encountered in the
wake of the legalization of the U.S. dollar and the subsequent rise of a dual-
currency economy following the economic crises of the early 199os. Draw-
ing on my initial experience living with an Afro-Cuban family, the chapter
folds into an examination of Cuba's new raced economies of commingling
exclusion and market assimilation, as well as the entrepreneurial strategies
some black and darker-skinned Cubans have creatively fashioned amid its
workings.
Interstitial in the mix is a query into the ambivalent nature of Cuba's
evolving neoliberal condition, its relation to the island's tourism industry,
and their conjoining raced effects vis-n-vis spaces and embodied perfor-
mances of blackness. Here I explore the ahistoricizing nature of folkloric
representations of Afro-Cuban expressive culture and their recent mone-

INTRODUCTION 25


tizations, as well as the revolutionary state's role in such packaging. The
chapter then moves to a discussion of the rise of raced forms of regulation
as the Cuban state has sought to police the social incongruencies of the
moment, and the questions these developments raise via lived realms of Cu-
ban citizenship. The political urgencies of such developments are brought
into focus with the chapter's concluding segue into critiques among Cuban
raperos regarding the systemics of raced policing of black youth.
Chapter 2 delves into hip hop's rise in Havana during the rapid social flux
of the 1990s. The chapter foregrounds the role of race in the early making
of hip hop, while introducing a range of key figures in Havana's nascent hip
hop community, as well as the revolutionary state's peripheral engagement
with the young cultural movement. Here I discuss the crafting of "black
spaces" through the ways raperos and their immediate predecessors arose
from local spaces of practice in which self-consciously modern understand-
ings of cosmopolitan blackness were celebrated and enacted in new Cuban
ways. The chapter then carries the conversation into an exploration of the
Cuban hip hop festival of 1997 as an early and highly spectacular illustra-
tion of the ways Cuban blackness found new dynamic play and lyric form
through a globally conversant lens of hip hop.
Chapter 3 moves into the ethnographic setting of my own research (1999
onward) with a focus on emerging identity currents within Cuban hip hop.
The chapter opens with my early engagements with key actors within Ha-
vana's hip hop community, with a particular focus on the pioneering hip
hop duo Obsesion. The chapter follows with a descriptive exploration of an
evolving range of locales through which raperos constituted themselves as
an artistic and cultural community. The chapter continues with an explo-
ration of the 2000 Cuban hip hop festival, which represented a significant
turning point in the movement's organizational character vis-n-vis expand-
ing institutional investments by the Cuban state. The festival's frame also
offers insight into raperos' involvements with African American and Puerto
Rican collaborators from the United States, and the significance of such
exchange regarding political discourse and dimensions of identity within
Cuban hip hop. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of a stage per-
formance of the Havana-based rap duo Anonimo Consejo, as exemplary of
positioned critiques within broader conceptions of revolutionary history
and struggle.
Chapter 4 draws upon a descriptive sampling of personal narratives and

26 INTRODUCTION


music-making practices in mapping the performative, often gendered na-
ture of black self-fashioning among members of Havana's hip hop com-
munity. The chapter opens with rapero mediations of subjectivity through
the coupling of two alternative streams of racial citizenship-one rooted
in a recuperative claiming of a critical black subject of Cuban history, the
other through national-expansive and often masculinist appeals to Afro-
hemispheric histories of black radical struggle. The chapter explores how
these creative routes of self-invention were shaped through a confluence of
mentoring relationships with Afro-Cuban intellectuals and African Amer-
ican political exiles. This is followed by a discussion of the rise of black
feminist-aligned discourse and subjectivity within rapero circles by way of
an increasingly vocal presence of women. Through such interventions, I
suggest, these women pose challenges to the largely masculinist frames of
Cuban hip hop and broader Cuban spheres of racialized patriarchy, while
constituting themselves as political subjects through artistic praxis.
Chapter 5 centers on the Cuban state's evolving efforts to incorporate
hip hop within institutional frames of revolutionary national culture and
raperos' varying negotiations of these moves. While related discussions are
initiated in previous chapters, this chapter focuses on later developments
culminating in the 2002 establishment of the Agencia Cubana de Rap (ACR,
or Cuban Rap Agency) under Cuba's Ministry of Culture, which signified the
height of incorporative state strategies. These events are examined in over-
lapping relation to Cuban cultural policy, intensifying market pressures,
and the global commercialization of Cuban popular music. Also examined
is the simultaneous rise of Afro-Cuban intellectual involvements with hip
hop vis-n-vis a broader interplay of intermittent state openings and an emer-
gent black public sphere. Here it is suggested that black and darker-skinned
raperos have been active in shaping a nascent black counterpublic rooted in
claims of a black political difference within an otherwise nonracial Cuban
national imaginary underscoring, in turn, dilemmas of Cuban race and na-
tional citizenship in the neoliberal era.
Chapter 6 focuses on more recent reconfigurations of Cuban hip hop in
relation to further economic, social, and ideological erosion on the island
accompanied by waning state support. Central to this discussion are efforts
by raperos to establish alternative projects and support structures indepen-
dent of state institutions and influence. This chapter also explores the grad-
ual decentering of hip hop's racial currents in dialogue with two concurrent

INTRODUCTION 27


developments, both of which resonate in one form or another with Cuba's
expanding marketplace. The first is the rise of more commercially minded
reggaeton music, which has displaced much of the space-official, popular,
and talent-wise-that hip hop once occupied. Included here is a discussion
of reggaeton's Cuban genesis in eastern Santiago de Cuba and its westward
march toward Havana.
A second related development concerns the departure abroad by many
key figures within Havana's black-identified rapero community. While in-
formed by a range of overlapping factors varyingly impacting the character
of island hip hop, the national exodus has also contributed to an interna-
tionalization of Cuban hip hop into diaspora as artists have sought to recon-
stitute community through social media and international travel. This chap-
ter concludes with the continued challenges faced by black antiracist efforts
in Cuba, while acknowledging the role and legacies of Cuban raperos within
this unfolding moment of political practice and national transformation.
A short postscript revisits the book's main arguments and contributions,
while offering a closing vignette and a related coda.

28 INTRODUCTION


Chapter 1.
Raced Neoliberalism:
Groundings for Hip Hop
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the
very bottom of hardships.
-W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Dicen que Dios no aprieta, pero Cuba estrangula. Pero a pesar de todo,
de mil modos te amo Cuba
[They say God does not squeeze, but Cuba strangles. Regardless of all,
in a thousand ways I love you, Cuba]
-"Mi nacion," Los Paisanos
In the summer of I998 I made my first trip to Havana for a Spanish-language
course I had arranged through online sleuthing and e-mail exchanges. I had
recently completed my MA work on Garifuna youth and performance in
New York City, and having leftover research funds I decided to take the op-
portunity to visit Cuba while seeking to improve my Spanish skills. Raised in
New York City by leftist parents-my father African American, my mother
Jewish-who met through their early 196os activism amid the U.S. civil
rights movement, Cuba and its revolution were celebrated in my home as a
defiant counterweight to histories of imperial capitalism.
As was the case within many black left circles of the time, the Cuban
Revolution's early commitments to racial equity and internationalist sup-


L

i.i. Hip hop producer Ariel Fernandez Diaz, as shown on the back cover of Cuban
Hip-Hop All Stars. Photo courtesy Steve Marcus
port for U.S. black radicals and anticolonial struggles in Africa carried
particular resonance in my movement household. Fidel Castro's famed
1960 stay in Harlem and impromptu meeting with Malcolm X at the Hotel
Theresa struck an especially intimate chord, occurring around the time of
my father's on-air reporting on social justice issues with New York-based
WBAI-Pacifica radio, work through which he had interviewed Malcolm X on
a number of occasions himself. My mother, moreover, was involved in early
solidarity work with the leftist Fair Play for Cuba Committee, while a close
aunt visited Havana in the late 1980s as part of a delegation of U.S. health
care professionals exploring the island's public health system. Given this
familial history, Cuba and its revolution had long occupied a site of intrigue.
Yet while my trip to Havana that summer may have been informed by
inherited nostalgias of revolutionary lore, I recognized the necessity of ex-
periencing this mythic Cuba on my own historical terms. Cuba of 1998, of
course, was not the Cuba of my parents' era and generation. It had been a
decade since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the end of Cuba's prefer-
ential trade with the Soviet Union and its allies. Since the early 199os the
island's ambivalent though ever-deepening engagement with market cap-
italism had introduced new social incongruencies and heightened levels

30 CHAPTER ONE


of contradiction into a once defiant revolutionary socialism. By 1998 the
strains were clearly evident even to a foreign visitor such as myself. Of par-
ticular note were the ways these developments impacted the island's com-
plexities of race and class, long foci of revolutionary Cuba's efforts to build
egalitarianism under state socialism. Such fissures of race and class were
also latent sites of historical tension rooted in Cuba's very inception as a
modern nation.
I was, as it turns out, fortunate to have arranged an informal homestay
with a Cuban family in Havana's western barrio of Playa, a short walking
distance from the state-run language school where I was attending daily
Spanish classes for payment in U.S. dollars. I met the family through Del-
maris, an administrator at the school with whom I had initially been in con-
tact about the program via her workplace e-mail, access to which at the time
was highly coveted given Cuba's remarkably (if rather conspicuously) under-
developed electronic communications infrastructure. Despite recent opens,
Cuba has one of the lowest levels of Internet penetration in the hemisphere
where private Internet access has long been restricted by the Cuban state as
a means of regulating open circulation of information. Delmaris and I were
nonetheless able to weave conversation through our exchanges to organize
a homestay with her husband's family with whom she lived in a six-story
concrete edificio (apartment building) dating from the early 198os. While
Delmaris's light skin, long reddish-brown hair, and distant Chinese ances-
try would effectively classify her in Cuban terms as "white," her husband,
Amilcar, and his family were decidedly Afro-Cuban.
From there began my time in the three-bedroom home of Lisnida. A
retired geography professor, Lisnida shared her flat with her son Amilcar,
a state-employed architect, his wife Delmaris, and Lisnida's five-year-old
grandson Leni, whose mother, Alma, Lisnida's daughter, worked in the
eastern city of Matanzas. As Afro-Cuban professionals, Lisnida and Amilcar
were multigenerational beneficiaries of revolutionary Cuba's public invest-
ments in education and professional training that enabled black Cubans lev-
els of educational access unseen in the prerevolutionary period. In the case
of Lisnida, fidelities to the revolution included a dedication to watching
Fidel Castro's marathon speeches on state television and her enthusiasm in
sharing this living history with me, a visiting outsider.
As my initial introduction to a performing Fidel as revolutionary institu-
tion, I sat with Lisnida for the opening hour or so of one such speech. After

Raced Neoliberalism 31


feeling I had put in a competent beginner's investment, I headed out for a
beer with a friend, only to return a couple of hours later to find an aging
Fidel still in full pontificating swing. In truth I was never fully out of Fidel's
earshot that evening, as I was accompanied throughout my outing by distant
echoes of his seemingly omnipresent voice weaving its way through open
windows into the otherwise empty night streets. Yet while numerous house-
holds like Lisnida's had their TVs tuned to the speech, the ghostly quality of
the patriarch's voice resonating across carpetless floors seemed to suggest
an ever-receding presence. Though this still may indeed have been Fidel's
Cuba; the question, though, seemed to be for how long.
In addition to affinities with the island's revolutionary history, Lisnida
and her family also held strong identifications as black Cubans. Aware of my
interest in Afro-Atlantic cultural lines, for instance, Lisnida sat me down at
her kitchen table on a number of occasions to share nuances of Afro-Cuban
religious life. Though not a practitioner herself, Lisnida assumed a familial
intimacy as she took time identifying varying characteristics differentiating
followers of Santeria or Regla de Ocha-Lucumi,1 for instance, from those of
Palo Monte, and the secret fraternal society of the Abakua.
Lisnida's family's embrace of the Afro in Afro-Cuban, however, was not
limited to the cultural, nor necessarily bound by the national. I recall Lisni-
da's son, Amilcar, sharing over dinner one evening the story of his name-
sake, the late Guinea-Bissauan revolutionary figure Amilcar Cabral, recount-
ing Cabral's leadership in Guinea-Bissau's guerrilla war for independence,
along with his 1973 assassination at the hands of the colonial Portuguese.
Amilcar's affective ties to this history were far from abstract; Cuba's military
involvements in Guinea-Bissau's anticolonial struggle played a critical role
in the nation's triumph of independence in 1974. In relaying his narrative,
Amilcar expressed a prideful sense of identification with Cabral and Cuba's
broader history of anticolonial struggle in Africa, citing key moments from
the Congo and Ethiopia to Angola. Having spent significant time in Eastern
and Southern Africa myself, our dinner conversations broadened to encom-
pass my own diasporic experiences and solidarity efforts, including media
work in Cape Town, South Africa, during the waning years of apartheid.
It was clear from speaking with Amilcar that his understandings of Af-
rica and its recent history-and ultimately his own personal baptism by
it-were shaped by legacies of Cuban internationalism and solidarities with
African independence movements dating back to the early years of the revo-

32 CHAPTER ONE


lution. Legacies indeed. Guillermo, Amilcar's uncle and Lisnida's brother,
who frequently visited the household, served as a mechanic during Cuba's
sixteen-year military engagement in Angola.2 Fighting alongside the ruling
MPLA in its war against UNITA rebels backed by the United States, South Af-
rica, and Zaire, upward of ten thousand Cubans were killed during the cam-
paign, significant numbers of whom were Afro-Cuban. While Guillermo
spoke little in detail of his time in Angola during his visits-noteworthy
given broader official silences around the war's national costs and collective
trauma-he did share a sense of pride at having served in Angola's eventual
victory. Africa was thus interwoven in the lives of Lisnida's family in com-
plexly imbricated levels of both the personal and national.
Aside from shared ties of diasporic affinity, my relationship with Lisni-
da's household was clearly also a financial one. While my time with the fam-
ily enabled entr6e to their lives and opportunities to explore relationships,
our agreed-upon payment of US$15 per night for food and lodging helped
defray, at least temporarily, the family's growing need for U.S dollars. This
informal agreement was also clandestine, given recent efforts by the Cu-
ban state to regulate and capitalize on a growing dollar-market for residen-
tial room rentals to foreigners. Cubans were now required to pay a hefty
monthly dollar-tax for official rental licenses or risk fines upward of $1,500
and the possible threat of property confiscation.3 For Lisnida and family the
risk was apparently worth it; the $15 daily contribution was roughly equiv-
alent to the average monthly peso salary garnered by many public sector
employees.
Indeed, despite advanced education and levels of professional achieve-
ment, Lisnida's family found themselves dependent on the island's rapidly
expanding dollar economy within which it was difficult for most to survive
on state-regulated peso salaries. As part of the Cuban state's efforts to cap-
ture circulating dollars otherwise destined for the informal black market,
basics like soap, clothing, and essential foodstuffs were increasingly re-
stricted to dollar-only purchase in state-run stores. Aptly termed la shopping
in Cuban vernacular, these dollar-only stores came to symbolize the early
rise of a new dollar-based consumerism in a once definitely nonconsumerist
socialist Cuba (see Gordy 2006).
One of the only local dollar stores at the time was, rather ironically, in
close proximity to the Russian Embassy with its massive citadel-like office
tower peering ominously over the leafy residential barrio of Miramar. With

Raced Neoliberalism 33


its modest aisles of imported delicacies like pasta, powdered milk, and
canned goods alongside cooking oil and detergent, the supermarket was
conveniently located to serve Havana's diplomatic corps given the barrio's
heavy concentration of foreign embassies. In relatively short order these
dollar-only stores became ubiquitous throughout Havana and the broader
island. By 2000 some 75-80 percent of dollar remittances by Cubans living
abroad-a primary source of circulating dollars-would channel through
such state-run stores and into government coffers (Eckstein 2010: 1050).
Within this new reality Lisnida and her family were struggling daily to
make ends meet. With no family living abroad to remit potentially life-
changing dollars to subsidize their household income, their ability-or was
it a sacrificial concession-to rent a room in their cramped apartment to
a dollar-paying Yuma (foreigner) was something of a momentary windfall,
one arising from the privileged work-related access Delmaris, the sole os-
tensibly "white" member of the household, had to foreigners such as my-
self. Her coveted position within the island's evolving dollar-based tourism
economy was far from unique, however. It was already apparent that white
Cubans were favored for hire in tourism-related employment, Cuba's fastest-
growing generator of foreign currency following its recent post-Soviet-era
turn toward liberalized markets. Although Lisnida and her family were
clearly better off in comparison to the severe hardships they and most Cu-
bans endured during the depths of the early 1990s economic crisis, they had
clearly entered a new moment of challenge in which dimensions of race and
class were reemerging as key factors shaping social opportunity and mo-
bility on the island. Was this the utopic Cuba of my parents' revolutionary-
tinged era? Did that Cuba indeed ever quite exist?
My time in Lisnida's home and broader experiences in Havana that sum-
mer triggered an urgent curiosity regarding the peculiarities and fraught
tensions of a rapidly changing Cuba. Most intriguing, I had heard during
my stay of an evolving local hip hop scene, one with an apparently signifi-
cant level of Afro-Cuban involvement. Reared amid hip hop's urban birth
and later exposed to the complexities of hip hop communities in Brazil and
South Africa (M. Perry 2008b), I was fascinated by the idea of Cuban hip hop
and what insights it might offer regarding the island's current condition and
future trajectory. Living a thirty-minute colectivo (collective taxi) ride from
Havana's center and well over an hour from the neighboring municipality

34 CHAPTER ONE


of Alamar, areas where much of the local hip hop activity at the time was
flowering, I unfortunately had little exposure to the music during that ini-
tial trip. I did, however, leave that summer determined to return to Havana
to explore Cuban hip hop as a window into what was clearly an island in
historic flux.
What, then, is the backstory of hip hop's emergence on the island? In
what ways might its rise speak to the particularities of Cuba's shifting eco-
nomic and social terrain? Given Los Paisanos' conflicted allusion to a Cuba
that "squeezes" yet remains beloved in their song "Mi nacion" referenced
in the chapter's opening epigraph, how might enduring tensions of race,
nation, and citizenship in light of the island's unfolding neoliberal uncer-
tainties factor into the mix? As I would come to learn, such questions were
of both critical concern and daily consequence for many within Havana's
hip hop community, while at the same time instrumental to the broader
political nature of Cuban hip hop itself.
Market Transitions
It is unquestionable that the 1990s marked a distinctive juncture in Cuba's
history, one largely defined by rupture and dissolution following the col-
lapse of the Eastern bloc and the subsequent suspension of Soviet subsidies
upon which the Cuban economy and wider revolutionary project had long
been dependent. As a consequence, Cuba fell into a severe economic cri-
sis between 1989 and 1993 resulting in a crippling 40 percent reduction in
GDP (Jatar-Hausmann 1999: 46). It was during a now infamous 1991 speech
before the Congress of the Federation of Cuban Women that Fidel Castro
declared el periodo especial en tiempos de paz, a "special period in peacetime,"
demanding acute austerity measures aimed at reducing national consump-
tion and expenditure.
While signs of recovery from this special period would begin to emerge
after 1996, the resulting and evolving character of Cuban society had un-
questionably taken a historic turn. I've heard Cubans painfully recall the
early 1990s as el tiempo de losflacos (time of the skinny ones), a period in which
acute scarcities of produce, shelved goods, and meat of any kind contributed
to endemic nationwide levels of undernourishment.4 Exacerbating if not
strategically exploiting the scenario, the United States tightened its trade

Raced Neoliberalism 35


embargo during this period, resulting in an estimated $67 billion loss to the
Cuban economy by decade's close in addition to an accompanying range of
social costs (Hidalgo and Martinez 2000).5
By 1993 urgent intervention was needed to stem the deepening economic
and ensuing social crisis, compelling Cuba's ambivalent dance with global
capital and attending openings to neoliberal market forces. I underscore
ambivalent here to speak to the complexly fraught nature of Cuba's recent
engagements with neoliberalism. Unlike much of the Global South obli-
gated to accommodate neoliberal reforms by way of international lending
and regulatory agencies or regional free-trade agreements such as NAFTA,
Cuba's socialist leadership adamantly eschewed any participation within
such frameworks. Revolutionary Cuba has indeed been a vehement critic
of global free trade, assuming, for instance, vocal membership as a found-
ing partner in the anti-neoliberal bloc ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los
Pueblos de Nuestra Am6rica), formally led by Venezuela's late Hugo Chivez.
Such efforts notwithstanding, it is clear that more informal modes of ac-
commodation were undertaken by the Cuban state in ways that clearly res-
onate with neoliberal monetization. It was the 1993 legalization of the U.S.
dollar and the subsequent creation of a dual dollar/Cuban peso economy
that most cogently signified a turn toward a market-driven, dollar-intensive
economy and implicit erosion of state socialism. While the introduction
of pesos convertibles (convertible pesos, or Cucs) in 2004 as official tender
sought to remedy the incongruencies of dollar-based exchange, foreign cur-
rency dependence continues as Cubans remain reliant on foreign exchange
in order to purchase the globally pegged cucs now vital to daily life.
Dollar legalization was quickly followed by a series of deregulatory re-
forms involving the limited sanctioning of privately owned small businesses
and cooperatives, the breakup of state farms and creation of private farmers'
markets, and openings to foreign investment and joint ventures.6 Market-
aligned shifts have accelerated under Raul Castro, who has overseen radical
reductions to public sector payrolls and state subsidies, as well as authoriz-
ing private home ownership alongside private real estate and car markets.
The recent $900 million revamping of the port of Mariel-long infamous
for the 1980 boatlift of ten thousand Cubans to the United States during
an acute moment of revolutionary crisis-into an expansive internationally
financed and operated economic free-trade zone stands as a particularly
cogent marker of this neoliberal turn.7 Given ongoing moves toward nor-

36 CHAPTER ONE


malizing U.S.-Cuban relations, the pace and scope of such marketizations
are certain to accelerate and broaden.
On the social front, the once essential state-issued libreta (little book)
long guaranteeing families basic monthly levels of subsidized food would
eventually provide so little it became a sardonic brunt of Cuban humor.' The
island's celebrated national health care system has in turn become strained
due to the contracting out of tens of thousands of Cuban medical personnel
to Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa for hard currency remuneration
and other forms of economic exchange.9 While Cuba provided urgent med-
ical expertise during international crises like the recent West African Ebola
epidemic, the broader leasing of professional personnel like doctors and
engineers abroad accounted for almost half of Cuba's hard currency earn-
ings by 2006, more than double the revenue generated by tourism (Sinchez-
Egozcue 2007: 7, cited in Eckstein 2010: 1049). The concurrent growth of a
"medical tourism" industry catering to foreign-currency-paying elites from
Latin America and the Caribbean, moreover, speaks further to a monetiza-
tion of Cuba's public health care system in the face of a withering socialist
state.
Here I turn again to Aihwa Ong's notion of neoliberalism "as exception"
regarding the selective introduction of market strategies and intertwined
modes of social governance as aberrations to established governing prac-
tices in order to more effectively compete in the global economy (Ong
2006). In the case of Cuba, neoliberal rationales and their market-friendly
effects have increasingly permeated Cuban society as exceptions to domi-
nant socialist rule, engendering a deep ambivalence of national condition
and identity. While the Cuban state continues (ever anemically) to claim
state socialism as its guiding principle and mode of governance, its efforts
to not only mediate but in the end actively facilitate market reforms suggest
a discordant slide toward embrace of a neoliberal state (cf. Hardt and Negri
2004; Wacquant 2012).10
In Ong's reading, such incongruencies tend to produce graduated zones
of exclusion under which rights associated with citizenship are increas-
ingly afforded along lines of entrepreneurial ability rather than national
belonging. In Cuban form, one sees these logics embodied in the rise of
cuentapropismo, an evolving state-sponsored self-employment scheme that,
while ostensibly regulated, places responsibility for employment on the in-
dividual alone, thus resonating with a broader turn toward private sector

Raced Neoliberalism 37


employment and individuated market competition (cf. Burnett 2011). This
shift echoes Alexei Yurchak's discussion of the rise of an entrepreneurial
ethic in postsocialist Russia, displacing previous modes of collectivist or-
ganization and social practice (Yurchak 2003). Such "creative destruction,"
to borrow from David Harvey (2007), resonates with the ways neoliberal
marketization has similarly encouraged entrepreneurial-and ultimately
elite capitalist-class formations in settings like China and India. As in
these and other global examples (W. Brown 2003; Comaroff and Comaroff
2009; Vrasti 2011), the rise of the market over the state as abettor of social
well-being requires each to refashion oneself as rationally minded homo
oeconomicus (economic human) (Foucault 1979) in competitive pursuit of in-
dividual gain. From doorstep peddling of "street pizzas" to renting rooms
to foreign tourists, enterprising strategies to creatively resolve (resolver) daily
hardships in light of Cuba's diminished capacities for social welfare indeed
speak poignantly to the island's neoliberal turn.
Raced Economies
As Lisnida's family's experience suggests, the ways Cubans have come to navi-
gate and compete within the island's new economy have been significantly
impacted by dimensions of race. Regarding foreign remittances-long the
greatest single source of dollars and other foreign-currency income for most
Cubans-smaller numbers of black Cubans living abroad and the tendency
for migrants of Afro-Cuban descent to be less financially secure have contrib-
uted to marked remittance disparities between white and darker-skinned
Cubans.11 In addition to enabling higher standards of living in an immediate
sense, remitted monies may also be invested in small entrepreneurial proj-
ects providing additional financial benefits. With limited recourse to remit-
tances and their entrepreneurial effects, black and darker-skinned Cubans
are ostensibly left with tourism-related commerce-Cuba's other emergent
site of foreign exchange-as a potential source of dollars and cucs. Yet as
Delmaris's case suggests, tourism carries its own raced logics and spheres
of exclusion.
While the dismantling of the island's Batista-era tourism industry was a
celebrated early achievement of the revolution, in line with similar neolib-
eral strategies in the region (Desforges 2000; Gregory 2006; Klak and Myers
1998; Scher 2011), tourism was designated as a strategic sector shortly after

38 CHAPTER ONE


1989 and provided more than 40 percent of the island's hard currency in-
come by 2001 (Associated Press 2001) .12 In Cuba's European-oriented hotels
and related tour services, however, there is wide acknowledgment of pref-
erential hiring for lighter-skinned Cubans (de la Fuente 2001; Roland 2010;
Sawyer 2005). Although these workers receive salaries in Cuban pesos, their
incomes are often augmented exponentially by tips and other transactions
in foreign currencies and/or Cucs circulating within these contained tour-
ist spaces. For a long time, the only darker-skinned employees visible were
male security personnel stationed at hotel entrances vigilantly guarding
these privileged currency zones from the public space of la calle (the street).
One rationale offered for these whitened spaces is that many tourist ho-
tels are often jointly owned and/or operated by European hotel conglomer-
ates who exercise foreign racial preferences when making hiring decisions.
An alternative explanation offered is that the tourist industry is simply re-
sponding to the island's predominantly white European and North Amer-
ican clientele who prefer to be served by people who "look like them.""
Either scenario presents dilemmas for revolutionary Cuba and its embed-
ded ideals of racial equality. They also suggest a certain abdication of sov-
ereignty and full rights of citizenship in which economic livelihood is no
longer ensured or arbitrated by the state, but rather allocated by the market
along lines of racial difference.
The experiences of Mario, a dark-brown-skinned Afro-Cuban friend
from the working-class barrio of Jesus Maria in central Havana, testifies to
the lived realities of such raced exclusion. While not a particularly invested
hip hop "head," Mario was not unlike many I later met in Havana's rapero
community: that is, young, largely unemployed-at least formally-black
men from working-class backgrounds. With his customary jeans, well-worn
athletic shoes, and New York Yankees cap he had acquired by way of a cousin
in New Jersey, Mario assumed a stylized flair similar to many local followers
of hip hop. When we first met in 1998, Mario, then in his early twenties,
frequently complained of his inability to acquire work with a state-run tour-
ism company despite his university education and coveted English fluency.
While passing his finger along the inside of his left forearm in the common
Cuban gesture indicating color or race (i.e., "the blood"), he explained, "Por
supuesto, es el color de piel que me impide este trabajo" (Of course, it's the
color of my skin that keeps me from this work). Given legacies of Afro-
Cuban support for the revolution stemming from histories of expansion

Raced Neoliberalism 39


in areas like public education, urban housing, and universal health care,
Mario expressed a sense of disillusionment (if not a hint of betrayal) about
the current Cuban moment. Frustrations of this kind eventually played into
his decision to immigrate to France in 2000 through a foreign fiance visa
acquired by way of his French girlfriend, now his wife, with whom he now
shares two children in Nantes.
Mario's departure from Cuba can be seen as a fairly strategic one in this
light, fashioned in response to an increasingly monetized everyday in which
his racial status constrained his range of opportunity and social mobility.
Emigration would indeed become ever more common among young black
Cubans, including, as I later explore, many key members of Havana's hip
hop community. Yet by immigrating to France in an effort to circumvent
such limitations, Mario was compelled in the end to forfeit his legal status
as a Cuban citizen. Cubans living or traveling abroad for extended periods
are obligated to relinquish citizenship, and upon return must request of-
ficial permission to visit the island on a temporary basis.14 Although once
abroad Mario eventually became certified as an electrician through a local
polytechnic, for a number of years he worked part-time in Nantes as a salsa
DJ and dance instructor-tapping in this way into global markets of Cuban
cultural trade. Thus while a concession of formal rights with emigration
may have been unavoidable, cultural realms of Cuban citizenship remained
for Mario not only accessible but relatively viable in a commercial sense.
Interplays of race, citizenship, and economies of exchange have in fact
become commonplace in Cuba, where racially marked space and signs of
blackness have emerged as sites of tourism-related commerce. Anyone fa-
miliar with the island over the last decade or so is aware of a strong tour-
ist trade in Afro-Cuban cultural expression in a wide array of forms, many
of which draw upon notions of black "otherness" steeped in exotic and/or
erotic kinds of desire. This trade and its packaging has been mediated in
important part through an enduring trope of Cuban folklore that, through
recent market alignments, has helped facilitate a trafficking of black cul-
tural markers as exploitable assets for tourist revenue (see Ayorinde 2004;
Delgado 2009; Hagedorn 2001; R. Moore 2006a).
Rooted, as Robin Moore (1997) has detailed, in nationalist efforts among
early twentieth-century artistic movements to imagine a racially syncretic,
postcolonial ideal of Cuban nationhood, and intellectually codified by the

40 CHAPTER ONE


celebrated ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, the trope of folklore has assumed
an implicitly raced meaning in its nearly exclusive application to Afro-
Cuban cultural forms. Reminiscent of similar projects in the Caribbean and
broader Latin American region (Canclini 1995; Godreau 2006; Guss 2000;
Thomas 2004), the labeling of Afro-Cuban expressive realms such as music,
dance, and religious community as folkloric has worked to contain these
forms (and by extension those who practice them) firmly within the trans-
culturated bounds of a Cuban national patrimony (Ortiz [1940] 1963; cf.
Yelvington 2001). Such folkloric representations-be they objects of study
or appropriated national spectacle-are ultimately resignified and statically
assimilated within a race-neutral(izing) discourse of to popular, obscuring
these forms' historical specificity and dynamism as ongoing expressions of
Afro-Cuban life and cultural agency.
Building upon this legacy, various cultural institutions formed during
the early revolutionary period sought to document and institutionally situ-
ate Afro-Cuban folklore within the revolutionary scope of national culture.15
Although these efforts were in keeping with a broader cultural policy aimed
at fostering revolutionary-infused arts and culture by way of state promo-
tion and guidance (Hart Divalos 199o;16 cf. R. Moore 2006b), the emphasis
has been on institutional representations of afrocubanidad (Afro-Cubanness)
as performed national spectacle. Through national stagings of both sacred
and secular forms of Afro-Cuban music and dance, Cuba's Conjunto Folk-
l6rico Nacional has, since its founding in 1962, been an exemplar of state-
sponsored efforts (see Daniel 1995; Hagedorn 2001).
While the Conjunto owes some of its creative impetus to Afro-Cuban
demands for inclusion within the revolutionary project and draws heavily
upon black artistic leadership, its performative repertoire implicitly builds
upon an Ortizian legacy positing Afro-Cuban cultural realms juxtaposed
to that of modernity (see Bronfman 2002; R. Moore 1994) .17 Such framings
tend to reproduce renderings of Afro-Cuban cultural forms-in particular
those associated with African-derived religious systems-as primitive, an-
tediluvian counterpoles to modern socialism (see de la Fuente 2001; Palmi6
2002). The language of folklore in this sense engenders a fossilizing stasis of
black Cuban cultural forms as bounded sites affixed to, and ultimately con-
tained within, a nonracial Cuban national imaginary. Afro-Cuban cultural
spheres are therefore relegated to an unchanging national past, effectively

Raced Neoliberalism 41


fixing black Cubans within static representations of the "traditional" rather
than recognizing the dynamic ever-changing nature of Afro-Cuban cultural
practice, subjectivity, and experience.
Within today's cultural marketplace, folkloric framings have also enabled
the packaging of black cultural forms as exploitable resources for tourist
dollars and other exchange. These moves are tied in a broader sense to what
Ruth Behar (1999) once referred to as Cuba's "buena-vistaization" in allusion
to The Buena Vista Social Club, the 1997 album of classic son music produced
by Ry Cooder and the subsequent Wim Wenders's documentary of the
same title that launched a global frenzy for Cuban music and culture. This
commercial wave is embedded in nostalgic yearnings for an old Cuba-a
prerevolutionary Cuba of vintage pre-1959 American cars, historic urban
architecture, and "traditional" forms of expressive culture and tropical ex-
oticism. Reminiscent of Renato Rosaldo's notion of imperialist nostalgia
(1989), buena-vistaization thus speaks to the ways Cuban cultural markers
have been reconfigured, packaged, and marketed for Western consumption
via appeals to imperialist-laden desires for an untainted prerevolutionary
past. As Tanya Hernandez suggests, such ahistoricizing nostalgias are of-
ten coupled with quests for an authentically "pure" Afro-Cuban subject and
attending musicality rooted in preverbal longings for noble savagery (Her-
nandez 2002).
There are, for example, numerous locales in Havana where tourists regu-
larly flock to consume and bodily experience Afro-Cuban cultural practices
such as rumba music and dance. One such widely attended event is held
along Callejon de Hamel. On any given Sunday this small narrow street in
the Central Havana neighborhood of Cayo Hueso draws large gatherings
of local as well as foreign tourists, numbers of whom may arrive via tour
buses that sit just outside the street's ornate entrance.18 Colorfully awash
with Afro-Cuban religious motifs and murals as well as a few ritual altars,
the Callejon's aesthetics are largely the creative invention of the Cuban artist
Salvador Gonzalez Escalona, whose gallery sits conveniently adjacent to the
space dedicated to the weekly rumba performances. Living only a few blocks
from the Callejon, I attended the rumba innumerable times between 1999
and 2006.
I recall one particular Sunday, however, when the artist Gonzalez Es-
calona, a mestizo who often performed the role of microphone-wielding
host of the rumba's festive play of dance and song-though he participates

42 CHAPTER ONE


directly in neither-welcomed the crowd by alluding to the rumba as "nues-
tro folklore" (our folklore). At that point a dark-skinned black woman who
appeared to be in her late thirties shouted definitively from the audience
"iEste no es el folklore, esta es nuestra cultura!" (This is not folklore, this
is our culture!), followed by affirmations from some in the crowd. Her re-
marks laid bare tensions between the performance of rumba as a folkloric
spectacle, framed in this instant for tourist consumption, and its lived
embodiment as a cultural space of enacted community (cf. Daniel 1995).
Such discord draws attention to the market-driven commodification of Afro-
Cuban cultural forms and signs of blackness within Cuba's tourist economy,
one significantly enabled through the language of folklore.
The Cuban state for its part has played its own role in the commercial
marketing and packaging of folklorized blackness. Departing from earlier
histories of suppression (Hagedorn 2001; C. Moore 1989), the state has as-
sumed an increasingly active role in the public promotion of Ocha-Lucumi
and other Afro-Cuban religious systems as generators of tourist-related
income. One notable example is Havana's Museo de los Orishas, housed
in the headquarters of the state-sanctioned Asociacion Cultural Yoruba de
Cuba. For a fee of Cuc$io (equivalent to US$io, roughly half a month's av-
erage peso salary), visitors can view upward of thirty religiously adorned,
life-size figures ofvarious orishas (deities) of the Ocha-Lucumi pantheon and
other religious paraphernalia. Yet farther afield, state-run religio-commerce
has evolved to offer not only excursions to designated Ocha houses but,
reportedly, government-sponsored tours through which paying customers
can participate in rites of initiation into the Lucumi religion itself (Hage-
dorn 2001). Rogelio Martinez Fur6, a prominent Afro-Cuban intellectual
and founding member of the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional, refers to such
practices as "pseudo-folklore," akin in his view to a prostitution or pimping
of traditional religious systems (Martinez Fur6 2000: 159).
Folkloric packagings, moreover, often involve gendered and sexualized
dimensions as well. In large craft markets in Havana and other tourist ar-
eas, one can find a bountiful collection of racialized caricatures of black Cu-
bans for sale. Often venturing into the absurd, many figurines and printed
T-shirts adopt racially ascribed stereotypes such as grossly enlarged lips
framing big toothy smiles. One variation involves a dark-skinned head with
vulgarly exaggerated red lips stretched to form an ashtray to accommodate
one's favorite Cuban cigar. Many others play upon gendered specific no-

Raced Neoliberalism 43


tions of a black primal hypersexuality. In male form, this can translate into a
smiling black figurine with a protruding erect penis complete with pink tip.
More common are tables of brown painted female figurines topped with
colorful head-wraps invoking "Mammy" or "Aunt Jemima" figures of the
U.S. antebellum South. Yet unlike their sexually neutered correlates to the
North, these figurines index a raced economy of erotic desire; their absurdly
large breasts (sometimes with protruding nipples) and correspondingly
ample backside command a sexualized gaze. Articulating upon endur-
ing representations of the mixed-raced mulata as an oversexed temptress
(Arrizon 2002; Kutzinski 1993), this motif is often accompanied by a large
phallic cigar projecting from a provocative wide grin. As Jill Lane's work on
nineteenth-century bufo theater has shown, similar gendered forms of black
sexualized caricature were formative in the early shaping of Cuba's national
imaginary (Lane 2005). These tropes, however, are also clearly in historical
dialogue with other North and Latin American variants of racist antiblack
caricature (cf. Lott 1993; Rivero 2005). One can, for instance, find strikingly
similar figurines circulating in tourist markets in the Dominican Republic.
When I spoke informally with market vendors in Havana (many ofwhom
were not black) about the figures' physical attributes and sexual explicit-
ness, a number told me that these images were simply drawn from Cuban
folklore. These responses brought to mind the ways racial fictions continue
to operate at a deeply embedded commonsensical level within much of Cu-
ba's popular imaginary. One vendor in fact claimed these figures and their
grossly exaggerated body parts actually resemble black Cubans themselves.
My suggestion that such depictions might be infused with racist meanings
was often meet with adamant denials of any racist content or intent. What
is clearly less debatable is that such imagery and attendant discourses align
with prerevolutionary black caricatures and broader hemispheric narratives
of antiblack racism. These forms, once more, are intentionally reproduced
for foreign tourist consumption, a practice that comes into focus when
considering that many vendors claimed that these figurines were fabricated
foremost to meet foreign tourists' own notions and consumer tastes for
iconic representations of Cuba and its "culture." Blackness in a neoliberal
Cuba apparently sells.

44 CHAPTER ONE


Racial Entrepreneurialisms and Their Regulation

Amid this raced marketplace some darker-skinned Cubans have in turn
found enterprising ways to mobilize markers of blackness within an evolv-
ing economy from which they are otherwise largely excluded. While such
strategies coincide with broader Cuban trends toward entrepreneurial life-
ways, they are in this instance both shaped by and traffic within racialized
circuits of desire and its trade. Maneuvers of the kind thus suggest in effect a
kind of raced homo oeconomicus in their flexible adaption to Cuba's expanding
market rationales.
Recall again Callejon de Hamel's weekly rumba. Among its other attri-
butes, the rumba has long been a noted space for the hustling of tourist
women by young black men cognizant of the spectacle's racial draw. Here
I am reminded of Oscar, a stylish dark-skinned man in his late twenties
whom I periodically ran into at the Callejon often in the company of young
foreign women. One afternoon over a shared bottle of rum in plastic cups,
Oscar explained in essence that he was aware of an economy of racialized
desire within which he, as a young black man, operated vis-n-vis Cuba's
tourist trade. In speaking of his experiences, Oscar noted unapologetically:
"Oye, me gusta cuando las mujeres blancas me persiguen, cuando puedo
decirle que tienen que esperar un poco. Imaginalo, en la cara de todo ese
rascimo que siempre ha llamado mi piel sucia, sin valor, imagina!" (Listen,
I love it when white women chase me, when I can tell them they have to wait
some. Imagine it, in the face of all the racism that has always called my skin
dirty, worthless, imagine!).
Oscar juxtaposed this experience against the hardships of working in a
metal workshop where he claimed some of his white colleagues resented
his position of relative seniority. Within the public domain ofla calle, he ex-
pressed a sense of redemptive gratification in his ability to use his blackness
of skin as a mode of social capital, enabling him entree to privileged spaces
and potential opportunities that he might not otherwise have in today's
Cuba. I have no idea whether Oscar eventually joined the ranks of young
black and darker-skinned men I have known since the late 1990s who, like
Mario and ultimately many rapero friends, left the island on foreign fiance
visas with hopes of better lives in Europe, Canada, or the United States.19 If
he did, though, I would not be surprised.

Raced Neoliberalism 45


While romantic scenarios of this kind clearly do not preclude mutually
loving relationships, it would be difficult to assume they fully operate out-
side broader spheres of raced desire that permeate Cuba's tourism sector
in ways similarly noted in other Caribbean settings (Brennan 2004; de Al-
buquerque 2000; Gregory 2006; Kempadoo 2004; Sanchez Taylor 2001).
Economic inequalities are also frequently salient in these contexts. Given
the often prohibitive application costs of Cuban passport and visa fees that
ran well into multiple hundreds of U.S. dollars by the late 1990s,20 foreign
women in these scenarios frequently offset such expenditure. Over the years
I have known North American women ofvarying ages involved in such rela-
tionships, and it is not uncommon for them to provide additional financial
support to their Cuban partners-and often, by extension, their families-
during the extended months of bureaucratic processing. While these
women clearly exercise agency within these situations, dimensions of race,
class, gender, nationhood, and sexuality and their interwoven economies of
power are unavoidable within such transnational romances.
An eroticized market for blackness has also been an active component
of the island's illicit foreign-based sex trade, which evolve alongside the
growth of tourism and the dollar economy.21 Racial difference in this context
emerged as a currency of exchange between largely darker-skinned Cubans
and their predominantly white foreign patrons in heterosexual as well as
same-gendered spheres of sexual desire and commerce (Allen 2011; Lums-
den 1996; cf. Alexander 2006). Offering historical scope, Anne McClintock
notes that women of color have long been sites of masculinist conquest
through the conjuring of colonial territories as "porno-tropics" in the Euro-
imperial imagination (McClintock 1995, cf. Stoler 1995). Here, nonwhite
women are frequently figured as fetishized objects by male travelers who
project imperialist claims as parcel of broader feminizations of non-Western
societies.22
Building upon these legacies, European magazines and tour operators
have long exploited such language and imagery to promote Cuba as a travel
destination for sex tourism (Clancy 2002). Along these lines there are annals
of Internet sites targeting hetero-male sex travelers that cite Cuba as a top
sex tourism destination. As a descriptive example, on one English-language
site, cuba-sex.com, I encountered the following anonymous posting: "Cu-
ban prostitutes are called jineteras, or 'jockeys.' Wild, untamed, uninhib-

46 CHAPTER ONE


ited women, they love to get on top and ride a man hard. Often displaying
Afro-Cuban features, these dusky, scantily-clad native girls with fine asses
are very passionate and may cling tightly and fondle you after sex" (italics
in original).23
This brief passage illustrates in no uncertain terms a racially fetishized
objectification of female sex workers circulating globally on sex tourism
websites. Indeed, similar sites and language have been documented in rela-
tion to the Dominican Republic's foreign-tourist-directed sex trade (Greg-
ory 2006). Not only do such narratives reproduce hypersexualized imagery
of black and darker-skinned Cuban women through an electronically dis-
seminated tourist gaze, but they further situate such eroticized represen-
tations squarely within fictive bounds of a primal black bestiality. Yet amid
such racialized trade there may clearly be more at play.
The expression jinetera, derived from jinete, the Spanish term for a horse
jockey, suggests degrees of social maneuvering regarding the women's "rid-
ing"-both literal and figurative-of tourists for economic remuneration
or other conferred social privileges. Thus implicit in this allegorical play is
the question of who in the end may be pimping whom. Here I do not wish
to elide the varying structural inequalities between darker-skinned Cuban
sex workers and their foreign johns (or janes); nor do I seek romanticized
degrees of social agency. Rather, I seek to underscore that while a sexualized
commodification of blackness may operate globally as a site of consump-
tive desire, it may simultaneously allow some darker-skinned Cubans spaces
and gendered modalities of labor within a market economy in which Afro-
Cubans are often structurally marginal.
Further to the point, the wider phenomenon ofjineterismo is not reducible
to sexualized markets of exchange, but rather speaks more broadly to the
rise of informal, often racially associated street hustling for tourist income
via an array of nonsanctioned (that is, illicit) services to foreigners. Con-
sider again Oscar's scenario. Although Oscar is state employed, his osten-
sible leisure visits to touristed rumba spaces moved him within informal
economies of tourist trade and hustle. Jineterismo practices, in their strate-
gic application within spaces of tourist trade, are therefore part and parcel
of a wider entrepreneurial range of strategies developed in accordance with
Cuba's new neoliberally inclined markets of exchange, markets that are of-
ten raced, gendered, and potentially sexualized in particular kinds of ways.

Raced Neoliberalism 47


Jineterismo's entrepreneurisms in this sense prefigured the formal advent
of state-sanctioned cuentapropismo, which, like its illicit cousin, is also
predicated on individuated forms of market hustle.
Within an unfolding economy where racial status is increasingly tied to
social inequality by way of global currency flows, illicit strategies for eco-
nomic gain have in turn become heavily policed by the Cuban state. The
escalation of police activity in the streets of Havana since the Special Period
offers a poignant expression of the raced nature of such market-inscribed
governance. In a speech in January 1999 commemorating the fortieth an-
niversary of the founding of the National Revolutionary Police, Fidel Cas-
tro addressed the rise in illicit activities like street crime, prostitution, and
drugs that followed the introduction of the U.S. dollar. In response, he ar-
gued, the streets must in effect be taken back. Almost overnight, roughly six
thousand additional police were assigned to the streets of Havana (Fernan-
dez Tabio 1999, cited in Trumbull 2001: 312). During this period police of-
ficers could be found on virtually every odd corner in many central areas of
the city. A central focus of this crackdown was petty street crime and un-
derground black market activity upon which large numbers of Afro-Cubans
(and many Cubans more generally) had become dependent given limited
entree to sanctioned forms of hard-currency acquisition.
This crackdown disproportionately affected young black men, who are of-
ten racially marked and targeted by Cuban police as delincuentes (delinquents).
Within this scenario preexisting laws under the rubric of peligrosidad (danger-
ousness, or risk of criminal behavior) were expanded into stop and frisk-like
practices commonly directed at young black men (see Ayorinde 2004: 142).
During a conversation with my friend Rodrigo, a darker-skinned Afro-Cuban
intellectual in his early forties, about his repeated experiences with police
and similar challenges at hotel entrances, he spoke of a candid exchange he
had one evening with a police officer. The officer, he said, confided that Cu-
ban police were instructed to be vigilant of black youth, particularly at night,
given a claimed propensity toward crime. Such practices, Rodrigo added,
were "sintomatico, parte del pensamiento institucional que tiene sus raices
en las instituciones politicas" (symptomatic, part of the institutional think-
ing that has its roots in political institutions).
While it may be difficult to substantiate Rodrigo's claim, associations
of black Cubans with criminalized pathologies via a racially coded language
of marginalidad (social marginality), to which I will return, have a long his-

48 CHAPTER ONE


tory in Cuba, grounded intellectually, once again, in the early work of Fer-
nando Ortiz ([1906] 1973; cf. Arandia 2001; Maguire 2011; R. Moore 1994).
An alternative explanation for the targeting I have heard cited by Cubans is
that large numbers of Havana's police are drawn from outlying provinces
so as to minimize affinities with the local population. The purported pro-
vinciality of these officers, it is suggested, lends itself to biases that inform
racial profiling. Whether a cultural manifestation, a product of intentional
design, or perhaps a combination of both, the historical weight of raced
policing is compounded by the fact that darker-skinned Cubans reportedly
comprise a disproportionate percentage, if not a majority, of Cuba's incar-
cerated (Ayorinde 2004; Perez Sarduy and Stubbs 2000; Sawyer 2005).
In a quotidian sense commonplace in the streets of Havana by 1999,
young blacks were routinely stopped by questioning police and asked for
their carnets de identidad (national ID cards). Officers could then radio in the
individual's information to check for previous criminal activity; any dis-
crepancies or prior offenses noted might result in arrest. As I mentioned
earlier, my experience as a brown-skinned man of being frequently stopped
by police in my central Havana neighborhood conditioned my habitual car-
rying of a tattered photocopy of my U.S. passport that, upon presentation,
usually enabled me passage without further consequence. In one particular
experience, however, I found myself inadvertently enabling such policing.
I had joined two friends, Mario's older brother Ernesto and his friend
Luis, for a beer one afternoon in the Plaza de la Catedral, one of the touris-
tic and thus highly policed sections of the historic, commercially rehabbed
Habana Vieja. As we shared a few cans of Cristal amid tourists weaving bus-
ily about restaurants abutting the plaza, we noted a blue-clad police officer
within a few paces of us surveying the activity. As we continued in con-
versation the officer abruptly turned and asked Ernesto and Luis to stand
and present their carnets, the information of which he began conferring
via radio to some disembodied bureaucracy on the other end. Within short
order both men were handcuffed and carted away in a small Russian-made
Lada police car despite my protests and unanswered queries as to the reason
for their arrest. Once informed of their destination, a regional police station
located rather aptly on Avenida Dragones (Dragons Avenue), I followed on
foot and sat outside the building awaiting their release. After it eventually
became clear that neither Ernesto nor Luis was coming out anytime soon, I
returned home discouraged.

Raced Neoliberalism 49


The next morning I called Ernesto and found him home; he and Luis
were evidently released late the night before. Ernesto explained that the of-
ficial rationale given for their detainment was the officer's claim that the
two men were jineteros who had been harassing me, a foreigner. Given his
close proximity the officer was well within earshot of our conversation, one
clearly between friends-albeit apparently differentiated by way of accents
and levels of Cuban Spanish fluency. When I asked Ernesto about how he
made sense of this, he responded almost casually, "Oye, estamos acostum-
brados a esta mierda. Para los negros, esto es normal" (Listen, we are used
to this shit. For blacks, this is normal).
Raced forms of state policing are of course not limited to men. There
are corresponding histories of young black and darker-skinned women in
highly touristic areas being racially marked as jineteras, particularly when
in the company of foreign men. I recall my friend Yanelsi, a dark-skinned
woman in her early thirties, complaining about being repeatedly stopped
by police who suspected her of working a temba, or foreign john, while with
her German husband. African American anthropologist Kaifa Roland has
similarly documented personal experiences of being racially interpellated
as a sex worker by tourist hotel security staff (Roland 2010), while Amalia
Cabezas has analyzed the broader racialized projections of such gendered
criminalization endemic to the island's tourist zones (Cabezas 2009).
Some critics have alternatively argued that the Cuban state has tacitly
encouraged prostitution as a means of generating tourist revenue, while
suggesting that periodic crackdowns have occurred only after drawing
negative international attention to the expanding sex trade.24 Addressing
this tension, Mette Louise Berg asserts the revolutionary state has been
complicit in marketing Cuba as a locale of black female sensuality, while
simultaneously seeking to police darker-skinned women's economic agency
as sex workers (Berg 2004). Such complexities underscore the interstitial
workings of race, gender, and sexuality vis-n-vis a dialectics of criminaliza-
tion and governmental regulation (and tacit packagings) within Cuba's new
monetized nationscape.
In response to the broader systemics of such raced policing, young men
in a couple of poorer, predominantly black barrios in Central Havana began
around 2001 wearing their carnets de identidad dangling from their necks
as a form of symbolic protest. As markers of citizenship as well as foci of ra-
cialized surveillance, these public displays spoke to the mounting tensions

50 CHAPTER ONE


around race and the rights of national belonging for young blacks within
Cuba's new economy. One noted neighborhood where these protestive per-
formances of nationhood took place was Mario's barrio of Jesus Maria.
Abutting the heavily touristed Havana Vieja, Jesus Maria has long been
branded as one of the more infamous of Havana's barrios marginales (socially
marginal neighborhoods), an expression, as mentioned, embedded with
racially inscribed notions of black pathological criminality rooted in narra-
tives of Afro-Cubans as primitive, atavistic outliers of a modern Cuban citi-
zenry.25 Revolutionary efforts to rehabilitate such raced zones of temporal-
national deviancy are given poetic form in the opening montage of the 1977
film De cierta manera (One way or another) by the late Afro-Cuban filmmaker
Sara G6mez.21 In this sequence, black-and-white images of a wrecking ball
demolishing dilapidated urban housing are juxtaposed with those depicting
the construction of modern apartment blocks in allusion to Cuba's trans-
formist socialist march toward forging Ernesto "Che" Guevara's mythic
"new man" of revolutionary lore ([1965] 2007). In the current moment one
might consider Havana Vieja's extensive tourist-related commercial recon-
struction and related residential displacement as a neoliberal variant of such
rehabilitative renewal.
While recent developments may carry historical resonances, forms of
raced regulation and enabling discourses of black criminality have clearly
been elaborated upon and emboldened within Cuba's shifting economy.
Although the revolutionary project may have expanded realms of national
inclusion through a utopic promise of a socially equitable nonracial Cuba,
these commitments have been significantly undermined by the growing
dominance of market competition and its uneven effects along racial and
class lines. With the rise of a new commerce in blackness, however, this
terrain has also proved fertile ground for some black and darker-skinned
Cubans to fashion creative strategies to tap into traffickings of racial
difference.
Such racial entrepreneurialism recalls Robin Kelley's discussion of self-
commodification strategies among African American youth seeking to cap-
italize on today's increasingly global market for black popular culture and
creative expression (Kelley 1997). Kelley suggests markers of blackness in
this sense are commercially leveraged by young African Americans as cul-
tural assets within a postindustrial economy in which they are otherwise
structurally disenfranchised. It is precisely these kinds of globally attuned,

Raced Neoliberalism 51


1.2. Rapero performing at Havana Pena. Photo by the author

market-oriented racializations from below, to borrow from Leith Mullings
(2004), that can be seen in active Cuban motion today.
Enter Hip Hop
Regarding the rise of island hip hop, it is also worthwhile to consider the
productive tensions between racial exclusion and circuits of raced con-
sumption as a space of maneuver for Cuban raperos. As a recent social
phenomenon with a pronounced presence of black and darker-skinned Cu-
bans, hip hop found its grounding amid a fluid moment of national uncer-
tainty in which race has emerged as a particularly fraught site of social dif-
ference. Arguably the most widely disseminated conduit of "black" popular
imagery globally, and one largely conveyed through a masculine persona
of urban marginality, to what extent might hip hop afford in Cuban terms
a language of political critique and identity by way of expansive vocabu-
laries and extranational notions of black affinity? Pushed yet further, in a
landscape where rights and equitable access to resources long mediated
by the state are now increasingly arbitrated by the market, might hip hop

52 CHAPTER ONE


offer enterprisingly "flexible" forms of alterative belonging and/or notions
of citizenship (Ong 1999) for some black and darker-skinned Cuban youth
in the neoliberal era?
In dialogue with the protestive display of national identity cards, one
central and enduring concern voiced by raperos-many of them also young,
darker-skinned, male, and drawn from similar barrios-involved the quo-
tidian realities of raced policing since the late 1990s. From Hermanos de
Causa's composition "Lagrimas negras" to Anonimo Consejo's "Las apari-
encias engafan," Papo Record's "Revolucion," and Los Paisanos' "Mi na-
cion," to name but a few, Cuban MCs have long critiqued the targeting of
darker-skinned youth by Cuban police alongside an ascendant market econ-
omy. Like their carnet-donning peers in Jesus Maria, they too call attention
through public spectacle to the raced limits of Cuban citizenship as they are
currently embodied and lived.
One of the more infamous challenges along these lines involved a per-
formance of MC Papi Humbertico during Cuba's eighth annual hip hop fes-
tival in Havana's outlying municipality of Alamar. That hot August night in
2002, Humbertico walked onstage accompanied by two others carrying a
rolled bed sheet. Before an audience of some three thousand mostly darker-
skinned youth and an assemblage of international press, the bed sheet was
unfurled to expose in large block letters "Denuncia Social" (Social denun-
ciation). Humbertico asked the crowd if they knew the meaning of the
expression before lapsing into a series of songs rapped in a fluid Cuban
cadence over hard-edged hip hop beats. His lyrics recounted the daily lives
and struggles of people in his working-class, predominately black barrio
of Guanabacoa, touching on themes of poverty, crime, imprisonment, and
prostitution. A sea of hands could be seen waving in the air as the crowd
sounded off in spirited agreement whenever the MC hit a particularly salient
chord. As energies peaked, however, Humbertico took aim at Cuban police,
their blue ranks visible alongside the stage. Citing the frequent harassment
of black youth, he riffed:
Oye t6, contigo mismo, contigo que en paz no me dejas un instante, no
te tengo miedo, no me intimida tu vestimenta azul ni el cargo que tengas,
para mi no dejas de ser un ignorante, adelante, estoy a tu disposicion ...
montame en tu jodido camion que yo,
yo no me callar6.

Raced Neoliberalism 53


Hey you over there, you don't leave me in peace for a minute, I have no
fear of you,
your blue uniform doesn't intimidate me, nor the position you hold, for
me you're still
ignorant, go ahead, I'm at your disposal ...
throw me in your fucking truck because I
will not be silenced.
Rounding out his challenge amid a din of catcalls, Humbertico concluded:
Amo mi bandera, aqui naci y aqui me van a enterrar, seguro puedes
estar de que tengo bien claro el concepto de la revolucion cubana.
Estoy con esto, pero no contigo ...
Esto es contigo, loco, esto es contigo: Policia, policia, to no eres mi
amigo, para la juventud cubana eres el peor castigo... to eres el
delincuente!
I love my flag, here I was born and here I will be buried, you can be sure
I have a clear understanding of the Cuban Revolution.
I'm with this, but not with you ...
This is for you, crazy, this is for you: Police, police, you're not my
friend, for Cuba's youth are the worst punishment ... you are the
delinquent!27
Standing among the crowd atop one of the endless rows of concrete benches
ringing the stage below, I turned to my friends Alexey Rodriguez and Lou
"Piensa" Dufleaux-two MCs from Havana and Montreal respectively who
were scheduled to perform in the festival's coming nights-in shared sur-
prise. In the numerous annual festivals we had collectively attended, none
of us had witnessed so blunt a challenge by a Cuban MC, let alone one
launched the opening night of the festival, the premier event of its kind
drawing ample national and international attention. My companions and I
wondered out loud how this all was going to play out. Although Humbertico
was ultimately penalized by Cuban authorities with a temporary ban from
public performance, the proverbial cat so to speak was already out of the
bag. In testifying, "I love my flag / here I was born and here I will be buried
/ you can be sure I have a clear understanding of the Cuban Revolution / I'm
with this, but not with you," Humbertico marks his inherent claim to Cuban

54 CHAPTER ONE


citizenship while underscoring the disjuncture between the ideals of the
revolution he affirms and its lived contradictions.
Might such frictions be part and parcel of the "exceptional" nature of
neoliberal governance Ong's work points us toward? Amid an evolving mar-
ketplace in which blackness itself is imbued with ambivalent kinds of social
capital, might some Cuban raperos be engaged in their own forms of racial
entrepreneurialism? If so, transnational circuits of consumption in this in-
stance may in the end open up rather than restrict plays of racial alterity and,
ultimately, spheres of citizenship. How then might we locate such raced
maneuvers amid the narrative lines of hip hop's Cuban emergence?

Raced Neoliberalism 55



Chapter 2.
Hip Hop Cubano:
An Emergent Site of Black Life
While the early Cuban roots of rap music and hip hop culture can be traced
back to the mid-198os, it was not until the economic crisis of the early
nineties and the island's ensuing market turn that hip hop began to take
shape with apparent urgency as a self-defined movimiento. I suggest that
Cuban hip hop in this sense has emerged as an organic phenomenon of a
particularly acute moment of social disjuncture and transformation, one
shaped at a shifting confluence of national and transnational fields of his-
tory and power. Popular narratives of hip hop's Cuban birth for their part
have become something of urban lore through their telling and retelling by
the initiated. Ever-growing numbers of foreign journalists, filmmakers, and
academics descending on Havana in recent years have in turn contributed
their own renderings to these narratives. Here I do not wish to replicate pre-
existing accounts, but rather seek to foreground the instrumental role that
race has played in hip hop's ascendance in Cuba-a role whose complexities
have often been downplayed or obscured by chroniclers. While my work is
clearly in dialogue with existing scholarship, my intervention is directed in
the end at providing an ethnographically grounded and critically histori-
cized analysis of Cuban hip hop as a multivalent site of racial practice.
Hip hop's Cuban biography inevitably begins in Alamar, a coastal munic-
ipality nine miles east of Havana popularly noted as the birthplace of island
hip hop. The suburb's sprawling collection of over two thousand multi-


storied apartment blocks were built in the 1970s and early 198os with the
help of Soviet architects. Though many were constructed through the work
of microbrigadas-volunteer civilian work crews organized to build housing
with state-supplied materials-the cubical form and gridlike orientation
of Alamar's semiurban layout reflects a utilitarian functionalism of Soviet-
era design. Originally raised to accommodate young couples from Havana's
overpopulated center as well as an influx of rural workers from the outlying
provinces, the municipality is now home to roughly one hundred thousand
residents. While some commentators have noted a black or Afro-Cuban
majority in Alamar (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo 2000; Sokol 2000), my
experience suggests that although black and browner-skinned families are
a marked component, the municipality's working-class population is gen-
erally more multiracial in character.
Racial demographics aside for the moment, a key factor in Alamar's cen-
tral figuring within Cuban hip hop is simply one of geography. A principal
route of rap music's entry into Cuba in the mid-198os was by way of South
Florida radio stations whose FM signal on good days could be accessed by
makeshift antennas fashioned from apartment windows or on rooftops in
and around Havana. With its high-rise buildings and northern coastal loca-
tion, Alamar was ideally positioned for such reception. And so it was there,
the narrative continues, that a cultural space eventually identified with hip
hop first took root. Building on this lore, a number of U.S. accounts have lik-
ened Alamar to a massive Cuban "housing project" (Robinson 2002; Sokol
2000), analogous in this sense to the South Bronx's urban topographies of
public housing that first gave rise to hip hop in the post-industrial 1970s.
Pushing the analogy further, Alamar aligns nicely with Paris's banlieues and
Sao Paulo's periferias as comparable, often racialized zones of urban margin-
ality and corresponding global hubs of hip hop culture (McCarren 2013; Par-
due 2008). While such parallels carry a certain cachet in Cuba and beyond,
it is in fact difficult to pinpoint precisely where and when hip hop actually
emerged in the Havana area. It is, however, unquestionable that Alamar and
the broader region of Habana del Este (Eastern Havana) played a formative
role in hip hop's early Cuban ascendance.
Cubans in close proximity to the North American mainland have indeed
long accessed U.S. radio broadcasts by informal means for many decades.
Now in his fifties, my friend Tonel tells of his early experience in his seaside
Havana barrio of Playa listening to North American Top 40 on AM radio

58 CHAPTER TWO


in the 1970s from as far away as Arkansas.1 U.S. rock music, for example,
has had a significant following in Cuba since the 1950s despite state an-
tagonisms, including broadcast bans of English-language rock in the early
1960s for its alleged corruptive influence (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo
2004). Spheres of U.S. popular culture have in fact long been an import-
ant, if at times discordant, resource in the making of Cuban popular culture
and broader national imaginary. One need only consider Cuba's celebrated
national sport of baseball-or pelota (ball) as it is lovingly called-which
was introduced to the island as early as the 186os. Underscoring these link-
ages, historian Louis Perez (1999) suggests that the omnipresence of North
American culture since the mid-nineteenth century has tied Cuban notions
of national identity and modernity inextricably to those of the United States.
Emergent Blackness
Hip hop's Cuban entree, however, not only was inspired by the proximity
of the island's neighbor to the north, the genre's extranational dimensions
were for many also embedded with racial meaning. Cuban youth drawn to
rap music have and continue to be largely darker-skinned, urban, and rel-
atively more marginal-a set of demographics, I suggest, that is neither
coincidental nor inconsequential. As I have argued elsewhere, the participa-
tion of racially marked subaltern youth in hip hop communities across the
globe frequently involves dimensions of racial difference (M. Perry 2008b).
In many of these settings a semiotics of black marginality is often reworked
in ways that provide cogent expression to local experience and sites of strug-
gle. Such practices assume particular salience within the Afro-Atlantic, where
African-descendant youth in an array of locales have used hip hop to fashion
notions of black-self in ways that are frequently both contestive and trans-
cendent of nationally bound racial framings (cf. Anderson 2009). In the case
of black and brown Cuban youth of the late 198os and early 1990s, I suggest,
engagements with U.S. rap music and broader hip hop aesthetics signified
for many a nascent form of racial politics-one involving levels of racial
identification and self-meaning making.
Ariel Fernandez Diaz's prodigious work as a Havana-based journalist, DJ,
hip hop radio host, and music promoter long positioned him as something
of an organic intellectual within the island's hip hop movement. His recol-
lections of hip hop's early Cuban rise, in turn, offer insight into the evolving

Hip Hop Cubano 59


history of the phenomenon. As evidenced by the prolific range of articles
he has authored on Cuban hip hop, Ariel has substantial resources to draw
upon in his accounting (cf. Fernandez Diaz 2000) .2 And yet in a more imme-
diate sense, Ariel's own personal narrative provides a poignant entry into
the social complexities of the broader movement as a whole while providing
a window into its raced nuances.
Born and raised in the outlying Havana barrio of Lawton, Ariel grew into
adolescence and young adulthood as Cuba was undergoing transformative
shifts in the early 1990s. With his light brownish skin and short-cropped
hair more straight than curly, he would likely be broadly read as mestizo or
possibly jabao within Cuba's graduated racial classification system. Politi-
cally speaking, however, Ariel evokes his blackness as a primary source of
self-identity. As he explained to me during a conversation in 2002: "I con-
sider myself black, sometimes I'm clearly more black, I don't know, it's a
bit complicated. Everyone on my mother's side is black, and those on my
father's side are white. So my black family came from Africa, and my white
family came from the Canary Islands of Spain. So I think I have both cul-
tures, both races. I'm a mix, no? But I feel more black than white. I think it's
something positive."3
While such black self-understandings may appear to suggest a level of
ambivalence, Ariel's evolving and deeply invested sense of black identity
has found important mediation through, among other things, his ongo-
ing engagements with hip hop. Similar things can be said of a number of
black-identified raperos I have known over the years who would otherwise
be classified as mulato, moreno, trigueno, or any additional host of terms com-
monplace in Cuba for degrees ofnonwhiteness. Many cite their involvement
in hip hop as influential in shaping black self-affirmations of racial identity.
Elaborating along these lines, Randy Acosta of the Havana-based duo
Los Paisanos explained during an exchange: "Me? I'm black. Well, here in
Cuba I'm jabao. This is what they tell me here in Cuba, jabao: this light
brown hair and eyes more or less all the same color, and with light brown
skin."4 When I asked how long he had identified as negro, Randy replied:
"Not very long. It has been a short time, since I began to take the hip hop
movement seriously. Hip hop is a thing that frees the mentality, it's free-
dom. Many people don't understand this, but for us, it's freedom. We have
changed our way of thinking and we have completely opened our thinking.
I don't know, it's a powerful weapon. Hip hop is a force, it's life, it's a way of

60 CHAPTER TWO


life." Randy's comments suggest a shifting sense of racial identity in which
hip hop is viewed as instrumental at both political and ontological levels
of play. Expanding on this theme, Randy and his artistic partner Jessel "El
Huevo" Saladriga would later pen the song "Lo Negro" (The black) address-
ing racialized stigmas that in their view inhibit black self-affirmation among
Cubans of African descent.5
In Ariel's case, his impassioned dedication to hip hop as, in Randy's
terms, a distinctive "way of life" and focal point of self-identification seemed
at times to border on the devotional. Such commitment is exemplified in
Ariel's efforts as a self-taught journalist to be the first to publish extensively
on Cuban hip hop in the state-run press, his hosting of Havana's first hip
hop radio program, La Esquina de Rap, his rise as a DJ, and his eventual po-
sition as a coordinator of state-sponsored hip hop projects and directing
editor of the government-financed hip hop magazine, Movimiento.
When we first met in 2000 in the lobby of a Havana hotel where a delega-
tion of U.S. hip hop artists and activists affiliated with the New York-based
Black August collective were staying, Ariel was dressed in white from head
to toe, marking his year-long status as an iyawo, or religious initiate into
Ocha-Lucumi. Through our conversations over the years it became clear
that Ariel's involvement in the Afro-Cuban religion was as vital a compo-
nent of his everyday life and sense of self-direction as was hip hop. Rather
than competing ontologies, these differentially raced spaces-one sacred,
nationally figured yet deeply resonant with lineages of Africanity, the other
cosmopolitanly modern and transnationally expansive-have been mutu-
ally constitutive parts of how Ariel views and defines himself as an Afro-
Cuban man.
Indeed, like a number of other hip-hop-affiliated Cubans I have known,
Ariel simultaneously occupies and moves between public and more private,
often sacred spheres of black meaning and communal belonging. Such
black multivocality finds poetic form in Ariel's professional nom de guerre.
Having considered the stage name DJ Afro until he realized the alias had
been claimed by a member of the Venezuelan fusion band Los Amigos In-
visibles, Ariel eventually settled on what he considered as a more organic
and personally meaningful moniker, DJ Asho. The term asho refers to one of
the central caminos or sacred paths of the orisha Obatali, his personal santo.6
Drawing parallels between Ocha-Lucumi and hip hop as coeval black cul-
tural spheres, Ariel described DJ Asho as a syncretic way of marking his si-

Hip Hop Cubano 61


multaneous belonging-characterized as "en mi sangre" (in my blood)-to
both communities.
Further illustrating an overlapping fluidity of sacred and secular, Ariel
spoke of receiving spiritual consejo, or advice, through the sacred Ifi divination
tradition, suggesting his personal path was linked to his need to remain on the
island to advance hip hop as a productive force in Cuban society.7 Such under-
standings appeared to have emboldened Ariel against a range of obstacles he
seemed to often confront in his personal and professional life. He explained
at the time that his convictions-at one time both political and spiritual-
precluded the idea of immigrating to the United States. This option had
become all the more tangible given Ariel's recent participation in a month-
long tour of New York City in 2001 as part of a delegation of Cuban raperos,
during which time one visiting MC chose clandestinely to remain in the
United States. The draw would indeed have been appealing: while there the
delegation connected with various facets of New York's hip hop community
including foundational figures like DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and
members of the pioneering Nuyorican breakdance troupe the Rock Steady
Crew. Recalling these encounters, Ariel spoke of them at the time as fulfilling
"a grand dream" of his life. That Ariel lived and breathed hip hop as a "way of
life" was unquestionable. This focus, in turn, helped shape his sense of black
self while informing his commitments both in Cuba and eventually beyond.
Reflecting upon hip hop's ascendance on the island one afternoon, Ariel
spoke to me of a movimiento de soul (soul movement) in 1970s and 198os Ha-
vana that preceded rap music's appearance on the island. He recalled the
popularity of James Brown's music among its adherents, as well as a group
called Los Estivis (the Stevies), who gathered for a period every weekend to
celebrate the music of Stevie Wonder. "Los Estivis were completely black,"
Ariel explained, adding, "I mean it was really a racial space of people who
followed Stevie Wonder, James Brown, and the soul music. Los Estivis was
essentially a space of blacks." With few circulating LPs coupled with a dearth
of functioning turntables, the primary means of accessing this music was
through audiocassettes of U.S. radio broadcasts either recorded in Havana
or sent by Cuban family in the States. Such informal circulations enabled
alternative soundscapes outside official channels of state-run media in
ways that recall Peter Manuel's discussion of the impacts of audiocassettes
on popular culture and identity in Northern India during a similar period
(Manuel 1993).

62 CHAPTER TWO


Along related lines Ariel and others recall glimpses of U.S. Soul Train
episodes that could be tapped into under ideal weather conditions using
improvised TV antennas or viewed on VHS tapes introduced by Cubans
living or traveling abroad. As Ariel recounts:
People recorded the program on these cassettes and would learn how to
dance from them. Soul Train, you know, is a dance program, and so people
learned how to dance from the show as they exchanged cassettes. What
helped out this movement a lot were athletes who traveled [abroad]. Al-
most all athletes-track and field, volleyball, baseball-are blacks, no?
They liked this way, the style, the clothing, the large pants. They would
buy nice radios to play in the streets, boom boxes, these kinds of things.
So these people traveled and would buy records, LPs, which folks then
copied onto cassettes.
Ariel's comments raise a number of salient points, including a central
one that concerns the role of international travel in exposing Cubans-in
this instance athletes-to African American music styles and related forms
of black popular fashion from the United States. At the same time he sug-
gests a certain racial dimension at play regarding music reception, circula-
tion, and its redeployment.
Reflecting upon the immediacies of that period, Alexis "D'Boys" Rodri-
guez, an influential Havana-based Afro-Cuban DJ and producer of hip hop
events, also foregrounds questions of travel regarding his early encounters
with what he refers to as "la musica Afro-americana" (black American mu-
sic). As he explained to me: "My father was a sailor, a [Cuban] merchant
marine. And he traveled a lot spending time in Canada and the United
States where he heard a lot of black American music, like funk and all that
stuff-he also danced a lot. I'm in this sense like a mirror of my parents. I
always liked this music because it was the music I always heard. For all my
life, since I was born, I remember listening to funk music, it was simply part
of my culture."8
Beyond simply questions of exposure, Alexis's account underscores ac-
tive identification and embodied rearticulation of African American pop-
ular music and dance by Afro-Cubans in globally conscious ways. Such
practices recall the ways Afro-descendant youth in other contexts have
similarly adopted African American music idioms and forms of popular
fashion to mark their belonging to a cosmopolitan blackness in ways that

Hip Hop Cubano 63


often complicate dominant national prescriptions (Anderson 2009; Dia-
wara 1998; Hanchard 1999; Sansone 2003; Thomas 2004; Wade 2002). In
this case, participation within a contemporary black globality-this mnsica
Afro-americana-offered an alternative lens to imagine and possibly embody
Afro-Cuban blackness in ways that ultimately supersede the spatial and tem-
poral bounds of Cuba's official nationscape.
While informal access to and trafficking of U.S. media may have oc-
curred, Ariel suggests such avenues were not necessarily sanctioned by the
Cuban state. Regarding U.S. radio broadcasts of rap and R&B music during
this period, Ariel recalls: "I don't know if it happened accidentally or in-
tentionally, but there started to be broadcasts of Cuban radio at the same
frequency as broadcasts from the United States. I don't know if it was ac-
cidental, you know, but it was very funky because they put a radio station
on the same frequency as [Miami's] 99 Jamz. They put a Cuban station with
such force, you know, it was impossible to get 99 Jamz."
Revolutionary Cuba indeed has a history of disrupting U.S. radio trans-
missions-the most notable involved blocking the U.S.-funded, Cuban-
exile-run Radio Marti out of Miami. These jamming efforts underscore the
ways radio has long been a site of ideological struggle in Cuba, including
histories of state censorship of local music programming as well (Freder-
ick 1986; Hernandez-Reguant 2006). In the case of North American music,
these strategies were less about blocking potentially disruptive effects of
overly political forms of U.S. propaganda than about guarding against "cor-
ruptive" foreign intrusions into the Cuban revolutionary body. As with the
banning of U.S. rock music in the early 1960s, the appeal of North American
popular music among Cuban youth was one that the state apparently wished
to ward off. Considering Ariel's and Alexis's recollections and understand-
ings of the moment, it appears that the circulation of U.S. black popular mu-
sic among Afro-Cuban youth actively continued despite such state efforts.
Another individual whose memories of this period offer insight along
these lines is Pablo Herrera, a pioneering Afro-Cuban hip hop producer
whose work within Havana's hip hop community has been equally pro-
digious. Reflecting on his early experiences with North American music,
Pablo explained:
I listened throughout high school to a lot of [U.S.] FM music. I listened
to everything they used to play on the Top 40, and I used to write down

64 CHAPTER TWO


the Billboard listings. A lot of the mainstream music from the eighties,
though, was mostly white music. The minute I found black music I forgot
about all the rest of it. I was like, 'I'm not fucking with that shit, this just
does not speak to me. This other music speaks to me.' This is what I'm
saying, I wanted to gain a cultural connection that may have to do with
being African, Africans in the diaspora, and our discourses musically and
culturally are what draws us to each other. It made it feel like wow, I dig
your shit forever, I love this shit!9
Pablo's comments speak vividly to the ethnomusicologist Steven Feld's
notion of music listening as a participatory act, one that Feld suggests "brings
out a special kind of'feelingful' activity and engagement on the part of the
listener" in the making of social meaning (Feld 1984: 13). Pablo's involve-
ment with North American music in this sense was both active and delib-
erate, assuming his own affective structures of feeling (R. Williams 1977)
involving levels of racial identification and resignification. Such sensibil-
ities, moreover, evoke Josh Kun's discussion of the African American jazz
virtuoso Rahsaan Roland Kirk's iconoclastic celebration of "blacknuss" as
a "musical language that exploits and articulates the aurality of race" (Kun
2005: 133). While Roland Kirk's blacknuss may have been imbued with a
certain aesthetic depth of black historical life, in Pablo's reading such affects
are rendered racially audible in a diasporic sense. Recalling Michael Han-
chard's (1998) discussion of Brazil's Black Soul movement of the 1970s that
similarly drew on currents of African American popular music in framing
cosmopolitan notions of blackness, the interplay between consuming and
redeploying racial self-meaning has the potential to shape local identities
while laying ground for racially conversant forms of social practice as well.
Indeed, a shift from active listening to artistic crafting occurred as Cuban
interest in hip hop spread from the radio waves to la calle by the mid-198os.
During this period a cultural space began to take shape as increasing num-
bers of youth, almost exclusively darker-skinned and largely male, began
gathering in both private and public settings. Informal parties called los
bonches began springing up in homes, parks, and on street corners where
young people gathered to listen, dance, and otherwise participate in the
collective making of la mona-a term coined to refer to U.S. rap and R&B
music and the social space that evolved around the following. Musicologists
Deborah Pacini Hernandez and Reebee Garofalo (2000) provide insightful

Hip Hop Cubano 65


documentation of the early contours of la mona as a cultural precursor to
the rise of hip hop on the island. Where my account diverges, however, con-
cerns questions of racial identification and their transnational dimensions.
Recalling los bonches, local lore tells of a park in Ariel's home barrio of
Lawton, known as Parque de los Policias due to its proximity to the local
police station, where in the early to mid-198os informal la mona parties
were held on weekends. In Ariel's recounting, moneros would gather around
makeshift DJ tables, "a piece ofwood placed over boxes," with rudimentary
amplifiers and speakers to party to U.S. rap, R&B, and "funky soul." During
our conversation I told Ariel his description sounded remarkably reminis-
cent of the local street jams of the mid-1970s I had attended as a child on
the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Aware of Ariel's sensibility as an astute
student of U.S. hip hop, I wondered if his description might have been in-
formed by an awareness of hip hop's lore-laden origins and, if so, whether
it might be an effort to position himself and Cuba more broadly within hip
hop's now globally disseminated lineage.
Ariel's personal details notwithstanding, I have heard from others of
Parque de los Policias' famed reputation for los bonches de calle, a central
component of which was a local form of breakdancing. Popular accounts of
this period describe informal competitions known as los retos de breakdance
in which dancers challenged one another to the play of la mona music. DJ
Alexis D'Boys, one of those early street dancers, explained that, given the
scarcity of cassette players, dancers often resorted to the use of improvised
chants as background beats upon whose rhythmic tempo moieros danced.
One of the more legendary of these chants etched in collective lore is "la caja,
he, he, la caja," referencing a percussive play upon boxes (cajas) to mimic the
cadence of hip hop beats.
In contrast to suggestions that this participatory space of music and dance
had a largely multiracial character (Baker 2011: 268), DJ Alexis recalls Parque
de los Policias as a primarily black space:
El Parque de los Policias was a completely black movement, one that
started in a barrio where the population was go percent black. This bar-
rio Lawton was one of the marginal barrios. Before the triumph of the
revolution it was a barrio of the upper class, and many blacks worked in
houses of the rich; this was a wealthy zone. But when the owners of these
houses fled to the U.S. after the triumph, the domestic workers moved

66 CHAPTER TWO


into these houses and this became a marginal barrio. This park, Parque
de los Policias, where you had b-boys, they were all black. You might find
a white [blanquito], but it was fundamentally black.10
Pablo Herrera's reflections of the moment echo similar lines: "Commu-
nal cultural efforts like la mofa and el bonche exist in Cuba sort of like
secret societies just to take the music. These were completely black spaces,
full-on black. This was nothing but black. So what I'm saying here is that if
there existed any previous understanding of, or any prelude to, hip hop in
Cuba, it comes from el bonche."
Offering possible nuance to the point, Ariel adds in reference to Parque
de los Policias and the broader space oflos bonches:
I always say that the prominent color and the strongest presence of people
were black and mestizos, you know what I mean, so there may have been
some white people, yes, but that wouldn't make it interracial, because
the commentary is really coming from the black folks. The leadership is
coming from black folks, and the main figures, the major dancers, the
people who made a reputation and were most famous at the time were
basically blacks. Like the big names, the biggest breakdancers-they
were black-so I would say the leadership of those spaces came from
blacks and people of color, you understand me?"
Beyond simple demographics, realms of racial identification were appar-
ently also active within these emerging spaces. Among early bonche mem-
bers, Ariel suggests:
There was a language of acceptance that was definitely tied to where we
knew we came from-we share a local experience and we share a story.
And this was conscious but not exactly spoken about, you know what I
mean? But we knew the connection we had between each other locally
here in Cuba was also a connection we had with black music in America,
because we're black and we feel connected with those black folks. We
never felt like we were distant from those black people. And we accepted
and embraced this music because we feel we are part of it, and that we
can be accepted there. It is something we could assimilate easily, you
know what I mean? It's something we can connect with easily, something
that we feel beyond words, you know what I mean?12

Hip Hop Cubano 67


While the crowds and attendant identifications may indeed have engaged
vocabularies of blackness, los retos de breakdance were primarily male-
centered celebrations of music, body, and movement, the masculine char-
acter of which is reflected in DJ Alexis's alias, "D'Boys" (pronounced "da-
boyz"). As Alexis elaborates: "When I started, the first element of hip hop
culture I became involved in was as a b-boy,13 which is why I go by 'D'Boys'
after the guys who I started dancing with. We became friends and formed
a group of b-boys and worked on our choreography, and people wound up
naming us 'da-boyz.' I got my name because I was the most active in the
group, and I was crazy for those battles."
Evocative of Alexis's personal account, early moneros fashioned a largely
homosocial space of male performativity reminiscent of New York City's
early b-boy culture of the 1970s and 1980s. The competitive masculinist pos-
turing central to these b-boy battles grew in part out of urban gang culture
from which some young black and Puerto Rican men, who comprised much
of the pioneering ranks of New York's breaking crews, drew (Chang 2005;
Rivera 2003). While histories of structural violence and racialized class mar-
ginalization particular to postindustrial urban America were not inherent to
revolutionary Cuba, there nonetheless seemed to be a gendered dimension
of cultural translation and embodied identification among moneros who
first took up hip hop music and dance. Indeed, such masculine groundings,
as will be explored, continued to be a central (though not necessarily defini-
tive) social contour of Cuba's evolving hip hop phenomenon.
Transnational Complications
Dance and body-centered musicality have of course been enduring fac-
ets of Afro-Cuban cultural life in realms of both the secular and sacred.
Yvonne Daniel's allusion to rumba as a holistic "complex" of "combined
music/dance activity" (Daniel 1995) speaks in this sense more expansively
to fields of Afro-Cuban expressive practice writ large. Traditions of Afro-
Cuban music making have at the same time long engaged Afro-Atlantic
routes of cultural dialogue and interchange in many politically resonant
moments and ways. Echoing drumming patterns introduced by relocated
Saint-Dominguean slaves following the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution,
Eastern Cuba's tumbafrancesa owes an important part of its history to semi-
independent cabildos14 and the more transgressive palenques (maroon com-

68 CHAPTER TWO


munities) of the former enslaved who formed autonomous communities
of black radical freedom. Some more recent histories of the black dialogic
kind are recalled through the work of Leonardo Acosta and Ned Sublette
regarding cross-fertilizations between Cuban popular music and U.S. jazz
via trans-Caribbean currents of exchange between Cuba, Haiti, and New
Orleans (Acosta 2003; Sublette 2007). An important chapter here, Acosta
suggests, occurred during the first U.S. occupation of Cuba (1898-1902)
when African American battalions introduced local Cubans to early jazz,
elaborating upon conversations initiated in the late nineteenth century by
Cuban migrants to New Orleans-among them musicians who contributed
creative form to Jelly Roll Morton's celebrated ode to early jazz's "Spanish
tinge."
Closer historically, a long lineage of Afro-Cuban musicians, from Frank
"Machito" Grillo, Mario Bauza, Luciano "Chano" Pozo, and Arsenio Rodri-
guez to later artists like Mongo Santamaria and Chucho Valdes, were instru-
mental in the development of Afro-Latin jazz forms through artistic repar-
tee with African American musicians. Here, vocabularies of racial affinity
were undoubtedly active in the creative mix (see J. Moreno 2004). Indeed,
Dizzy Gillespie's oft-cited reference to Chano Pozo's claim that their collab-
orations worked from a shared sense that "we both speak African" (Gillespie
1979: 318) suggests a racial transcendence of nation via diasporically envi-
sioned notions of black musicality." The life narratives of bandleaders Ma-
rio Bauzi and Arsenio Rodriguez, moreover, speak to the ways jazz cosmo-
politanisms enabled artistic mediations of black-self in the space between
Cuban and U.S. racial landscapes." Similar translational dimensions can be
seen in the work of the mulato poet Nicolas Guillen, whose literary medita-
tions on afrocubanidad arose in conversation with fellow poesia negra writers
like Puerto Rico's Luis Pales Matos and the Dominican Republic's Manuel
del Cabral, as well as decades of correspondence with the African American
poet Langston Hughes (Ellis 1998; Kaup 2000).
What marks more recent lines of diasporic interchange is that their
routes of dialogue are more often than not electronically mediated. Recall-
ing Ariel's reference to the ways young people drew upon Soul Train videos
in emulating popular styles of African American dance, DJ Alexis speaks
with wisps of nostalgia of a video of the classic U.S. breakdancing film Beat
Street (1984) acquired by his father as his first exposure to b-boying: "From
his travels to Canada he brought me a video of the film Beat Street along with

Hip Hop Cubano 69


music. From this I first learned how to dance. I lent this video out to many
people, who recorded it and copied the music and used it to learn how to
dance. And this is how we first learned how to breakdance and about the
hip hop culture."17
With its colorful portrayal of the South Bronx's early hip hop scene awash
with the bravado of breakdance battles, the majority of the b-boys portrayed
in Beat Street are Nuyorican, reflecting, in turn, the instrumental role of
Puerto Ricans in the development of breakdance as an urban art form. As
Raquel Rivera has argued, Puerto Rican participation in the early shaping
of New York City's hip hop culture involved mediations of blackness and
latinidad via creative exchange with African Americans grounded in shared
Afro-descendancy and local histories of racial subjugation (Rivera 2003).
Such diasporic complexities and their raced understandings were not
lost on Alexis, an impassioned student of hip hop. Situating breakdance
within narratives of Afro-Atlantic cultural synthesis and resistance, Alexis
explained to me:
Look, the research that I have done on hip hop is that its culture comes
from Africa, its roots are African. For example, black Africans [los negros
Africanos] who practiced capoeira used a move, a dance that was at the
same time a form of defense against whites coming to exploit them.18
By coming to Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica they transformed
it into a dance, though one used for defense. But at the same time the
dance evolved and became breakdance. In terms of its evolution and ar-
rival in the United States, many Africans of course were also brought to
the United States, but it was Puerto Rican immigrants there in the States
who developed this dance and evolved it into breakdancing.
Alexis then added: "Take DJ'ing, for example, it comes from Jamaica.
DJ Kool Herc came to the United States from Jamaica and established DJ
culture and MC'ing as well. And graffiti, some of the first graffiti artists
were Puerto Rican, you understand. This is why I say hip hop is of Afro-
Caribbean (afrocaribe5o) origin, this is the study I have done. Coming from
Africa and the Caribbean and then to the United States it became a big
movement, a community of hip hop."
Evoking notions of Afro-Caribbean cultural ownership, Alexis's ac-
count imbues hip hop with a certain black authenticity while simultane-
ously grounding Cuba within its embryonic arc. In the case of breakdance,

70 CHAPTER TWO


2.1. MC Alexis "el Pel6n" Cantero of Hermanos de Causa. Photo by the author
Puerto Ricans' Afrodiasporicity offers a creative vehicle through which Afro-
Brazilian capoeira-as syncretic bridge between Africa and the diaspora-
is transformed into modern breakdancing. In Alexis's formulation, hip
hop emerges as a kind of black "changing same," to borrow from Paul Gil-
roy's elaboration upon Amiri Baraka (Gilroy 1993: cf. Baraka 1966), through
which an expression of African historical roots and transnational routes of
cultural synthesis mark an evolving black historicity that implicates Cuba's
participation and membership along with Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Jamaica.
Alexis's and other moneros' early involvements with hip hop music and
dance thus demonstrated an active embodiment of such diasporic intimacy.
Alexis's fluency in hip hop's coming-of-age narrative helps lay further claim
to his own membership within this lineage. Like their black and Latino
peers in New York City, moneros similarly appropriated public space in the
making of la moia as a racially marked site of cultural (self-)production.
And if we consider anecdotal accounts of frequent police breakups of los
bonches (Hoch 1999), these emergent spaces were not in turn necessarily
well received by the Cuban state.

Hip Hop Cubano 71


Frictions of Street and State

Official efforts to regulate public space and the airwaves notwithstanding,
it would be inaccurate to portray the Cuban government's position regard-
ing la mona's rise as strictly oppositional. State institutions, in fact, appear
to have played a role in introducing Cuban youth to U.S. popular music
through various public channels.19 One such early source was 1980s televi-
sion programming dedicated to popular music from Cuba and abroad. Both
Alexis and Ariel, for instance, recall seeing Herbie Hancock's futurist 1983
"Rockit" video on Cuban television. As Alexis describes it, the video with its
hip-hop-inspired scratching techniques and young, track-suit-adorned men
b-boying was his first awakening to breakdancing.
Of yet possible greater impact on la mona's early growth was the estab-
lishment of state-sponsored parties and spaces in the early 1990s where
youth, primarily black and darker-skinned, gathered to listen and dance to
African American popular music. Premier among these was La Piragua-an
open-air performance space on the seafront Malecon adjacent to the sto-
ried Hotel Nacional, where weekend la mofa parties were organized during
summer school breaks (Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo 2000).20 Along with
other open-air music gatherings in Havana, La Piragua was organized by
the Union de Jovenes Comunistas (uJc, or Union of Young Communists),
which, as the youth wing of the Cuban Communist Party, is charged with
promoting socialist ideals and political participation among Cuban youth.
In addition to these larger state-sponsored events, smaller bonches
would continue to be organized informally in private homes and public
sites like parks. While these developments marked the growth of a cultural
movement in the making, they also underscore the beginning of the Cuban
government's various efforts to engage, if not institutionally incorporate,
this emergent racially implicated space of youth activity. Indeed, this play
between street and state remains an enduring and ever defining tension
within the evolving narrative of Cuban hip hop.
One likely rationale for these state-sponsored parties was to channel
young peoples' energies during the long summer vacation months. Such
interests would appear to take on added urgency considering that these
spaces were organized in the early 1990s at the onset of the economic crisis
of the Special Period, a time when scarcities of food, electricity, and medi-
cine and the collapse of socialist rewards pushed Cuban society toward des-

72 CHAPTER TWO


perate ends. This is not to suggest a reductive reading of state intentions,
but rather to emphasize the multivalence of possible interests that played
into institutional actions during this period. It would make sense that the
socialist state would want to offer outlets for Havana youth during the hot
and extended summer break from state-run schools. Yet such priorities
could also dovetail with interests in maintaining effective levels of govern-
mental control amid a time of particular societal stress.
One only needs to recall the summer huelgas (riots) of 1994 when hundreds
of Central Havana residents-large numbers of whom were young, black,
and male-took angrily to the streets, targeting storefront windows display-
ing dollar merchandise only foreign tourists and a few well-positioned Cu-
bans at the time could afford. In addition to Fidel Castro famously joining the
fray to calm the protesters, the state dispatched young members of the Blas
Roca worker brigade as a bulwark to help quell the unrest. The brigade's de-
ployment against largely darker-skinned rioters carried a certain irony given
that the group was named in honor of Blas Roca Calderio, a venerated black
Communist Party committee member. Cuba's leadership in fact was report-
edly acutely aware of the racial undercurrents and potential menace of the
moment (de la Fuente and Glasco 1997)
Triggered by the hijacking of a Havana ferry in an effort to flee the is-
land,21 this previously unimaginable expression of post-1959 unrest was a
critical link in a chain of events that coalesced in that summer's balseros cri-
sis. In response to the huelgas and in an effort to alleviate mounting social
pressures of the Special Period, the Cuban leadership allowed some thirty
thousand Cubans, many of them poor and darker-complected, to take flight
on makeshift rafts (balsas) heading north to the U.S. mainland. For roughly a
month, a carnivalesque environment ensued in greater Havana as individu-
als, groups, and families scrambled for materials and resources to construct
improvised rafts out of inner tubes and scrap wood.22 The exodus repre-
sented the first time since the 1980 Mariel boatlift that Cubans were granted
temporary liberty to leave the island en masse, an episode that also involved
significant participation of darker and poor Cubans. Occurring one year fol-
lowing the legalization of the U.S. dollar, the summer of 1994 represented
a critical point of crisis and reckoning for the Cuban state, the revolution,
and Cubans as a whole.
It was amid the uncertainties of this period that an aspiring DJ, Adalberto
Jimenez, acquired a small space in Central Havana at the busy intersection

Hip Hop Cubano 73


of Avenues Infanta and Carlos Tercero, dubbed el local, where he began orga-
nizing weekend la mona parties (Fernandez Diaz 2000). Similar gatherings
centered around the music of Adalberto and other early DJs intermittently
proliferated through the mid-199os in a number of state-run Casas de la Cul-
tura (neighborhood cultural centers) in Central Havana.23 Falling under the
auspices of Cuba's Ministry of Culture, the introduction of la mona parties
within local Casas de la Cultura indicated a level of institutional state sup-
port. Beyond these sanctioned spaces, other la mona parties are reported to
have been frequently broken up by police given their association with foreign
cultural influence and alleged antisocial (i.e., deviant) behavior (Olavarria
2002; Sokol 2000)-experiences echoed in DJ Alexis's personal accounts of
the period. Taken in tandem, all would seem to suggest an ambivalence on
the part of the Cuban state regarding its dealings with an emerging U.S.-
inspired youth culture, at one time seeking to regulate through official ave-
nues while policing extra-institutional expressions.
As Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo (2000, 2004) suggest, such state anxi-
eties appear to have hinged on long-standing claims of diversionismo ideol6gico
(ideological diversionism) from revolutionary precepts, a charge previously
leveled against Cuba's rock movement. Formulated in the early 1970s amid
debates concerning the ideological role of culture in forging revolutionary
ideals and citizenry (cf. Hart Divalos 1990), diversionismo ideologico spoke
of the need to create a bulwark against counterrevolutionary tendencies (or
manipulations) of Western capitalist culture-particularly those emanat-
ing from the United States-that could potentially undermine the socialist
project (cf. R. Castro 1974). In line with post-'59 conflations of revolution
and nationhood, capitalist-infused cultural forms deemed "foreign" to the
Cuban Revolution were therefore not only antithetical to socialism but in-
congruous with an otherwise autochthonous Cuban cultural patrimony.
Such forms were therefore "ideologically diversionary" from the socialist
path as well as officially sanctioned narratives of cubanidad.
While hip hop may have been implicated in such early scriptings, its po-
litically infused associations with blackness-both off and increasingly on
the island-posed additional complications to the ideological saliency of a
racially transculturated Cuba and subsequent revolutionary investments in
a postracial nationalism. The labeling of largely black la mona gatherings
as sites of antisocial(ist) potential, moreover, resonates once again with the
enduring coupling of black Cubans with pathologized deviance that render

74 CHAPTER TWO


Afro-Cubans ever discordant with the transformist project of revolutionary
socialism. Indeed, hip hop's racially disruptive tendencies and state efforts
to regulate (if not mitigate and contain) them became a central site of fric-
tion between this emerging cultural phenomenon and a wary Cuban state.
Evolving Spaces
State cautions being what they were, the establishment of el local and subse-
quent gatherings in neighborhood Casas de la Cultura marked a new phase
in the development of la mofa as an evolving cultural space, one that co-
incided with an active shift in focus from moferos to raperos. While small
numbers of youth in the Havana area may have started experimenting with
rapping by the late eighties, it was not until 1995 that a more formal conver-
gence ofwhat would become Cuban hip hop began to come into focus. That
year Rodolfo Rensoli, a late-twenty-something university-educated cultural
worker and poet, along with Balesy Rivero founded a small arts collective
known as Grupo Uno through which they began organizing local rap com-
petitions in their municipality of Bahia in the Habana del Este zone.
Prior to his involvement in hip hop, Rensoli had been active in Hava-
na's rock scene as a promoter of music-related events. When I first met him
and Balesy in 1999 amid preparations for the fifth annual hip hop festival,
Rensoli's ebony brown skin and tight-knit Afro made it difficult to imagine
him partaking in the frenetic head-banging customary by many long-haired
rockeros (rock devotees) at Cuban rock shows. When I mentioned this, Ren-
soli told me that the common labeling of rock as "white" music in Cuba was
a false one, explaining, "Ifyou know the history you know that almost every-
thing that comprises rock music in the first place was invented by black peo-
ple."24 Rensoli added that though he considered himself a rockero during
his involvement with Cuba's rock scene, he was also influenced by the is-
land's growing reggae movement, with which he eventually came to iden-
tify as well. Rensoli's involvements in these music making spaces appear
to have been motivated in important part by an intellectual commitment
to avant-garde forms of cultural expression through the promotion of what
he termed mnsicas alternativas (alternative music). While his participation in
the early shaping of Cuban hip hop may have been inspired along similar
lines, questions of race did in fact occupy a meaningful place in Rensoli's
understandings of hip hop's significance on the island.

Hip Hop Cubano 75


As Rensoli described it, what first drew his attention to this new youth
culture in the making was breakdancing, an increasingly visible presence in
the streets of his East Havana barrio by 1995. Rensoli recalls his intellectual
curiosity deepening after he attended a local folkloric presentation where,
reminiscent of DJ Alexis's account, a discussion of the African roots of the
dance style occurred. Around this time young men began gathering infor-
mally at a local patio to freestyle rap,25 and while attending a neighborhood
"soul party" Rensoli shared a conversation with a group of raperos who were
complaining about the lack of available performance spaces. It was at that
point, Rensoli explains, that he and Balsey decided to explore the idea of an
event to showcase what they recognized as an emergent moment of island
hip hop, forming the collective Grupo Uno to undertake the project. In the
summer of 1995 Grupo Uno organized three days of local rap competitions
in Bahia, drawing MCs from the neighboring East Havana barrios of Ala-
mar, Cojimar, Regla, and Guanabacoa. The following June a similar com-
petition was held across town in a local cultural center in the leafy Havana
barrio of Vedado. Organized by the director of the hosting casa de la cultura
plaza, the event dubbed "Rap Plaza 96" was noted in the state-run Granma
newspaper as the first festival dedicated exclusively to hip hop.
Although these were all small shoestring events showcasing a handful of
local rap groups, they marked the birth and unfolding complexities of what
would become Cuba's annual hip hop festival. The events' crosstown loca-
tions, moreover, underscored the rise of two potentially competing centers
of early rapero activity, one clustered around Havana's eastern suburbs and
the other located in its central urban zone. In was in 1997, however, that
Rensoli approached the state-run Asociacion Hermanos Saiz (AHS) seek-
ing institutional support as a co-organizer for a proposed expanded com-
petition to be held that summer in the eastern municipality of Alamar.26
With few alternatives outside the all-providing socialist state, the costs of a
proposed Havana-wide festival would indeed require greater levels of gov-
ernment support. As the cultural arm of the Union of Young Communists
(uJc) charged with promoting (and channeling) music and artistic energies
among Cubans under thirty-five, Hermanos Saiz would have been an obvi-
ous option.
In the opinion of Pablo Herrera, then manager of the Vedado-based rap
group Amenaza, Rensoli may have also been interested in reclaiming and
securing Grupo Uno's hold on the festival and Eastern Havana's prominence

76 CHAPTER TWO


within the developing trajectory of Cuban hip hop.27 Regardless of motives,
it is clear that by 1997 increased institutional involvement was strategically
essential for organizing and securing subsequent festivals, a reality that also
marked an escalated governmental stake in the evolving space and future
direction of hip hop Cubano.
For those in the Cuban leadership who viewed hip hop with suspicion
as a nonindigenous foreign import, there may have been grounds, at least
ostensibly, for such concerns. Given early scarcities of production-related
resources, the vast majority of island hip hop throughout the mid-199os in-
volved live performances over prerecorded "background" cassettes from the
United States and Europe. This meant Cuban MCs often composed lyrics to
foreign instrumental tracks, sometimes rapping over beats from a popular
repertoire of commercial hip hop from the States. Accounts of the period
also suggest that early raperos tended to mimic performance and fashion
styles of African American artists, often donning hooded jackets, skull
caps, boots, and imitation gold chains (Fernandez Diaz 2000; Smith 1998).
While transnationally indebted, such style practice may not have been de-
void of political meaning making, however.
Drawing upon his work with young Garifuna men in Honduras, Central
America, Mark Anderson suggests that similar displays of African Ameri-
can fashion style often involve the negotiation of contemporary forms of
Garifuna identity, offering "a diasporic resource for the performance of
a Black cosmopolitanism that sits uneasily alongside images of Garifuna
tradition commonly produced by the state, the media, and Garifuna orga-
nizations" (Anderson 2009: 175). Rather than passive consumers of U.S.
cultural exports, Anderson suggests, these young men tap into stylized di-
mensions of African American commercial culture in crafting alternative,
cosmopolitanly modern notions of black Garifuna-ness in ways that may
challenge otherwise dominant, nationally bound representations. Compa-
rable practices have been noted by Steven Gregory (2006) among Haitian
immigrants in the Dominican Republic and have been similarly sited by
Deborah Thomas (2004) in shaping transnational understandings of black
modernity in Jamaica (see also Diawara 1998; Hanchard 1998).
In the case of early raperos, plays upon black-identified U.S. music and
style forms may also be seen as efforts to negotiate new grammars of Afro-
Cuban-ness as a means of marking racial difference while expanding the
terms of Cuban blackness itself. Indeed, for many darker-skinned youth

Hip Hop Cubano 77


who first took to hip hop, everyday levels and modes of racialized expe-
rience as discussed assumed an increasingly charged, transnationally in-
flected significance amid Cuba's market turn of the 1990s. Governing lines
within which blackness had been historically configured and channeled-as
folkloric, autochthonously rooted, spatially and temporally bound-were
in this sense creatively redrawn via hip hop's globally conversant, racially
coded aesthetics. Early raperos can in this light be seen as participating in
their own kinds of racial entrepreneurialism, yet ones involving resignifi-
cations of style as self-representational practice (cf. Hebdige 1979). If we
consider Stuart Hall's suggestion that "it is only through the way in which we
represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are consti-
tuted and who we are" (Hall1992: 30), the performative possibilities of black
popular style encourages attention to the representational force of style in
its capacity to enunciate, rather than simply reflect, identities of blackness
and ways of being.
Performing Blackness
In step with the rise of hip hop on the island, Cuba's annual hip hop festival
continued to grow in size and artistic sophistication through the early 2000s.
Despite limited resources, the festival expanded from an event involving a
small collection of East Havana-based raperos in 1995 to a multiday pro-
gram encompassing an island-wide diversity of groups and an assortment of
international artists. Based on my attendance from 2000 to 2003, the event
represented not only a culmination of a year's worth of artistic development
but also an annual opportunity for many raperos to push their music cre-
atively on multiple levels. Held since 1997 in Alamar's open-air anfiteatro be-
fore some three thousand predominantly black and brown-skinned youth,
the festival was the largest single stage for Cuban hip hop and recognized
by many MCs as the pinnacle occasion to showcase their music and tal-
ent. The festival's stature was all the more significant given that limited
production resources and commercial markets have long grounded is-
land hip hop-like most vernacular traditions of Cuban music making-
in the intimacies of live performance.
From the festival's inaugural year the social contours that have come to
define Cuban hip hop began to take shape. Key among these were raperos'

78 CHAPTER TWO


2.2. Mc Magyori "La Llave" Martinez (foreground) and DJ Yary Collia.
Photo by the author
emphasis on social themes drawn from experiences of a young, largely
darker-skinned generation of Cubans as they navigated the daily, often
fraught tensions of a Cuba in historical flux-one posed between revolu-
tionary socialism and ever-evolving market realities. Given the centrality of
social commentary and critique, raperos referred to their lyric-driven com-
positions as temas sociales or simply temas (social themes or themes) rather
than the more prosaic canciones (songs). The rhetorical significance of te-
mas, moreover, marked raperos' textual emphasis on the social message, or
mensa je, of their lyrics. Although resonances were surely present before, the
third annual festival-1997, Alamar's first-marked a move toward more
overt incorporations of social motifs, particularly regarding dimensions of
race and racial identity.
One related episode etched in the collective memory ofraperos and foreign
chroniclers alike occurred during the 1997 festival. Primera Base, a pioneer-
ing rap trio and the first to record a commercially produced rap album in
Cuba," performed their tema "Igual que tu" (The same as you) in tribute to
Malcolm X. In prefacing the song's performance, one of the MCs explained

Hip Hop Cubano 79


to the amassed Alamar crowd, "This is a homage to Malcolm X, because he
is our brother and we relate to black people all over the world, even in the
United States, and we feel sorry for our black brothers in the United States
who have to live the way they do. They have it the worst of the worst" (quoted
in Hoch 1999: 194). Evoking themes of resistance and self-determination,
the song drew inspiration from the life story and black masculine imagery
of Malcolm X. When it came to the chorus refrain, members of Primera
Base chanted in Spanish, "Malcolm, we wanna be just like you nigger, a
nigger like you."
A handful of North Americans present at the event were reportedly dis-
mayed by the seemingly flippant, decontextualized manner in which the
term nigger was affixed to Malcolm X. Among this group was Nehanda Abio-
dun, a prominent African American political exile living in Cuba who would
develop a long-standing relationship with Havana-area raperos. Although
clearly fraught, Abiodun speaks of the incident as provoking her interest in
the emerging scene, suggesting in turn that the resource-strapped artists
were in need of critical engagement.29 Reflecting on the moment, one of
the group's members, Ruben Marin, later recounted: "Everyone here sort
of felt the echo of Malcolm mania after Spike Lee's movie, so I read his
Autobiography to try to get to the truth of what he was really about. The
point I am trying to get across in the song is if a great man like Malcolm
X is considered a nigger, then I want to be a nigger too like him" (Verin
1998: 133).
While a sensitivity to the historical violence embedded in the term nigger
may have been obscured for members of Primera Base, an identification
with Malcolm X as a black liberatory figure apparently was not. Rub6n's
comments attest once more to the capacity and global reach of U.S. media
in conveying images and discursive notions of blackness. Yet rather than
being an object of unreflective consumption, Spike Lee's filmic portrait of
Malcolm X was drawn upon by these young men, two of them black, in mo-
bilizing alternative narratives of blackness in ways quite similar to those I
have discussed in the context of Afro-Brazilian hip hop (M. Perry 2008b).
As Rodolfo Rensoli, then the festival's organizer, recalled of the episode:
Never in Cuba has there been a song that expressed anything like "we
blacks are equal to you" like Primera Base's tema about Malcolm X. I think
that this song marked a new period for Cuban music. After this there was

8O CHAPTER TWO


a series of songs in rap where there was a self-affirmation of blackness. I
haven't analyzed it thoroughly, but if you were to examine Cuban music
the image of blacks is almost always one of drunkards. It is not the image
of blacks as social thinkers, or as cultural thinkers. Rap marks in this way
an overturning [vuelco] in the thinking of the black individual. It is in part
a self-reconciliation [auto-reconciliaci6n] as black people.30
Rensoli's notion of black self-reconciliation does indeed appear to have
been a recurring theme during the 1997 festival. A poignant case in point
involved Amenaza (Menace) and their performance of "Ochavon cruzao"
(roughly, Mixed-up octoroon).31 In this tema the group's three members of
variously mixed-race backgrounds address the lived ambivalences of racial
identity in contemporary Cuba. In doing so, the artists both complicate and
implicitly contest dominant narratives that present mestizaje as a histor-
ically stable and harmonious race-neutral core of the Cuban social body.
Awarded first prize for best composition during the 1997 hip hop festival,32
a lyric excerpt of "Ochavon cruzao" follows:
Tambi6n soy congo,
tambien fui esclavo,
tambien mi esperanza sufre para aquellos
que el racismo no ha acabado
Soy rumba Yoruba Andavo
y no acabo hasta ver lo
mio multiplicado
No ves soy pinto, ochavon cruzao
negro como el danz6n y el son cubano
negro como esta mano
negro como mi hermano
negro como Mumia
y negro como muchos blancos, mas quien lo diria, y no me cuentas
Mesafia raza mia.
Dijeron negro pero a mi no me contaron
Dijeron blanco pero en esta clan no me aceptaron
Dijeron tantas cosas
Soy el ser que nadie quiso,
lo negro con lo blanco, el grito de un mestizo

Hip Hop Cubano 81


I too am Congo,
I too was a slave,
and so too has my hope suffered for them because racism has not
ended
I am rumba Yoruba Andavo
and I won't be done until I see what's
mine multiplied
Can't you see I am mixed, mixed octoroon
black like the Cuban danz6n and the son
black like this hand
black like my brother
black like Mumia
and black like lots of whites, but who could tell, so you don't count me
My race defies.
They said black but they didn't count me
They said white but that clan didn't
accept me
They said so many things
I'm the one that no one wanted,
the black with the white, the cry of a mestizo"
While this passage offers poetic voice regarding struggles over racial
self-meaning, it also represents an early foregrounding of the movement's
quest for forms of black identification transcendent of Cuba's prevailing
racial continuum and its lived ambiguities. By exposing the internal dis-
sonance embodied in the celebrated national figure of the mestizo, the
song's first-person narrative undermines a foundational symbol of Cuba's
historical profession as a racially transculturated (i.e., racially neutral [ized])
nation. The tema's mestizo subject seeks to rectify, or in Rensoli's terms
self-reconcile, this dissonance by making its own historical claims to black-
ness. Such affirmations are voiced at one moment through the invocation
"soy rumba," whose Afro-historicity is further grounded through associa-
tion with Havana's acclaimed Afro-Cuban rumba troupe Yoruba Andavo.
Amenaza's marking of the danzon and son as "black" music forms, moreover,
recuperates these historical genres-long-acclaimed national symbols of a
harmonized, racially hybrid Cuban patrimony-as part of an Afro-Cuban
cultural lineage asserting, in turn, a black Cuban presence and historical le-

82 CHAPTER TWO


gitimacy. Amenaza's interventions along these lines thus literally "menace"
Cuba's nonracial glorifications.
Significantly, "Ochavon cruzao" also invokes the social memory of Africa
(congo) as well as the racial terror of slavery, two historical loci central to
the shaping of black racial consciousness in the Afro-Atlantic world (Gilroy
1993). And yet it is an enduring racism "that has not ended," which links the
living present to that of the past. Thus regardless of one's marked rendering
as mestizo, one's nonwhite self in this testimonial ode remains ever subject
to raced forms of history and power.
Although struggles over racial self-meaning are framed within the space
of Cuban nationhood, recourses to blackness are not necessarily so bound.
Here, the tema's brief though pointed reference to the radical figure of
imprisoned African American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal is poignant.34
Mumia's invocation presents an alternative, outer-national site of black
identification-one that transcends conflictive tensions between a racial
ideal and the raced realities of being nonwhite amid Cuba's fluidities of the
1990s. Unlike the historical figure of Malcolm X, the immediacy of Mumia's
black radicalism lends an urgency to such identifications. While Abu-Jamal
became a common lyric refrain alongside an assortment of "Free Mumia"
T-shirts by the early 2000s, 3 "Ochavon cruzao" initiated this link within
rapero circles. As I discuss in greater detail in the following chapter, en-
gagements with currents of U.S. black radicalism have been critical to the
making and moving of black self-understanding within Cuban hip hop. As
Amenaza's poetic "cry of a mestizo" suggests, however, despite such self-
affirmations, the ontological condition of being racially mixed remained
one of marked ambivalence. At least such was the case in 1997.
Lyric-centered analyses of the like might invite concerns regarding the
limitations of purely textual readings of social orientation and practice. It
is therefore important to foreground the ethnographic context of perfor-
mance within which raperos' lyrical expression arises. Possibly more than
any other contemporary Western music genre's, hip hop's aesthetic form
is predicated on the centrality of the spoken word as performed text. Among
Cuban hip hop artists, such textual prioritizations are reflected in their
vernacular use of the phrase los textos (the texts) in reference to their lyric
compositions.
Yet within Cuban hip hop's live-performance-driven settings, the sig-
nifying weight of los textos takes on an additional level of embodied sig-

Hip Hop Cubano 83


nificance. Beyond the initial composition when textual meanings are first
shaped, it is through Cuban MCs' public performance of their temas that
such textuality assumes self-actualizing force. It is of course the "rap"
through which the rapero artistically defines him/herself, marking in the
most tangible of terms that movement from textual realms of discourse
to those of corporal practice. While it is indeed one thing for a Cuban
youth of mixed race to compose the lyric line "[soy] negro como Mumia"
(I'm black like Mumia), it is a whole other ritualized undertaking to mount
a stage before three thousand peers and verbally proclaim over a micro-
phone "1;[soy] negro como Mumia!" Here it is less about performing a text
than the performative embodiment of the text as self-representational
practice. Rather than reflecting a preexistent subject a priori, raperos'
public performances in this sense seek to enunciate or socially enact that
very subject into being.
As public spectacle, then, the performative dimensions of blackness in
"Ochavon cruzao" are hence twofold. A blackness of self-meaning is sig-
nified in an immediate sense through announcing itself as such-a form of
performative utterance or speech act (Austin 1976). Yet in the same breath
this act is performative in that its enactment is ultimately productive of
something subjectively diferent and new (cf. J. Butler I99o). Amenaza's "cry
of a mestizo" thus invokes blackness as spectacle by asserting and making
conspicuous a black subject otherwise obscured by Cuba's nonracial scripts.
Similar to the mimetic adoption of black style previously discussed, raperos'
extranational use of racial markers is translated in ways that assume their
own locally situated meanings and structures of feeling. And while such
black self-reconciliations-to again evoke Rensoli's term-are imbued with
autochthonous national claims, they continue to index a modern black glo-
bality with which they actively converse.
This discussion runs somewhat counter to previous accounts of the
period suggesting early Cuban rap artists tended not to foreground trans-
national connections with other African descendant populations, thus
displaying a conspicuous absence of Afrodiasporic lines of identification
(Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo 2000). Here, appeals to an international
cosmopolitanism over those of racial diaspora are seen as primary (cf. Baker
2011). While these observations capture salient features of the early hip hop
scene, I suggest further exploration might yield additional complexities.

84 CHAPTER TWO


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2.3. Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars CD. Cover artwork 0 2000 by Steve Marcus
Arguments along these lines are drawn in part from an interview with the
producer Pablo Herrera, who suggested that contemporary Africa held little
attention among raperos as a source of identification and inspiration. As I
discuss in greater detail later, Africa would in fact become an important
point of reference for many Cuban MCs via the ways they imagine, bodily
mark, and performatively enact meanings of blackness. Yet beyond appeals
to an African historical rootedness per se, to what extent might contempo-
rary articulations with other Afro-Atlantic sites and histories provide more
immediate recourse to an Afro-globality, one self-consciously modern and
indeed cosmopolitan in scope?

Hip Hop Cubano 85


Black Assemblages

As I myself have come to know Pablo Herrera, there seems little ambiva-
lence regarding his own understandings of and participation within extra-
national routes of blackness by way of hip hop. Pablo and I first met at the
studios of Conjunto Folklorico Nacional in the summer of 1999 while he was
doing translation work for a group of North American participants during
a dance workshop hosted by the Conjunto.36 Workshop members had gath-
ered that day for a screening of the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando's
recent work Eyes of the Rainbow (1997), a documentary celebrating the life
of African American political exile Assata Shakur, who has lived in Cuba
since the mid-198os. Noting Pablo's seemingly flawless U.S. accent and the
fluidity of his engagement with visiting students, I mistakenly assumed the
brother was from the States. It was not until we spoke after the screening
that I realized he was not only Cuban but a key contact suggested to me by
a mutual acquaintance in New York City. Our exchanges from that point on
were almost exclusively in English, sprinkled with an African American ver-
nacular affecting a sense of a black fraternity, which I came to understand
as part of Pablo's facile charisma and charm.
I soon learned that Pablo earned an advanced degree in English and Rus-
sian translation at the University of Havana, where he completed a thesis on
the poetics of African American culture. This background made Pablo fairly
exceptional within Havana's hip hop community where the vast majority
of raperos and their largely black working-class followers did not attend
university, let alone pursue advanced degrees. Pablo later spent a number of
months in the late 1990s living in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he gained a deeper
appreciation for African American life and racial history. Pablo's cultural
fluency in black American-ness was indeed so well-tuned that I heard of
his ability to pass in Havana's streets and tourist hotel lobbies as a yuma
(foreigner), a notable feat for a young dark-skinned black man in Cuba.
Such skill found comic display in the 2000 film Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop by
the New York-based performance artist Danny Hoch in which Pablo, for
ironic effect, plays a monolingual camera-toting African American opposite
Hoch's street-hustling (and presumably Afro-Cuban) jinetero character.37
This dexterity undoubtedly contributed to Pablo's ability to maneuver
fluidly in a space between Cuban and U.S. cultural landscapes, one in which
hip hop served as an important medium of translation. Building on an

86 CHAPTER TWO


evolving network of North American contacts, Pablo eventually compiled
an improvised music studio in his rooftop apartment in Havana's outlying
barrio of Santos Suirez. His mother, a reputable Afro-Cuban architect who
helped instill within Pablo a grounded sense of black pride and respect for
Cuban socialism, designed the apartment-cum-music-studio that sat atop
her home. Pablo's rudimentary production equipment, including a digital
beat machine, electronic keyboard, and monitor speakers donated by a New
York City contact, came by way of Ariel Fernandez Diaz, who approached
him around 1999 about assembling a compilation disc of local hip hop.
The project culminated in the 2001 CD Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars, Vol. i, which
represented the first commercial compilation of Cuban hip hop artists.38
Crafting some of Cuba's earliest background beats, Pablo's home studio
became something of a hip hop mecca among established artists seeking
music production, including Anonimo Consejo, 100% Original, Obsesion,
Grandes Ligas, Las Krudas, Explosion Suprema, and Los Paisanos, to name
a few. Until the proliferation of personal computers and music production
software enabling a wider range of artists to produce background beats,
Pablo held important (though not necessarily uncomplicated) sway within
Havana's hip hop community as one of its premier producers.
As Pablo describes it, his sense of black selfhood was first and foremost
rooted in his family history and cultural fluency as an Afro-Cuban. Pablo's
mother, as mentioned, was a respected architect, while his father, a former
director of the radio and electronics section of Cuba's Naval Academy, was
the first Afro-Cuban to receive a PhD in his field. Among the first generation
of black professionals trained during the revolutionary period, their pro-
fessional and personal life trajectories were deeply tied and in many ways
indebted to the revolutionary project. For Pablo's mother, Daysi Veitia, such
fidelity found early expression as a teenage volunteer among the roughly
250,000 Cubans who participated in Cuba's massive National Literacy Cam-
paign of 1961, an experience recounted by Daysi in Catherine Murphy's 2012
documentary film Maestra. Daysi's later training and professional develop-
ment as an architect took shape amid Cuba's rising internationalism, a
period that involved her in Cuban-sponsored construction projects as far
afield as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bolivia.
Yet it was his parents' experiences working in Angola during the war
period that Pablo claims carried particular salience: "If you talk about the
generation of Afro-Cubans who went and fought in Angola in the end of the

Hip Hop Cubano 87


eighties and in the beginning of the nineties, the ways that they understood
Angolan culture and African people, or black people in Africa, the way they
talk about them was special. My parents had important experiences and
made important relationships with Angolans while there."39 Though mem-
ories of the war's trauma remained present, Pablo recounts, his parents' in-
volvements helped reconcile the human costs of the conflict by foreground-
ing Cuba's broader "victory" in helping Angola win the war and postcolonial
independence. Speaking of his parents' pride in partaking in this history, he
added: "The experience of having traveled to Africa and having been part of
something so grand as the liberation of a country in Africa was huge in that
sense.... I wanted to go to Angola when it was my chance, I wanted to go
to Angola to be part of that. Angola was seen as victory big time. I mean the
war had been won, and the Angolan people were free!"
Thus part of a generational narrative similar to that shared by Lisnida's
household,40 understandings of afrocubanidad were for Pablo and his fam-
ily intimately entwined with Cuba's revolutionary past, one in which con-
temporary Africa served as a poignantly lived referent. The singularity of
history, Pablo suggests, positions Afro-Cubans uniquely in diaspora vis-n-
vis engagements with modern Africa.
As Pablo has made clear in the course of our conversations, familial re-
courses to a Cuban Africanity were also grounded in spaces of the sacred.
Pablo traces such lines back to his paternal grandfather, whom he described
as a craftsman of African drums and shekeres used in Afro-Cuban religious
ceremony, as well as his mother, a longtime hija or initiated daughter, of the
orisha Yemanyi. These lineages extend to Pablo's own spiritual involvement
in Ocha-Lucumi as an hijo of Chang6 and his more recent initiation into
the sacred divinization pathways of Ifi.41 As he describes it, such commit-
ments are rooted in a deep Afrocentric resolve among Afro-Cubans that
has endured in his words as "a sacred space of victory that is untouched by
anything, and nothing can fuck with that."
Although Pablo's self-understandings drew upon autochthonous read-
ings of Afro-Cuban experience in realms of both the sacred and the profane,
hip hop seemed to offer an additionally meaningful site of black belonging.
As Pablo recounts, his involvement with hip hop began during a teaching
stint at the University of Havana in the mid-199os when he incorporated
Cuban rap lyrics into course material. It was around this period that he came

88 CHAPTER TWO


into contact with Amenaza, eventually developing a relationship with the
artists that evolved into a managerial role. Pablo recalls initially harboring
some concern about what he felt was the trio's lack of political awareness,
particularly in relation to dimensions of race. Shortcomings of this kind, he
suggests, contributed to a dismissive attitude among local raperos, some
of whom viewed Amenaza as superficial "pretty boys" in relation to the
more politically charged range of early island hip hop. As manager, Pablo
claims he encouraged Joel "Pando" Heredia, the creative head of Amenaza,
to engage more explicitly with questions of race and racial identity. This
intervention, he contends, helped initiate Amenaza's eventual turn toward
"Ochavon Cruzao," a tema that as discussed marked a new moment of racial
self-reflexivity within Havana's budding hip hop movement.
When I queried him about the tema's self-referential appeal to Mumia
Abu-Jamal, Pablo offered it was he who first introduced Amenaza to Mumia's
story. It is indeed worth noting that earlier the same year that "Ochavon Cru-
zao" was composed, Pablo had connected with a group of African American
activists from New York City during an international youth festival in East
Havana.42 A number of these individuals were active members of the Mal-
colm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a youth-oriented collective centered
on human rights advocacy and political mobilization among communities
of African descent. These contacts eventually led Pablo to Brooklyn the fol-
lowing year.
It was this same period of transnational exchange that gave rise to the
launching of Black August, a hip-hop-centered offshoot of MXGM with a
strong Cuban focus. Black August in turn became an influential interlocutor
with Havana-area raperos through running participation in a number of Cu-
ban hip hop festivals beginning in I998. A related organizational facet of
Black August entailed support for an older generation of imprisoned U.S.
black radicals and, by extension, a small circle of African American political
exiles residing in Cuba. A key figure among these intergenerational net-
works was Nehanda Abiodun, mentioned above. A native Harlemite now
in her early sixties who has been in asylum in Cuba since the early 199os,
Abiodun shares a tradition of black-left organizing with fellow radical-in-
exile Assata Shakur, and has maintained U.S. connections through in part
active membership in MXGM.
I will return to a more detailed discussion of Abiodun and Black August's

Hip Hop Cubano 89


legacy in Cuba; what is worth alluding to here is the instrumental role Black
August played in facilitating Afro-dialogic alliances between Cuba and the
United States via a transnational vocality of hip hop. Among those key in
this conversation was Pablo Herrera, who, along with Abiodun, served as
one of Black August's founding Cuban members. Extranational affinities
of blackness and their political inflections therefore do appear to have been
present from inception in hip hop's Cuban rise.

90 CHAPTER TWO


Chapter 3.
New Revolutionary Horizons
I had the fortunate experience of being introduced to and initially guided
through the often frenetic currents of Havana's hip hop scene through my
relationship with Magia Lopez and Alexey Rodriguez of the hip hop duo
Obsesion. They were then a married couple whose artistic creativity and
tireless commitment helped position them among the most productive
and respected of pioneering artists in the movement.1 The couple and their
extended families, in turn, offered me a supportive community and an in-
valuable window into the broader complexities of contemporary Cuban life
as a whole. As I explore in more detail, given the varying positions raperos
negotiated vis-n-vis state institutions and realms of revolutionary discourse,
Magia and Alexey's achievements and chosen involvements placed them at
times in somewhat ambivalent terms within some circles of Havana's hip
hop community.
Obsesion
When we first met in 1999 the couple, then in their midtwenties, was living
at Magia's mother's home in the central Havana barrio of Cayo Hueso. Their
second-story flat sat conveniently across the street from a casa particular (pri-
vate apartment) I wound up renting a room in and calling home for the bulk
of my time in Havana, all thanks to their initial introduction to the casa's


owner, Delbis. Along with Magia's mother, Caridad, and Magia's older sis-
ter, Tamara, and her young son, Norberto, the two lived in a small barbacoa
(improvised loft apartment) in an old five-story walk-up.
In time the couple moved to Alexey's parents' relatively more spacious
rooftop apartment in Regla. A fifteen-minute ferry ride across Havana's in-
dustrialized harbor from Habana Vieja,2 the municipality of Regla is known,
among other things, for its enduring associations with Ocha-Lucumi and
wider communities of Afro-Cuban religious practice. A living embodiment
of this history can be found in La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de Regla. This
small eighteenth-century church facing Regla's harborside docks is home to
La Virgen de Regla, a black-skinned Madonna who shares a syncretic form
with Yemaya, the maternal orisha of the sea. Tradition holds that when trav-
eling to Regla an offering ofa Cuban penny is thrown from the lanchita (small
ferry) into the blue harbor waters for blessings from La Virgen cum Yemayi.
Today, Regla and its neighboring barrio of Guanabacoa remain home
to sizable communities of babaliwos and iyas de ocha (religious godmoth-
ers, or madrinas) who live among its narrow streets, while Guanabacoa's
small municipal museum is dedicated to local histories of Ocha-Lucumi,
and other religious traditions of Palo Monte and the Abakui. The earliest
documented fraternity of Abakui was in fact founded in Regla in the early
nineteenth century (Cabrera 1958, cited in Sublette 2007: 191), and revelers
continue to visit the church of Nuestra Senora in homage to Regla's black
Virgin, her maternal figure shrouded in Yemaya's oceanic blues.
Alexey was raised in a black working-class family just a few blocks from
the waterfront church, and his sense of history and black-selfhood is in
turn deeply meshed with that of Regla. Such historicity, however, is largely
grounded in the secular rather than the sacred-neither Alexey nor his par-
ents are practitioners of Ocha-Lucumi or other religious traditions, Afro-
Cuban or otherwise. As described earlier, a portrait of Toussaint L'Ouver-
ture poised in military garb with his foot upon a hissing snake greets those
entering Alexey's home. This heroic icon of the Haitian Revolution stands
in this sense in profane analogy to that of Eleggua, the orisha of the cross-
roads, whose figure sits in ritual guard at entryways of many santeros' homes.
Indeed, Haiti has assumed an enduring presence in Alexey's domestic life,
one finding artistic form in his composition " Viste?" from Obsesion's
2011 album, El Disco Negro. An ode of solidarity with Haitians following the
devastating earthquake of 2010, the tema is interwoven with a solemn ex-

92 CHAPTER THREE


change between Alexey and his father, Celso, reflecting upon the traumas
of the event and its historical resonances in light of Haiti's struggle for black
nationhood.
Currents of Afro-hemispheric affinity within the Rodriguez household are
not limited to Haiti, however. Among other visual markers displayed prom-
inently in the Regla flat stands a black-and-white portrait of Malcolm X in
iconic pose, while a large spray-painted image of an Afro-adorned man sits
against an outside wall of their rooftop patio overlooking Havana's skyline
across the harbor. Recalling MC Rub6n Marin of Primera Base mentioned
earlier, Alexey tells ofhow his exposure to a Spanish-language Cuban edition
of The Autobiography of Malcolm X influenced his thinking about his blackness
as well as his broader membership to a black historical world.3 Yet these
varying figures on parade-L'Ouverture, Afro'd figure, and Malcolm X-
stand in interesting tension with la Virgen de Regla not only in terms of a
scared-secular divide, but also along gendered and temporally divergent lines
as well. Such semiotic play, while rooted in the local, were thus more expan-
sive and self-consciously diasporic-if decidedly modern and masculinist-
in scope.
Over the years Alexey and Magia's Regla home has hosted countless gath-
erings ofraperos and other hip-hop-affiliated folk, one ofwhich was alluded
to in the book's opening vignette. The couple's bedroom eventually doubled
as a makeshift studio where Alexey, working with PC-based consumer soft-
ware, produced many of the duo's background beats and vocal tracks. The
room itself is adorned with hip-hop-inspired artwork and images; one of its
walls is dedicated to a frenetic collage of photographs and graffitied notes
from visitors, both local and foreign. During one of my own early forays to
their place on a hot and muggy afternoon in the summer of 1999, I queried
the two about what seemed to be a pervasiveness of black-self-affirming
lyrics within local hip hop. In response, Alexey explained:
This is a stage of rap. One must first announce "I am black." And when
you acknowledge this, we can then move forward from there. I think this
is valuable, this is valuable today especially here in Cuba. It seems to me
that black people now know more about themselves, and I think our work
is contributing to establishing this. And part ofwhat is necessary here is
to know your history in a deep kind of way-to know who you are, your
roots, and where you come from.4

New Revolutionarn Horizons 93


As Alexey's comment suggests, his conception of black identity is an
implicitly political one. Rather than passively given, such identity is un-
derstood within the Cuban context as a conscious and active assertion of
self-"I am black"-which in turn serves as the ground upon which to
"move forward," to act. Here, Alexey is not suggesting a notion of blackness
as a detached marker to be chosen or rejected at whim. Blackness rather is
seen as embodied and lived subjectivity, one that he claims Obsesion and
other Cuban MCs have worked to make critically visible.
Years later while speaking to an undergraduate class of mine in New
Orleans, Magia spoke similarly of a "process" of coming into racial self-
consciousness (auto-consciencia) rooted in a lived experience of race through
which, in her words, one "reflects," "learns," and ultimately "acts." She
added that in her case such self-actualization grew from an ongoing set of
conversations tied to her involvements in hip hop and wider evolving fields
of Cuban racial discourse. Magia emphasized that it was through her mu-
sic that such black self-consciousness and its embedded politics assumed
animated form. Such racial practice has been a consistent element of Ma-
gia and Alexey's artistic vision over the years, not something eventually
discarded and moved beyond (cf. Baker 2011: 277). For Magia and Alexey,
whose dark complexion, hair, and facial features unequivocally mark them
as negros, such blackness of embodied form and historical weight is largely
inescapable.
During that early Regla exchange, Magia explained that in the past she
had been hesitant to identify as black despite her family's strong tradition
of pro-black affirmation. A striking, dark-brown-skinned woman, Magia re-
called her early-school-age tendency to claim any nonwhite identifier other
than negra. Prevailing traditions, she explained, taught her that as a young
woman of color, blackness was not something to embrace. Those same
raced genderings that fixed la mulata as the quintessence ofheteromasculine
desire and celebrated symbol of a racially transculturated nation compelled
darker-skinned women to distance themselves from the term negra and its
peripherality from normative centers of racial and gendered privilege.
It is precisely against such historical erasure that the Afro-Cuban poet
Nancy Morej6n's celebrated poem "Mujer negra" empathically speaks (More-
jon 1979). Mapping black women's presence in the making of Cuba from
Africa to enslavement to independence struggle and finally to contempo-
rary revolutionary, Morej6n's ballad of personal freedom is fused with that

94 CHAPTER THREE


{

3.1. MCs Magia Lopez (left) and Alexey Rodriguez of Obsesidn.
Photo by Sahily Borrero
of national liberation as the first-person yo (I) evolves by poetic end into a
collective celebration of nuestros (ours) with the arrival of the Cuban Revolu-
tion. Here Morejon offers a recuperation of a black female subject of Cuba's
conjoining histories of nationhood and revolution, one analogous in this
sense to Magia's own recuperative efforts of black self-reconciliation.
By 1999 Magia's outlook had indeed shifted. Her identity and performa-
tive presentation as a black woman increasingly became a central facet of
her work as one of Cuba's pioneering female MCs, a role that expanded in
scope over the years as one of the movement's most active and accomplished
members. A key current of these labors has been Magia's efforts to challenge
the raced sexualization of black and brown-skinned Cuban women, ener-

New Revolutionary Horizons 95


gies that arose in conversation with a broader emergence of black womanist
voices within Cuban hip hop's otherwise male-centric space. As I explore in
more detail in chapter 4, these female artists not only complicated hip hop's
highly masculinist orientation, but often also provided critiques of the wider
heteronormative workings of racialized patriarchy in the Cuban everyday.
During the many years I have known Magia and Alexey, their sense of
blackness has become an ever more celebrated facet of their personal and
public lives as artists. When we first met in 1999, Magia wore synthetic ex-
tensions braided into her hair, while Alexey kept his in a short-cropped fade.
Within a couple ofyears Magia began wearing her long, reddish-brown hair
combed out into a big Afro-like crown, or alternatively bound in colorful
African-style wraps reminiscent at the time of the black neobohemian flair
of Erykah Badu. For Alexey's part, he began grooming what became a head
of mid-shoulder-length dreadlocks, a practice in dialogue with a growing
number of young black urban men who, while not necessarily followers of
Cuba's nascent Rastafari movement (see Hansing 2001),5 embraced dread-
locks as a nonconformist, Afrocentric marker of black masculinity.
Such stylized body practice was not free of potential costs, however.
There is history of Cuban police harassment of black men with dreadlocks
for their perceived associations with Rastafarians and marijuana use, a
raced and largely gendered form of social regulation-again tied to racial-
ized framings of criminality-to which I will return (see chapter 6). Despite,
or precisely in spite of, such racially coded antagonism, Alexey held his locks
as performatively integral to his sense of black-self, yet one clearly in dia-
logue with wider global circuits of black corporal practice and aesthetics of
style (cf. Diawara 1998; Kelley 2012). Magia and Alexey would eventually set
the politics of black hair to music in their tema "Los pelos" (The hair),6 in
which the duo addresses the restrictions as well as the celebratory possibil-
ities of black hair. As Magia riffs:
Pelo suelto carretera, no hay desriz
y me di cuenta que pa' que si yo no naci asi
El hombre que me quiere me acepta como soy,
Africana! Adonde quiera que voy seguro!
Mi naturaleza rompe patron de belleza no me vengan con que
pa' luciese mis fina ...
Pa'riba los pelos y que crezcan los dreadlocks

96 CHAPTER THREE


Hair loose on the street, there's no relaxer
and I realized that I was not born like that
The man that would accept me as I am,
an African woman! Wherever I go, for sure!
My natural beauty breaks standards of beauty; so don't tell me
to look more refined ...
To the top with hair and let the dreadlocks grow
A body-centered poetics of black style, however, extends beyond hair.
When performing, Magia often appears in West African-inspired gowns
and headwraps. While periodically garbing his thin frame in African prints,
Alexey is more often draped in classic rapero attire of oversized baggy pants,
U.S. footwear, and long, loose-fitting tops-a fashion grammar globally
synonymous with hip hop. Regardless of attire, for many years the two never
hit the streets without a set of dark wooden amulets about their necks. Fash-
ioned by Alexey as symbols of the couple's bond, these amulets bore carved
faces with strong African features and were spoken of as carrying protective
spiritual significance.
Such crafting skills drew upon Alexey's former employment in the early
1990s in a state-run workshop of tourist crafts. This early space of tourism
commerce is where the artists first met-Magia was then making clay fig-
urines. As Magia recalls, "This was during the Special Period, and people
were losing jobs, payrolls were reduced. I was the first to lose my job, and
then they closed the entire workshop and Ale lost his job."7 Magia eventu-
ally found employment in a dollar-only tourist shop, while assisting Alexey
with the sporadic work he found carving small wood sculptures for the in-
formal tourist trade. Alexey later worked briefly in a printing house, a job
that his father, Celso, helped him obtain.
None of this, however, provided much by way of income. Alexey was at
one point compelled to take a job collecting street trash and mowing lawns
for a monthly state salary of 40 Cuban pesos (roughly equivalent to US$2).
While their ability to move between their respective family homes helped
manage costs, like nearly all Cubans during this period Magia and Alexey
were struggling to make basic ends meet on state-regulated peso salaries.
Rather cogently, a common Cuban refrain from the late 1990s mused, "El
gobierno pretende pagarnos, y nosotros pretendemos trabajar" (The gov-
ernment pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work).

New Revolutionarn Horizons 97


Forms of public-sector employment that had long provided stable in-
come for the vast majority of Cubans during the revolutionary period were
ever increasingly less viable by the mid to late 1990s. As Magia's and Alexey's
narratives testify, early state schemes tied to an emerging tourism market
did not provide much by way of a living (let alone competitive) peso salary
vis-n-vis a rapidly expanding dollar economy. These shifts and their injuri-
ous effects were felt acutely by young Cubans like Magia and Alexey entering
the workforce, a generational demographic worth noting from which the
first wave of raperos was drawn. Indeed, it was amid such fluidity that Ma-
gia and Alexey got married in 1996 and, significantly, formed Obsesion as
a trio initially with comrade-in-arms DJ Roger Martinez.8 From that point
they began performing informally in small venues as their music became
increasingly central to their personal, artistic, and ultimately political lives.
Along similar lines mentioned earlier, Alexey explains that his early ex-
posure to hip hop came from FM radio broadcasts from southern Florida
in the 1980s. With the help of an improvised wire antenna fashioned out-
side his bedroom window, his parents' rooftop apartment in Regla afforded
ideal access to these otherwise elusive radio waves. Alexey soon took to Ha-
vana's emerging b-boy scene. With the coming of the economic crisis in the
early 1990s, however, Alexey had to curtail his street dancing to preserve
his lone pair of shoes or risk, as he put it, "corriendo descalzo por la calle"
(running barefoot in the streets). Thus, in tune with broader trends within
Cuba's evolving hip hop scene, Alexey's pivot from dance to music making
marked a shift in artistic direction amid a backdrop of economic and related
social flux.
Transnational dimensions being what they were, Magia and Alexey never-
theless understood their blackness as deeply rooted in Cuban narratives of
history, nationhood, and revolution-renderings that find poetic form in
their music. One of Obsesion's early signature temas, "Mambi," offers a
vivid illustration of such interwoven autochthony. Released in 2000 on the
artists' debut album and awash in historical references, "Mambi" draws its
name from los mambises, the machete-wielding largely black and formerly
enslaved regiments of soldiers who fought among others under the famed
mulato general Antonio Maceo during Cuba's late nineteenth-century wars
of independence. Rather than a historical recounting, the composition's
first-person narrative likens Obsesion's members to modern-day mambi.

98 CHAPTER THREE


When asked about the song's thematic significance, Magia put it simply:
"Somos mambises, luchando lo mismo" (We are mambises, we are fighting
the same struggle). Below is the opening salvo of "Mambi."
Pa' el pueblo aqui estoy yo
[coro]: Yo estoy aqui diciendo
Obsesion Mambi pinchando
Que nadie espere ningun tipo de chance
Si Quintin Bandera nunca dio masaje,
4por que yo entonces?
1A fajarse!
Que la manigua esti gritando: Yo soy yo
Y es por mi por quien doblan las campanas,
no metan forros
El morro sabe que al combate corro y corro junto a los Bayameses
iCuba, orgullosa de mi!
No le temo a una muerte gloriosa
Estense quietos que insurrecto y prieto es un lho iRebambarambara! ...
For the people, here I am
[chorus]: I am here speaking
Obsesion Mambi in the battle
Nobody should wait for chance
If Quintin Bandera never gave up,9
then why should I?
Let's fight!
The manigua is screaming: I am me
and it's for me for whom the bells toll,
don't tell lies10
The Cuban fortress knows that in combat I run and run together with
the Bayameses
Cuba, proud of me!
I don't fear a heroic death
To be a rebel and black is still trouble. Making hell! ...1"
The tema's allusions operate on various overlapping levels. In an imme-
diate sense, foregrounding the racial significance of los mambises under-
scores the historical instrumentality of blacks in Cuba's national liberation

New Revolutionarn Horizons 99


struggle. The intimacies of such history are marked through figures like the
mambi leader Quintin Bandera,12 a celebrated black general of the indepen-
dence wars who served directly under Antonio Maceo, and the legendary
Manigua Brigade of mambi fighters from Cuba's eastern Oriente region.
These references stand in tension with enduring, largely race-neutral(ized)
renderings of Cuba's early national beginnings (Ferrer i998b; Helg 1995). In
line with postracial framings previously discussed, los mambises are framed
in official revolutionary discourse as liberators of the Cuban nation in ways
that often supersede if not mask their historical agency as Afro-Cubans.
Historical recuperations of this kind are further evoked by Obsesion
through their self-fashioning as present-day mambi, situating themselves
and their work within counternarratives of black struggle elemental to the
modern forging of Cuba itself. Indeed, in running "with the Bayameses,"
the artists index Cuba's national anthem, "La Bayamesa," and its opening
call ";Al combate, corred, Bayameses!" (Run to battle, men of Bayamo!)
as a marker of national legitimacy-one through which antiracist struggle
is held intrinsic to Cuba's own national liberation and birth. Sacrifice in
the nation's wars of independence-Cuba's "first" revolution in the discur-
sive teleology of the post-1959 revolutionary period-therefore warrants
a historical national indebtedness to black Cubans, tying Afro-Cubans in-
separably to national-revolutionary citizenship. Temporal imbrications of
black citizenship and revolutionary virtue in this sense provide a rhetorical
bridge between revolutionary past and present. "Yo estoy aqui diciendo ...
pinchando ... corro y corro junto a los bayamese... iCuba orgullosa de
mi! ... insurrecto y prieto es un lho iRebambarambara!" declares in essence:
"I am black, and Cuban, and revolutionary, recognize me, hear me speak!"
It is, however, noteworthy that "Mambi" opens with a dedication to the
African American imprisoned radical Mumia Abu-Jamal, expanding politi-
cal claims and forms of citizenship into realms of the contemporary outer-
national. Revolutionary articulations do nonetheless appear to grow first
and foremost from an organics of Cuba's own history. As the two explained
to me early on:
Alexey: We are rapping from the perspective of a socialist society, from a
point of view of socialism, and we engage it from a positive position.
Magia: Our role [as raperos] within the society is well defined within
socialism, and this is independent of whether we communicate, cri-

100 CHAPTER THREE


tique, or denounce certain things in society. Our position is well de-
fined in this sense.
MP: Well, do you then consider your music somehow connected to the
revolution?
Alexey: Yes, we cannot separate one from the other. I cannot make mu-
sic by putting aside what is significant about the revolution for me. I
can make a song that is critical of something, but never against the
revolution. Never against the revolution, because it is not like this,
not for Obsesion.
Magia: Since I was little my mother always told me, "Gracias por la revo-
lucion" (thanks to the revolution), because black folks have had more
possibilities under the revolution. I get annoyed, though, when a black
person makes a lot of noise criticizing the revolution. Before the tri-
umph of the revolution my mother told me that even light-skinned
[black] women could only get work as maids. The revolution allowed
black folks to study, to work, to be who we are today. From here on it's
us who have to work double, triple, whatever it takes to arrive at who
we are to become. It depends on us."
In comparison to many of their peers, Magia and Alexey were among
some of the more adamantly self-identified and vocal supporters of the Cu-
ban Revolution and, by relative extension, the Cuban state. I recall numer-
ous discussions with the two regarding current tensions in Cuban society
in which my critical readings as an "outsider" were often met with fervent
defenses of "the revolution." Here I mark the (Cuban) Revolution with quo-
tations not only to reiterate the artists' use of the term but also to under-
score the tendency within post-1959 discourse to conflate la revoluci6n with
el estado, and ultimately el pueblo (the revolution, the state, and the people/
nation). Within this secularized trinity where one-is-all, as all-are-one,
perceived challenges to one are deemed antagonistic affronts to all. While
such framing might serve the ends of curbing public critique, it can take on
additional charged significance when critique is leveled from afuera, or the
outside. Such dynamics informed the tone of some of our more animated
exchanges around Cuba's shifting landscape, with Magia in particular fre-
quently impassioned in her positions.
Yet as Magia implies, the artists' strong identifications with the revo-
lution were shaped in important part by their close relationships with

New Revolutionarn Horizons ioi


their parents, who, like many of their generational peers, share deep-felt
attachments to the island's revolutionary history. Such familial affinity is
reflected with comic flair in Alexey's 2011 tema "Esta es mi mami" (This
is my mother), dedicated to his mother, Maria. Shot against the domestic
backdrop of their Regla home, the song's YouTube video centers on a playful
back-and-forth exchange between son and mother, with Maria spiritedly
contributing her own rapping to camera.14 Recalling numerous conversa-
tions with Alexey's father, Celso, and Magia's mother, Caridad, I was often
moved by their fervent faith in both the principles and the achievements of
Cuban socialism. Yes, there may have been errores, mistakes, but the revolu-
tion had worked and was continually working to correct them.
While widespread disillusionment and cynicism regarding hardships of
Cuban life were commonplace among habaneros (Havana residents), with
the phrase "no es facil" (it's not easy) assuming mantra status since the
onset of the Special Period, I often found Celso's and Caridad's perspec-
tives refreshing given the conflicted assessments one commonly hears and
lives in Havana. Celso and Caridad are in this sense among that generation
of Afro-Cubans who share a lived memory of what Cuba was for poor and
working-class blacks before the revolution, as well as the hard-won transfor-
mations achieved through it.
In Celso's case, as a retired engineer he owes much of his education and
professional training to revolutionary openings of Cuba's long racially ex-
clusionary educational system-a similar generational narrative of black
professionalism shared with Lisnida and with Pablo Herrera's parents. Cel-
so's fidelity to socialism as it turns out dates back to early adulthood when
he won a poetry contest dedicated to the Russian Revolution, an award that
afforded him a trip to the Soviet Union in 1970. He later traveled to Czecho-
slovakia for a course in cartographic design, during which he also briefly
visited Bulgaria. Circuits of Cuban internationalism also brought Celso to
Ethiopia, where he spent two years during Cuba's military involvement in
the Ogaden War of the late 1970s. For Magia, recollections of her mother's
account of social mobility under the revolution-Caridad having been a
domestic worker herself-are illustrative of the affective power of this nar-
rative in Magia's own life.
Legacies of mobility notwithstanding, like many of their hip hop peers
neither Magia nor Alexey attended university, and as described they spent
most of their young adulthoods scrambling to make ends meet until even-

102 CHAPTER THREE


tually devoting themselves full-time to their music. As one of the more ac-
complished of Cuban rapero groups, the duo have been fortunate to have
garnered income, as inconsistent as it may have been, through local perfor-
mances and national tours, informal sales of their two recorded albums,
and eventually artistic tours aboard. They are relatively exceptional in this
sense-most raperos have not been as consistently productive in translating
talent into income. While the majority are generally unemployed in a formal
sense, like large numbers of young Cubans many have found resourceful
ways of getting by, or in Cuban terms inventar y resolver (to creatively invent
and/or resolve) by one means or another.
Magia's recollection of her mother's account of the prerevolutionary lim-
its of black women's opportunities for employment also underscores gen-
dered dimensions of racial regulation, a theme with which she is intimately
familiar in her own life. Revisiting Obsesion's "Mambi," Magia gives voice
to her own raced gendering in her opening volley:
Como e'? Yo soy niche
Mi intencion no es salir como negrita linda
en los afiches
Y si me ven asi es porque
s6 que todavia hay
quien quisiera ser mayoral
Pa' verme trabajando sin descanso
en los trapiches
Eso lo he sufrido, lo he visto ...
What's that? I'm black
My intention is not to be a pretty black girl in the posters
And if they see me this way it's because
I know that there are still those
who would like to be an overseer
So they can see me working without rest
in the sugar mills
I have suffered that, I have seen it ...
Here Magia evokes her blackness through the expression niche, a ver-
nacular Cuban term for blacks long inscribed with a racially derisive, if not
overtly racist, meaning. The phrase has, however, worked its way into the

New Revolutionarn Horizons 103


parlance of Afro-Cuban youth and, reminiscent of African American inver-
sions of "nigger" (i.e., nigga), is frequently employed as a marker of pro-
black unity and self-affirmation. Indeed, the Santos Surez-based trio of
100% Original give flamboyant expression to such verbiage in their tema
"Pa' mis niches" (For ma' niggaz), which proclaims: "Nigga, niche abre tus
ojos / Si hoy hemos sobrevivimos porque en el ayer luchamos para juntos
hoy estar unidos" (Nigga, niche open your eyes / If today we have survived
it's because we fought for our unity in the past).
For both Magia and 00% Original, the term niche evokes legacies of ra-
cial subjugation as well as liberatory possibilities. Yet in contrast to ooo%'s
masculine rendering centering "hombre negro" (black brother) as cardinal
protagonist, Magia's niche is decidedly female, one unwilling to conform to
normative prescriptions that would fix her body-"a pretty black girl"-as
an object of heteropatriarchal gaze and consumption. Magia alternatively
historicizes such raced genderings by invoking the memory of enslavement:
"I know that there are still those who would like to be an overseer / So they
can see me working without rest in the sugar mills." By proclaiming "I
have suffered that, I have seen it," Magia marks a historical link with racial
slavery, while testifying to its everyday vestiges in the life of black women.
Though Magia too declares "somos Mambises, luchando lo mismo," her
gendered positionality would in fact become an increasingly vocal part of
her artistic voice and identity as a performer.
Obsesion nonetheless represents something of an enduring older-guard
within Havana's hip hop community, most of whom have tended to range
between their late teens and early twenties during their music-making
years in comparison to the duo's thirties (and eventually beyond)-an age
difference that often translated into having relatively younger parents. This
contrast may in part account for Obsesion's relatively less conflicted iden-
tifications with the Cuban state and its institutions in comparison to many
of their peers. As I discuss shortly, forms of revolutionary affinity are often
a central and defining component among many Cuban MCs. A key distinc-
tion, however, lies in raperos' varying mediations in that space between the
Revolution with a capital R and alternative revolutionary conceptions vis-
n-vis dimensions of identity and political positioning. Magia and Alexey's
comments do nonetheless underscore the tendency among many Cuban
raperos during this period of viewing their work as critically engaged from
within-rather than against-the Cuban Revolution.

104 CHAPTER THREE


It is also clear that in addition to a range of autonomous, self-financed
projects, Magia and Alexey share a long history of working collaboratively
with state institutions-a history at times generating ambivalence among
more institutionally wary members of Havana's hip hop community. In
2000, for instance, Obsesion was among four hip hop groups to join the
state-run empresa (venture/project) Benny Mor6 established to promote
performance opportunities nationally for Cuban musicians-the first such
institutional inclusion of raperos. Magia explained that their involvement
came about through months of struggle that, in the end, bore little fruit
given limited resources and an organizational inexperience regarding the
needs of hip hop artists. Obsesion's debut album, Obsesi6n, produced that
same year, nevertheless remains the one commercial hip hop album re-
leased on Cuba's state-run music label EGREM.15 Further along, Obsesion
was one of the first of the coveted few hip hop groups to join the newly
formed Agencia Cubana de Rap (ACR, or Cuban Rap Agency) in 2002-a
state organ set up specifically for the commercial development and promo-
tion of Cuban hip hop with an eye toward both domestic and international
markets. Magia would in fact eventually assume leadership of the ACR, a
complicated tenure to which I will later return.
While such involvements may not necessarily imply compromise, they
did mark both a dexterity and an ideological (if at some level strategic) will-
ingness to engage institutionally with the revolutionary state. Magia and
Alexey were indeed often adamant in conversation that institutional col-
laborations in no way menaced their artistic vision or craft, and if this were
to arise, they argued, they would cease to participate. Though Obsesion's
temas were often critically attuned to thorny questions of race and moved
from antiracist positions, unlike some of Havana's more outspoken hip
hop artists, they generally avoided launching direct critiques at the Cuban
state and its institutions. While degrees of autocensura, or self-censorship,
were frequently part of the negotiated politics of artistic production in Cuba
(cf. Fernandes 2006), given the duo's strong inherited identification with
the Cuban Revolution-and possibly by extension the Cuban state-they
seemed in my experience less concerned with these tensions than others.

New Revolutionarn Horizons io5


Elaborating Spaces

During my early foray into Havana's hip hop community I developed re-
lationships with a set of individuals who either were or soon became key
players within the local hip hop scene. In addition to the likes of Magia
and Alexey, and later Pablo Herrera, Rodolfo Rensoli, and Ariel Fernandez
Diaz, I befriended a dynamic crew of hip-hop-affiliated folks in el Vedado,
where DJ Alexis D'Boys among others was active. This seaside barrio with
its tree-lined streets was one of the more affluent (and whiter) of Havana's
neighborhoods prior to 1959. With the onset of the Cuban Revolution, how-
ever, many residents joined the exodus ofwealthy and middle-class Cubans,
given the threat-both real and perceived-the revolution posed to estab-
lished lines of racial-class privilege. Vedado today nonetheless remains
home to some of Havana's relatively more well-off residents, many residual
family of those who emigrated during the "white flight" of the early 196os.
In addition to benefiting from racially skewed patterns of foreign re-
mittance that privilege such lighter-skinned Cubans, Vedado residents live
in some of Havana's most coveted real estate, which in today's foreign-
currency-driven tourist economy translates into marketable capital. As one
of the barrios with the highest concentration of casas particulares that rent
rooms (both legally and illicitly) to tourists, Vedado benefits dispropor-
tionably from this niche of Cuba's new economy. The barrio does, however,
have pockets of black and darker-skinned Cubans, some of whom acquired
housing vacated by fleeing employers in ways similar to those mentioned
previously by DJ Alexis D'Boys in the context of barrio Lawton. Analogous
in this sense to the multi-unit solares of Central Havana, many of the onetime
palatial single-family homes in Vedado accommodate multiple households
among now-partitioned units.
One such site and surrounding black pocket centers around the intersec-
tion of Tenth and Nineteenth Streets, known locally as Diez y Diecinueve,
where Deno, a dark-skinned early-twenty-something dreadlocked black man,
lived with his extended family. Deno's home and adjoining patio, part of a
formerly grand two-story house now in need of significant restorative work,
became a communal center for the EPG&B crew (the Executive Plan Ghetto
and Barbito).16 Founded in the union of Grandes Ligas, a local hip hop duo
out of Vedado; Junior Clan, a duo from the adjoining Central Havana bar-
rio of Cerro; and a spoken-word circle known as Jovenes Rebeldes, EPG&B

I06 CHAPTER THREE


3.2. Producer Pablo Herrera (left) and DJ Alexis "D'Boys" Rodriguez.
Photo by Sahily Borrero
celebrated themselves as among the more subversively "underground" Mcs
in the Havana area." Increasingly graffiti-adorned, the patio beside Deno's
house became something of a local hip hop institution where, beginning in
2001, a series of EPG&B street concerts were held, involving guest appear-
ances by many of Havana's established raperos.
Taking on the flavor of a festival block party, these informal concerts
regularly drew hundreds of overwhelmingly darker-skinned youth into the
adjacent cobblestone streets in an otherwise sedate, predominantly white
Vedado. Claiming space at levels of both the material and the sonic, these
public spectacles often drew the attention of the police, who on numerous
occasions shut the events down. This eventually changed, however, as the
revolutionary state, through the conduit of the Asociaci6n Hermanos Saiz,
began lending support to these events in the early 2000s by supplying audio
equipment and arranging greater police tolerance. Such moves illustrated
a gradual shift in the state's approach from one of cautious suspicion to
institutional incorporation-a strategy I return to in detail in chapter 5.
While Grandes Ligas and Junior Clan members had close associations
in 1999, EPG&B as a collective had yet to be formed. It was during this early

New Reuolutionary Horizons 107


period, however, that I developed many ofmy connections with these artists
and their extended Diez y Diecinueve posse. Many contacts grew out of reg-
ular visits to La Pampa, a small cabaret-style club down the street from my
flat in Cayo Hueso. Sitting rather apropos in the shadow of General Antonio
Maceo's statue at the corner of Parque Maceo and the seaside thoroughfare
of El Malec6n, La Pampa was the latest local incarnation of la mofa where
Adalberto Jimenez held court as resident DJ. Here on any given Thursday
through Saturday night, well into the morning, an animated crowd of black
youth could be found extending into the street. While many lacked the 20
peso entrance fee (the equivalent of US$1), others preferred the cooler night
air to the stifling heat within. Given that the club's beats often resonated
well beyond its doors, the adjoining street was indeed integral to La Pampa's
social space and party.
Regarding attire, many young women attending wore tight-fitting tops
and some fluorescent spandex tights that were au courant across a nota-
bly wide generational range of Havana women at that fashion juncture.
Young men donned baggy pants, loose jerseys (including a small number
of NBA and NFL jerseys), U.S. baseball caps, and for a privileged few FUBU
and Eck6 designer gear-among the latest in hip-hop-aligned youth style.
These style practices were often informed by dog-eared U.S. rap magazines
and videocassettes of hip hop videos that found their way to Cuba via visit-
ing family members, friends, and tourists from the United States. They also
spoke broadly to expanding circuits of transnational exchange and a grow-
ing culture of consumerism in a once definitely anti-consumerist Cuba.
Inside La Pampa's small, sweltering, barely lit space, DJ Adalberto Jim6nez
played U.S. hip hop and R&B with intermittent microphone shout-outs be-
fore a moving mass of sweat-soaked bodies. Rather than LPs or the later
proliferation of CDs, Adalberto's music was "spun" from second-generation
audiocassettes over a dilapidated speaker system at deafening levels. The
sound quality though never seemed much of a concern to those gathered
in celebratory communion with and through the music. To my half-attuned
ear at the time, many beats often seemed slightly dated given the lag time it
took most North American music to make its way to the island.
Over subsequent years, however, such lag was less the case as consump-
tion habits evolved, fed in large part by the increased trafficking of North
Americans with linkages to Havana's hip hop community. It was in fact not
long before many were as abreast with the most recent beats as any pro-

io8 CHAPTER THREE


fessed hip hop head in the United States. Indeed, upon my repeated returns
to Havana I frequently found myself schooled on the latest U.S. tracks by
my rapero friends, many of whom had a particularly strong command of
music out of New York City and the Oakland, California, area due to estab-
lished bicoastal ties with local hip hop communities. The eventual access
to computer-based CD-burning technology dramatically increased the pace
and range of new-music dissemination within Havana's tight-knit networks
of hip hop devotees.
Regardless of how relatively current a track may have been on any given
La Pampa night, scores of dancing revelers, hands aloft, could be found
singing along with the lyrics though most spoke little if any English. Hip
hop for these young people was more than simply music; it was an active
and deeply lived facet of social life and identity. As DJ Alexis D'Boys, whom
I first met at La Pampa, once put it: "My life is hip hop, hip hop is my cul-
ture, I am hip hop. Hip hop is my life wherever I am until I die."18 Though
it was one of the only Havana-area locations at the time where the hip hop
devout could commune, La Pampa's dance-only format precluded live per-
formances. Local MCs had to rely on Thursday or Friday night open-mic
events held a half-hour bus ride away in Alamar's amphitheater as the only
semi-reliable performance venue. This, however, was 1999.
By 2000 another local hip hop pena (event party) emerged at a small
venue, Club Las Vegas, located just a few blocks from La Pampa on Infanta
Avenue at the border of barrios Cayo Hueso and Vedado. Prior to its hip
hop christening, I had visited the club to catch a small revue-style caba-
ret that turned out to be a nostalgic retro-pastiche of a classic teatro bufo
performance complete with the archetypical trio of el negrito, la mulata, and
el gallego caricatures. I recall the largely Cuban audience at the club being
highly amused with the buffoonish exploits of el negrito-the "little black
man" played in blackface opposite the gallantly masculine "Spanish" gal-
lego figure-as he ran around farcically trying to win the affection of the
alluring mulata adorned with her prerequisite long flowing hair and com-
plementary fishnet stockings. As Jill Lane's work (2005) illustrates, Cuba's
comedic teatro bufo tradition offered a popular blackface casting of dom-
inant racial, gendered, and class scriptings in the early framing of Cuba's
racially triangulated national imaginary-one apparently alive or revived in
the contemporary moment.
A decidedly different shade of Cuban blackness emerged Wednesday af-

New Revolutionarn Horizons 109


ternoons, however, when Las Vegas transformed into a weekly performance
space for local raperos and their fans. Descending into a sunken windowless
space on a given afternoon, one refreshingly cool thanks to its privileged
air-conditioning, groups like Anonimo Consejo, 100% Original, Junior
Clan, Raperos Crazy de Alamar, Grandes Ligas, and Obsesion performed
original material over prerecorded background tapes. The overwhelmingly
black, early to midtwenties crowd collected around cocktail tables beside
the floor-level stage came out religiously to indulge in music and drink while
rooting on local MCs.
Reflecting the expanding growth and sophistication of local hip hop, a
subsequent and in many ways intuitionally significant site for Havana-area
MCs emerged in 2001, Caf6 Cantante. A comparatively glitzy nightclub at
the crossroads of Vedado and Cerro barrios famed for salsa performances,
Caf6 Cantante was located in the basement of the Teatro Nacional (Na-
tional Theater) overlooking Havana's storied Plaza de la Revolucion. With
its towering monument to Jose Marti and iconic building-side portrait of
Che Guevara, the normally empty square is home to Havana's mass rallies,
including Fidel Castro's legendary May Day speeches. It was thus notable
that hip hop established a niche at the foot of such a sanctified space (and
in the institutional bowels of the National Theater), access to which was
afforded by the state-run Asociacion Hermanos Saiz (AHS) in conjunction
with the Instituto Cubano de la Musica (Cuban Institute of Music).
While Pablo Herrera recalls encountering the pioneering hip hop crew
Amenaza during a show in Caf6 Cantante in the mid-199os,19 my first ex-
perience of the locale was in 2001 during recently instituted Saturday after-
noon matinees devoted to local hip hop performances. By this time Pablo
and Ariel Fernandez Diaz (aka DJ Asho) were cohosting the afternoon hip
hop event under the auspices of AHS involving a mix of U.S. hip hop music
and live performances. From this moment on the caf6 emerged as the pre-
eminent weekly showcase for Havana-area raperos. By 2002 the venue was
incorporated into an expanded multiday Cuban hip hop festival, reflecting
again the Cuban state's growing institutional investment in hip hop during
this period.
One final site instrumental to hip hop's ascendance in Havana at this
formative juncture was La Madriguera. A small compound located on the
dilapidated grounds of Parque Quinta de los Molinos in Central Havana,20
La Madriguera had long served as a central administrative point for AHS's

110 CHAPTER THREE


involvements with Havana raperos. Here Rodolfo Rensoli's Grupo Uno,
through the institutional sponsorship of AHS, organized a number of Ha-
vana's early hip hop festivals, including annual MC auditions for festival
entry. By 2003 La Madriguera began organizing regular nighttime penas
hosted by DJ Ariel Fernandez Diaz, now institutionally positioned within
AHS as the principal liaison between the revolutionary state and the island's
hip hop movement.21 Far from the earlier days of Adelberto's pirated audio-
cassettes, Ariel held court with state-of-the-art CD-based electronic mixing-
tables broadcast over high-end mobile speakers.22 Some of the latest East
Coast beats were spun before an energized local crowd of young, demon-
stratively black and darker-skinned hip hop heads. While La Madriguera's
penas made occasional space for impromptu free-style sessions among lo-
cal MCs, the spot was primarily one dedicated to body-centered celebrations
of U.S. hip hop. To gain broader perspective on the evolving dimensions of
rapero performance, however, one needs to revisit Cuba's annual hip hop
festival as a cumulative marker and apogee of creative innovation among
Havana-area artists.
Performing Blackness at the 2000 Festival
In the summer of 2000 I returned to Havana after a few months' absence
just a week or so prior to the sixth annual Cuban hip hop festival, custom-
arily held during the sweltering month of August. Part of the logic behind
the August scheduling was to hold the festival during the summer recess
when school-age youth, who comprised a sizable component of Alamar's
hip hop fan base, would be free to attend evening performances that often
ran late into the night. Another key consideration was that Black August,
a New York-based hip hop collective that participated in the two previous
festivals, was set to partake again in 2000. The collective traditionally orga-
nized events in August in remembrance of the August 1971 murder of Black
Panther George Jackson23 and preceding August histories of black resistance
dating back to Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion. Through modest donations
to Havana's rapero community and, most significantly, the shepherding of
U.S. hip hop artists to the island for annual performances, Black August
had become an integral facet of the festival since 1998. Unlike the previous
year, when I had failed to attend, I recognized in 2000 that I could ill afford
to miss another year's festival.

New Revolutionarn Horizons  III


Once back in Havana I immediately headed out to reconnect with people,
finding everyone feverishly in preparation for the upcoming festival. A com-
mon complaint in rapero circles at the time concerned the disorganization
on the part of the festival's lead coordinator, Grupo Uno. In attending sub-
sequent festivals it was indeed my experience that there was often confusion
over the details of the event's preparation, necessary resources were rarely
in place, and schedules were habitually in flux. It is also worth noting in
retrospect that this 2000 edition of the festival would be the last year that
Rensoli and Grupo Uno would be coordinating the event. Since 1999, the
Cuban state had become increasingly active in the festival's organizational
structure, a development reflecting increased efforts to incorporate hip hop
within institutional folds of the state. For the immediate moment Rensoli
and company were still the lead organizing force behind the festival's four
nights of performances.
The afternoon of the festival's opening night, I headed out to Alamar's
amphitheater to attend the evening's sound check and to retrieve a prom-
ised credential tag that would allow me backstage access during the festi-
val. On that muggy August afternoon in front of Havana's stately Capitolio
building, I boarded a 20-peso maquina-one of the old, often ramshackle
pre-1959 American cars that operate as privately run collective taxis-for
a twenty-minute ride east to the coastal municipality of Alamar. Between
the colossal Capitolio, the prerevolutionary seat of Cuba's legislature styled
after the U.S. Capitol that looms over Havana's skyline, and the antiquated
fume-engulfed maquina, I was reminded of the everyday intimacies of U.S.
imperial legacies and the improvisational nature of their transformation on
the island. Might Cuban hip hop, I mused, be yet another variation on this
proverbial theme? Or, now in hindsight, in what ways might the unfolding
hip hop festival reveal neoliberal countercurrents of empire and revolution
at the millennial turn?
Following the ride and an additional fifteen-minute walk down from the
main road past countless rows of high-rise apartment buildings, I arrived at
Alamar's amphitheater. Atop descending concrete tiers of empty seats lead-
ing to a large stage below, the festival's organizer, Rodolfo Rensoli, was in the
control area scrambling to pull together final details for the opening night's
performances. While waiting to speak to him about my credential tag, I
joined in on a cajita lunch provided to all working the festival prep. Named
for the small brown paper boxes stuffed with fried pork, congri (rice with a

112 CHAPTER THREE


sprinkling of red beans), and raw cabbage-long a Havana street staple-
these lunches represented a limited, though at the time much appreciated,
gesture of governmental support for an otherwise resource-strapped festival.
While absorbed in my cajita, I listened in as the MC trio of Alexei, Am-
aury, Ransel of Reyes de las Calles rehearsed their tema "El mundo va a aca-
barse" (The world is coming to an end). The track's instrumental built upon
a sample riff from the classic 1974 hit "La Habana Joven" (Young Havana) by
the immortal Los Van Van, Cuba's premier dance band since the early 1970s.
I later found out the track was produced by Pablo Herrera, who often spoke
of the need to create an "authentic" Cuban sound behind Cuban MCs rather
than relying on U.S.-produced background beats.24 In marked contrast to
the buoyant Van Van original, however, Reyes de las Calles offered a mark-
edly different rendering of a "young Havana."
Though deceptively playful in delivery, the song painted a grim portrait
of the social hypocrisy of the Cuban everyday. Thick with liturgical allusion,
"La Habana Joven" evoked the wrathful coming of a black God to a society
riddled with racism and duplicity, taking retribution against racists under
whose weight blacks have been perpetually "squeezed." Like many raperos,
Reyes employed metaphor and doble sentido (double meaning) to veil more
overt forms of critique, while further masking the bite through a stylized
use of humor and satirical play. For further effect, the artists went on to
perform the track during the festival equipped with a small blow-up raft and
plastic oars in a thinly disguised reference to los balseros, the thousands of
disillusioned Cubans who fled in rafts to the United States following the
onset of the economic crisis (see chapter 2). It was as if the trio were aban-
doning a torn and sinking Cuba while testifying to its demise. "El mundo
va a acabarse," as it turns out, was the opening performance that first night
of the festival.
I returned to Alamar later that evening with Magia and Alexey of Obse-
sion, who were scheduled to perform later in the festival's multiday run.
Within a few blocks of the amphitheater we could feel the reverberations of
bass-heavy beats echoing off buildings, ever intensifying as we drew closer.
The music was of U.S. rather than Cuban origin, suggesting that the eve-
ning's performances had yet to start despite our late arrival. The organiz-
ers were evidently priming the crowd with recent tracks by Common and
the Roots, two favorites of local hip hop followers who had or would soon
perform in Cuba. As we made our way toward the entrance flooded with

New Revolutionarn Horizons  113


attendees purchasing tickets at five Cuban pesos apiece (roughly US$0.25),
we encountered a few police officers at the doorway who allowed us passage
after viewing our credential tags.
Once inside we were met by a descending sea of roughly three thousand
young people milling about in energized anticipation of the festival's first
night of music. Surveying the scene, it was a significantly darker-skinned
audience in comparison to the multiracial range of Cuba's broader popula-
tion. Also notable was the apparent youth of those attending; the median
age could not have been much beyond seventeen. This was clearly a younger
following in comparison to those I had encountered at smaller hip hop
events throughout Havana, where, in line with most artists, the audience
generally ranged between their early twenties and early thirties.
A key difference was that the majority of these young people were drawn
locally from Alamar, as the distance and scarcity of reliable night transport
for return to Havana made it difficult for many outsiders to attend. This,
however, did not deter the most devoted who managed by one form or
another to make it out to each of the festival's four nights of performances.
Much like La Pampa's patrons but thirty times its multitude, many of the
young men donned baggy pants and tops, baseball caps and skullies (skull
caps), and athletic team jerseys, while a few flaunted hip-hop-associated
U.S. attire like FUBU. Among the young women, spandex tights and
shorts along with form-fitting tops were again standard fare. Yet draped
squarely behind the stage below sat a towering Cuban flag basking in the
multicolored stage lighting as if to remind all: "This is Cuba, be there no
confusion!"
Once the evening's performances began, all attention was directed to the
onstage spectacle below. In addition to Reyes de las Calles, groups perform-
ing that opening night included Raperos Crazy de Alamar (RCA), Pasion
Oscura, and the female trio of Instinto. Waves of call-and-response moved
through the crowd, while in classic hip hop fashion a sea of arms bobbed
in rhythmic call with the music as energies rose. With performances wrap-
ping up around 1:30 AM, the crowd filed out into Alamar's darkened, now
quiet streets, heading home in anticipation of the following night's perfor-
mances. For some of us the night was far from over. The public buses and
maquinas that brought many to Alamar from Havana earlier were now no-
where to be found. Sweat-soaked, dehydrated, and exhausted, we dragged
ourselves up to the main road to wait for a passing bus carrying early morn-

114 CHAPTER THREE


ing commuters, eventually arriving back to Havana by 4 AM, only to do it all
again the next night.
The following evening Alamar had a notably different energy, however.
On approaching the amphitheater one could immediately sense a height-
ened buzz and nervous tension among the milling crowd as scores of blue-
clad police stood in front of the entrance overseeing crowd control. Inside,
additional stern-faced columns of police were positioned in front of and
beside the stage below. These numbers were in marked contrast to the rela-
tively sparse police presence on the festival's previous night. A key distinc-
tion was that in addition to a list of Cuban groups slated to perform, the
hip hop duo of Dead Prez and the DJ-cum-MC Tony Touch-all from New
York City-were topping the bill that night. This was Black August's (aka
Augusto Negro's) night at this year's festival.
Upon entering the amphitheater, members of Black August's New York
contingent handed out flyers in Spanish introducing the collective. The flyer
was adorned with a graphic composite of Afro-adorned images of George
Jackson beside Assata Shakur, the onetime Black Panther member and Cu-
ba's most renowned African American political exile. The two profiles were
framed by a large five-point Cuban-style star. Inscribed below in large block
letters read:
BLACK AUGUST 3RD ANNUAL BENEFIT CONCERT 2000
DEDICATED TO ASSATA SHAKUR AND VIEQUES, PUERTO RICO
The eight-page handout in Spanish opened with the question " Por que el
agosto negro?" (Why Black August?), followed by a brief history of events
that began:
The Tradition of Black August was established during the 70s in the
Californian penal system by men and women of the Black/New Afrikan
liberation movement as a way to remember and investigate a heritage of
resistance in the Americas.
This preface was followed by an outline of the collective's central principles,
which included:
- The global development of hip hop culture as a means of facilitating
international interchange between communities of youth with the in-
tention of promoting greater consciousness around social and polit-
ical issues.

New Revolutionarn Horizons  115


- Collective opposition to the criminalization ofyouth and youth culture.
- Organizing against the international prison industrial complex and
the escalated incarceration of political prisoners in the U.S.
- Fighting the persistence of white-supremacist propaganda and viola-
tions of human rights.
The text closed with the following statement:
Through a powerful union of hip hop culture and political information,
Black August promotes our own hip hop aesthetic which emphasizes
sincere self-expression, creativity, and the sense of responsibility to the
community.
The remaining six pages were devoted to Spanish translations of song lyrics
by Dead Prez and Tony Touch.
As is evident from this material, Black August organized around a set of
political commitments in dialogue with recent histories of U.S. black radi-
cal thought and practice. Drawing upon an earlier prison movement of the
same name aimed at political education among African American inmates,
Black August formed in the late 1990s in New York City as a project-offshoot
of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a youth-centered activist
collective grounded in a black nationalist orientation and human rights ad-
vocacy. While in conversation with an earlier moment of radical organizing,
Black August's program reflected cultural priorities of a younger generation
of activists who invoked hip hop as a global medium of political mobili-
zation and youth outreach. Beyond Cuba, such transnational bearings led
to Black August projects involving U.S.-based hip hop artists' and activists'
tours to South Africa, Brazil, Tanzania, and Venezuela. In the case of South
Africa, the 2001 tour was coordinated to coincide with the UN's World Con-
ference against Racism in Durban, with artists performing at the adjoining
NGO antiracism forum.25
Internationalist orientations being what they were, Black August's ideo-
logical groundings-along with its mother organization, MXGM-remained
significantly shaped by nationalist traditions of U.S. black radicalism.21
Black August's use of the term New Afrikan in its literature to refer to Afro-
descendant populations marked an alignment with a particular post-196os
vein of black-left nationalism along those of the Black Liberation Army
(BLA) and the New Afrikan People's Organization (NAPO), members of

116 CHAPTER THREE


which have been imprisoned or, as in the case of a few including Assata
Shakur and Nehanda Abiodun, forced into exile. Black August's support for
an older cohort of imprisoned radicals and broader anti-prison focus grew
in important part out of intergenerational networks of solidarity with this
history. Hip hop in this light is viewed as a temporal bridge through which
political sensibilities sought translation into a new era of social activism.
Amid these converging currents of black radicalism, revolutionary inter-
nationalism, and hip hop itself, post-1959 Cuba has played its own historical
part. Building upon legacies of support for African American radicals dating
back to Fidel Castro's impromptu 1960 meeting with Malcolm X in Harlem,
the U.S. black left has shared a long, if at times ambivalent, history of soli-
darity with revolutionary Cuba (Joseph 2002; Reitan 1999). Concurrent with
Cuba's anticolonial involvements in Africa, a stream of prominent figures
including Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, and others
like Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, visited or spent time in exile in
Cuba during the 196os and 1970s. As one of the first African Americans to re-
ceive asylum, the radical iconoclast Robert Williams hosted a Havana-based
AM radio program, Radio Free Dixie, whose 1961-65 broadcast mingling mu-
sic, news, and political commentary targeted black communities along the
southeastern United States. Yet Williams, like a number of subsequent Afri-
can Americans, left Cuba disillusioned about the perceived shortcomings of
the Revolution's antiracist commitments (cf. Clytus and Rieker 1970). There
have been related suggestions that Cuban support for U.S. black radicals
not only served as a proxy challenge to U.S. imperialism, but also offered a
popular means of deflecting domestic attention from Cuba's own incongru-
ences of race (C. Moore 1988).
Tensions notwithstanding, such histories have engendered their own
structures of feeling and forms of social memory in Cuba. Tapping into a
moment of this history, I recall my friend Rita reminiscing about her school-
age experience singing the popular solidarity song "iPor Angela!" calling
for the freeing of Angela Davis from imprisonment in the United States
during the early 1970s.27 As Rita shared the song, clenched fist raised high,
she began to cry as emotionally laden memories of the period returned to
her. Although she was not Afro-Cuban herself, Rita's nostalgias were rooted
in an affective sense of political solidarity that she, as a child of the Cu-
ban Revolution, shared with African Americans in their labors for social
justice.

New Revolutionarn Horizons  117


A more immediate set of conversations began with the arrival of Assata
Shakur, who, following a prison escape and period of underground activity
in the United States, was granted political asylum in Cuba in the mid-198os.
A former Panther long active in black radical circles in the New York area,
Shakur was also the godmother of the late hip hop artist turned global icon
Tupac Shakur, an association not lost on many hip hop devotees in both
the United States and Cuba. Indeed, given narrative form in her 2001 auto-
biography, Assata, Shakur's life of radicalism has attracted popular support
among a younger generation of politically minded U.S. hip hop artists and
affiliated activists, their ranks comprising much of the energy behind a 2005
"Hands Off Assata" campaign organized in response to a U.S. Justice De-
partment's $1 million bounty for her capture.28 Black August's co-dedication
of the 2000 festival to Shakur reflects these solidarities.
Black August's conjoining of Cuban hip hop and the lives of African
American political exiles was held as part and parcel of the same project.
To these ends Black August hosted a series of annual benefit concerts in
New York City with the dual purpose of raising funds in support of impris-
oned African American radicals and their families, while providing modest
material assistance to Cuba's hip hop community. With 1998 marking the
project's inaugural year and initial Cuban foray, artists Mos Def (aka Yasiin
Bey) and Talib Kweli, then of the duo Black Star, alongside MCs Sticman and
MI of Dead Prez, performed under Black August's umbrella at the festival.
Mergings of music and politics endured the following year as the Chicago-
born artist Common interrupted his festival performance to read a letter
of solidarity addressed to the audience from Dr. Mutulu Shakur-a former
NAPO member and stepfather of Tupac Shakur currently imprisoned in the
United States. Provoking a stir among Cuban higher-ups, the impromptu
presentation was prompted by Nehanda Abiodun, who I am told provided
the letter and encouraged its reading.29 Common later released the track "A
Song for Assata," likely evolving out of his time in Cuba, on his album Like
Waterfor Chocolate (2000), which recounted Shakur's experience of imprison-
ment in the United States.30
Black August's political affinities were not limited to nationalist claims of
blackness, however. The collective's 2000 co-dedication to Vieques, Puerto
Rico, underscored a transnational frame of social justice that, reminiscent
of internationalist orientations of earlier moments, recognized the often
imbricated linkages between antiracist and anti-imperialist struggle. Black

118 CHAPTER THREE


August's attention to Vieques also reflected the New York-based collective's
sensitivity to histories of Puerto Rican radicalism and labors for national in-
dependence, legacies of which found current expression in the campaign to
free the island of Vieques from over sixty years of U.S. military occupation,
an effort in which mainland Puerto Ricans played a vocal role.
A number of Nuyorican cultural activists were in fact integral to Black
August's formation and inaugural Cuban launching. Key among these was
Clyde Valentine, cofounder and editor of the now defunct hip hop maga-
zine Stress and a founding member of Black August. Another who shares
enduring connections with Havana raperos is Marinieves Alba, a Nuyorican
activist, writer, and events producer who helped organize a 2003 U.S. tour
of Havana-based artists culminating in a concert in Harlem's historic Apollo
Theater alongside the Roots. The Oakland, California, area brothers Kahlil
and Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi are two other enduring Puerto Rican supporters of
Havana's hip hop community, with Eli's 2003 film Inventos: Hip Hop Cubano
marking one of the earliest documentary treatments of Cuban hip hop. The
New York-based journalist Cristina Veran, moreover, was one of the first in
the United States to document Cuba's emerging hip hop scene (Verin 1998),
while the Bronx-born performance artist Caridad De La Luz, aka La Bruja,
accompanied the bill during the 2001 hip hop festival.
These collaborative involvements, once more, elaborated upon legacies
of Spanish colonial and U.S. imperial antagonism shared between the island
nations of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Such communion finds poetic form in the
celebrated verse "Cuba y Puerto Rico son de un pjaro las dos alas, reciben
flores y balas, sobre el mismo corazon" (Cuba and Puerto Rico are a bird's
two wings, receiving flowers and bullets in the same heart), penned in 1863
by the Puerto Rican abolitionist and independista poet Lola Rodriguez de Ti6
and later memorialized in Cuba by Pablo Milan6s in his 1978 ballad "Son de
Cuba a Puerto Rico." Yet his moment also built upon a rich history of Nuy-
orican participation in hip hop dating back to its artistic birth in the mid-
1970s. Hip hop's early development is indebted to the cultural interchange
and political affinity-making between African American, West Indian, and
Puerto Rican youth in New York City (see Chang 2005). Such intimacies,
Raquel Rivera argues, were grounded in Nuyoricans' shared experiences of
racial marginalization and histories of Afrodiasporic belonging forged, as
mentioned, through overlapping lines of blackness and latinidad (Rivera
2003). Black August's Cuban project can therefore be seen as elaborating

New Revolutionarn Horizons 119


on such interwoven affinities of race, diaspora, and hip hop via circulatory
solidarities of U.S.-Cuban exchange.
Black August's involvements with Cuban hip hop ran in close conver-
sation with efforts of another noted New Yorker, Danny Hoch. As a Jew-
ish hip-hop-identified performance artist, playwright, and cultural activist
raised in Queens, Hoch has long been an active interlocutor with Havana's
hip hop community. Building upon a network of relationships developed
with local MCs and others involved in Havana's scene since the mid-199os,
Hoch organized a number of collaborative projects including the previously
mentioned 2001 tour of Havana-based raperos to New York City. Hoch
has also incorporated lines of his Cuban experience into a number of his
performance pieces, including the previously mentioned Jails, Hospitals &
Hip-Hop and later Till the Break of Dawn (2007). As Nehanda Abiodun recalls,
Hoch, along with the venerable early hip hop notable Fab 5 Freddy (aka Fred
Brathwaite), hosted the first installment of Black August's Havana concerts
during the 1998 festival."
Returning to that August festival night, a heightened energy of excite-
ment was ever tangible as the audience milled about in anticipation of the
evening's performance. Though both Dead Prez and the Nuyorican DJ
turned music producer Tony Touch were headlining the bill, it was Dead
Prez's Afrocentric duo of M1 and Sticman who set the night's tone. In a
build-up to the artists' entrance, their support crew projected images of
Nelson Mandela, armed African soldiers, and black shackled fists raised
aloft on two giant screens that framed the Cuban flag at stage rear. When
Dead Prez finally arrived, the crowd roared with excitement, many of them
possibly recalling their initial festival foray two years earlier. The duo
opened with their nationalist ode "I'm a African" from their 2000 debut al-
bum, Let's Get Free. The scene was spectacular. The two dreadlocked artists,
surrounded by a stoic cordon of Cuban police below, rallied close to three
thousand darker-skinned youth in unison: "I'm a African, I'm a African /
And I know what's happenin'! / You a African, You a African / Do you know
what's happenin'?" English proficiency was apparently not necessary for
shared intelligibility, one that seemed to be conveyed at least in part along
lines of racial identification. Directly following Dead Prez's lead, Tony
Touch received a notably cooler response from the crowd, this despite his
efforts at Nuyorican Spanish and self-billing as Tony Toca (Tony "Touch").

120 CHAPTER THREE


Dead Prez spoke not a word of Spanish, yet they appeared to turn the
house out.
I recall Obsesion's Alexey Rodriguez, with whom I had traveled to the fes-
tival that evening, commenting on how impressed he was with Dead Prez's
performance, noting, "Su mensaje tenia tremenda fuerza" (Their message
had tremendous force). Although Alexey had little fluency in English, he
was quite familiar with Dead Prez and the politically charged nature of their
music, relying like others on translation assistance from English-speaking
friends like myself. He expressed concern, however, about one of the duo's
songs that evening, "They Schools," which offered a blistering rebuke of
the U.S. public education system. Alexey felt Dead Prez's indignation was
way over the top, taking particular issue with the line "All my high school
teachers can suck my dick, telling me white-ass lies and bullshit," which
he felt was excessively disrespectful. I shared with him my reading of the
song as a critique of a corrupt and racist education system, rather than a
personal attack on teachers per se-one systemic rather than individual in
nature. Alexey was not particularly swayed by my interpretation. I wondered
at the time if our disconnect might relate to long-standing tendencies in
revolutionary Cuba to privilege understandings of individual over structural
expressions of racism, often obfuscating broader systemic workings of ra-
cialized power and privilege. In a more immediate sense it was likely that
Alexey, as an Afro-Cuban, simply had difficulty identifying with Dead Prez's
level of black anger and societal alienation.
This discord reminded me of a distinction raperos often made between
their music and much of the more commercially oriented hip hop in the
United States. Gangsta thuggery, hyper-materialized bling, and virulent mi-
sogyny, so ubiquitous in corporately promoted U.S. hip hop, were conspicu-
ously (and often self-consciously) absent from Cuban hip hop. While hyper-
bolic in their seemingly endless commercial reproduction, such masculinist
tropes nonetheless emerge in conversation with histories of structural vio-
lence painfully endemic to postindustrial U.S. black urban life. Thus while
lines of racial affinity may have been in play that festival evening, Cuba and
by extension Cuban hip hop were in this sense indeed different.
This cultural divide resonated with an experience I later had following a
screening of the documentary film One Dollar: El precio de la vida during the
Havana Film Festival in 2002. Directed by the Panamanian American film-

New Revolutionarn Horizons 121


maker Hector Herrera, One Dollar chronicles the aftereffects of the 1989 U.S.
invasion of Panama on poor working-class Afro-Panamanians in Panama
City, depicting in brutal fashion the subsequent intensification of violence,
guns, and drug trafficking within these communities. Having attended the
screening with a handful of friends, I asked MC Michael Oramas of the hip
hop crew Junior Clan about his thoughts on the film. Michael responded
incredulously, "Todo lo que presento no puede ser real-algunos son falsos,
fabricados. Era demasiado" (Everything they presented cannot be real-
some are false, made up. It was too much). As critically minded and self-
declared "underground" as Michael considered himself, he found it difficult
to imagine such a violently desperate set of circumstances plaguing black
folks. While the dollar was also rapidly transforming the lived everyday in
Cuba, there were still few if any Caribbean, Latin American, or for that mat-
ter U.S. cities as relatively free of drugs, guns, and violent crime as Havana.
Cuba and its revolutionary history remained (if for the current moment)
notably different in this sense, a distinction that defied simple intraracial
translation while underscoring divergent historical positions vis-n-vis the
destructive tendencies of global capital and legacies of U.S. hegemony.
That said, there did appear to be salient connections that festival eve-
ning between Dead Prez's racially charged message and their young Cuban
audience. A shared sense of social belonging and/or common vocabulary
seemed to resonate. Reflecting on the internationalist dimensions of the
moment, the festival's coordinator Rodolfo Rensoli cited Black August's
participation and hip hop as enabling dialogue between Cuban and U.S.
MCs by way of diasporic currents of black identification. Regarding such
workings, Rensoli explained:
I used this idea of diaspora to help understand how blacks in the United
States, or blacks in the Caribbean, or blacks in other parts of the Ameri-
cas are all brothers. Part of our family went here, another part went there,
and for a long time we've hardly looked into each other's faces. All these
reflections came to me after my own experience with the festival, after
the level of communication between North American and Cuban raperos
helped me realize that there was a lot more in common between us.32
Reflecting further on the moment's dialogic possibilities, Ariel Fernandez
Diaz recalls:

122 CHAPTER THREE


The racial identity in the hip hop movement was there, the connection
with Black August just helped frame it, you know what I mean, to give
it better form and a better way to articulate itself. Because we definitely
needed and we definitely didn't have the intellectual and conceptual un-
derstanding of what we were trying to express. So we're not saying that
they taught us what we need to be addressing or talking about-we knew
that we needed to talk about-we were doing it way before. I mean, look
at "Ochavon cruzao" from '96 way before Black August.33 We were talking
about race before Black August.
So when Black August came we felt like someone had our backs. We
had support and another platform to validate the points that we were
already making. Black people have helped create the history of this coun-
try, and black people who have fought in the independence war and the
revolution have not been fully recognized by the state, which is mostly
dominated by white people. And with the denial of any kind of black ra-
cial identity with this thing "we are all Cuban" and "there is no thing as
black or white Cubans," you don't have anything to grab onto or gravitate
to. So suddenly you had people who helped us understand better what we
were trying to talk about and give it better intellectual form.34
Echoing similar lines, Pablo Herrera adds:
When Black August started coming to Cuba we found that we could iden-
tify with them, the same way they could identify with us. It wasn't that
they brought the politics to us, that they made us understand what race
meant, this is false.... That was a beautiful moment to be part of a ma-
jor moment of Pan-Africanism and solidarity between the people of the
United States and Cuba, African Americans and Afro-Cubans. Becoming
aware of the resources and the political activism that they were doing in
New York and San Francisco gave us tools to try and understand how to
deal with the shit here. We need to deal with the shit here in a radical way.
So I think something that is really important to talk about here is how
cosmopolitan Cuba became through Black August.35
While diasporic affinities and appeals to a black cosmopolitanism may
indeed have been instrumental during that and subsequent festivals, there
did appear to be limitations in their practice. I recall frustrations arising
during the 2000 festival over the limited degree of contact between local

New Revolutionarn Horizons 123


raperos and Black August's New York entourage. In the case of Dead Prez,
the only opportunity most Cuban MCs had to engage the duo was a few
fleeting minutes backstage just prior to their festival performance. Given
their connectedness, Pablo and Ariel were considerably more adroit in ac-
cessing the visiting artists. Pablo in particular, with his English fluency and
local position as a Black August liaison, appeared to spend significant time
during the festival in the company of artists and other Black August mem-
bers. For others, handshakes, embraces, and autographs were plentiful, but
often not much else. For many in the Black August delegation, the prior-
ity of the Cuban trip appeared more centered on connecting with African
American political exiles on the island rather than intentional structured
time for intercambio (exchange) with Havana's hip hop community.
The afternoon following Black August's festival program I attended a
meeting in an Alamar cultural center as part of the festival's coloquio (collo-
quium) series. In a dimly lit room with a handful of metal chairs and small
desks, roughly a dozen raperos and a few supporting cast members engaged
in a freewheeling discussion around issues, concerns, and grievances af-
fecting the hip hop community. One complaint concerned a lack of access
to visiting U.S. artists. Some members of the Diez y Diecinueve crew, for
instance, complained of their efforts to visit the Black August delegation
in their Vedado hotel only to be denied entrance beyond the lobby by hotel
security. I had myself spent time with the Black August entourage during
the festival, and in most cases these spaces largely conformed to the logics
of Cuba's new apartheid economy that tended to segregate Cubans from
dollar-paying foreign tourists and their restricted zones of consumption.
Revolutionary appeals to solidarity notwithstanding, global hierarchies of
social difference did not in the end appear to dissolve.
Another key issue raised at that afternoon's exchange concerned the fes-
tival's large police presence. Veteran MC Yrak Saenz of Doble Filo, for one,
was incensed by what he felt was the disrespectful treatment from police
the night before. Yrak recounted how he was harassed and questioned as he
tried to move about the stage-behavior that in his mind amounted to ";una
falta de respeto en mi propia casa!" (a lack of respect in my own house!).
While sharing his account he rubbed his finger along the underside of his
forearm, invoking the everyday Cuban gesture for blackness (i.e., "it's in the
blood") to underscore the raced significance of his encounter. During the
ensuing discussion there were complaints that hip hop shows seemed to

124 CHAPTER THREE


always draw more attention from the police than salsa concerts, which they
claimed were notorious for drunken spats of violence. Others chimed in
about rock shows, whose gatherings of mostly "white" youth rarely, if ever,
garnered the police attention with which hip hop had to contend.
The difference, they claimed, was hip hop's association with black youth,
whom Cuban police often indexed, again in a historically resonant sense,
with antisocial behavior aligned with violence and criminality. Many pointed
out that in fact fights rarely if ever occurred at hip hop events in Cuba. In my
experience this was indeed largely the case, remarkably refreshing given the
history of hip hop concerts in the United States where one often had to be
on guard against the looming specter of violent confrontation. By contrast,
my forays into Havana's hip hop spaces often exhibited a camaraderie and
absence of animosity among audience members. Havana's hip hop com-
munity was not free of internal tensions and interpersonal grievances-far
from it. Yet violence, criminality, and other so-called antisocial(ist) tenden-
cies in my experience were largely absent from hip hop followings in Ha-
vana. Nonetheless, the large police presence (and by extension the Cuban
state) appeared to think and act otherwise, perpetuating a long-standing
Cuban practice of policing black bodies and spaces.
An6nimo Consejo
The energy set in motion by Dead Prez and company that second festival
evening continued to build throughout the night as local Cuban groups
passed the torch. Closing out the show was the duo Yosmel Sarrias (aka
Sekou Messiah Umoja) and Maigel "Kokino" Entenza of Anonimo Consejo
(Anonymous Advice). Donned in a collage of Vietnamese-style straw hats,
oversized Che Guevara T-shirts, and amply baggy jeans with a single pant
leg hoisted aloft in au courant hip hop fashion, the duo hit the stage to
a ruckus reception. Although I had been aware of Anonimo Consejo and
their reputation as two of the most dynamic and lyrically provocative MCs
in Cuba, I had yet to see them perform.
Natives of the neighboring seaside municipality of Cojimar, Anonimo
Consejo were among the local favorites, and it showed. Working the crowd
through a series of call-and-response riffs, the duo had the riled-up au-
dience singing in animated harmony with many of their songs. The most
exuberant response seemed to arrive with their performance of "Las apa-

New Revolutionarn Horizons 125


I.

~Jf1

-J

p

s

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.4

3.3. Mcs Sekou Umoja (left) and Kokino Entenza of An6nimo Consejo.
Photo by Sahily Borrero
riencias enganan" (Appearances can deceive). Couched in tones of indig-
nation, the tema offered entry into the hardships of black youth navigating
the island's new dollarized geographies, and the Cuban state's often raced
efforts to police and regulate these marked spaces of exclusionary privilege.
An extended excerpt of the tema follows:
"Las apariencias enganan"
;An6nimo Consejo Revoluci6n!
lYosmel y Kokino Revoluci6n!
No me la aprietes mis
que yo sigo aqui
No me la aprietes mas, dejame vivir
Por mi Cuba lo doy todo soy feliz
Y to sigues reprendia en mi,
su ltame a mi
No te confundas con la arena que pisas
Dos pasos mis y se te recuerda
que estas en area divisa, Varadero

126 CHAPTER THREE


Todo no es como lo pintan
y yo sigo aqui de frente a los problemas
Aguantando con mi mano el hierro caliente
Sin pasarme por la mente coger una balsa
Y probar suerte en
otra orilla-a go millas
Todo no es como lo pintan
y yo sigo aqui
Cada paso en la calle es una preocupacion
Extranjero en busca de comunicaci6n
Con la poblacion,
5 minutos de conversacion
Policia en accion sin explicacion
Andando pa' la estacion
Trabajes o no trabajes,
ellos no pueden creer
Que estes hablando de cualquier otra cosa
Entonces te vas a reprender en mi
Yo que vivo y muero aqui
Yo que naci con el concepto y el ideal de
Jose Marti
Dejate de abuso
Coge mi coro cubano que dice
Yo sigo aqui, jamando el mismo cable que to
Yo sigo aqui, preparando el mismo vaso de agua con azucar que
bebes to
Yo sigo aqui, cogiendo el mismo camello insoportable que coges to
Yo sigo aqui, con el mismo pan de la
libreta que te comes to
Con el apag6n que molesta
Pi6nsalo antes de arrestarme
Justifica tu pregunta, yo tengo mi respuesta
Entonces porque icono! Te reprendes en mi
Yo que sigo aqui junto a ti
Sal de mi no me la aprietes mis

New Revolutionarn Horizons 127


;Dejame vivir!
Esto no es pa' que te erices
Esto no es pa' que me caces la pelea
Esto es para que entiendas de una vez y por todas
Que todos los jovenes no somos basura
Porque la divisa ha cambiado la forma de pensar de mucha gente
Y mucha de esa gente no somos nosotros,
los jovenes cubanos, quienes apoyamos
la idea de lo que es revolucion en todos los momentos
Anonimo Consejo Revolution!
Yosmel and Kokino Revolution!
Don't squeeze me anymore
because I'm still here
Don't squeeze me anymore, let me live
For my Cuba I give all, I am happy
And you continue to hassle me
let me go
Don't confuse yourself with the sand you step on
Two more steps and you'll be reminded
that you are in a dollar zone, Varadero36
Everything is not how it is painted
and I am still here confronting problems
Holding with my hand the hot iron
Without considering taking a raft
And trying my luck on
another shore-go miles away
Everything is not how it is painted
and I am still here
Every step in the street is a preoccupation
Foreigner looking for communication
With the population,
5 minutes of conversation
Police in action without explanation
Going to the station
Whether you work or don't work,
they can't believe

128 CHAPTER THREE


That you're talking of other things

So then you're going to hassle me
I that live and die here
I was born with the concept and the ideal of
Jos6 Marti
Drop this abuse
Take my Cuban chorus that says
I'm still here, in the same situation as you
I'm still here, preparing the same glass of water with sugar that you
drink
I'm still here, taking the same horrible bus
that you take
I am still here, with the same bread from the
libreta [ration book] that you eat
With the same annoying [electrical] blackouts
Think about it before arresting me
Justify your questions, I have my answer
Then why the fuck do you hassle me
I who am still here together with you
Leave me alone, don't squeeze me anymore
Let me live!
This is not to make your skin crawl
This is not to make you fight with me
This is so you can understand once and for all
That not all the young people are garbage
Because the dollar has changed many peoples'
way of thinking
And many of those people aren't us,
the young Cubans who support
the idea of what revolution is at all moments
This selection is an exemplar of Anonimo Consejo's contestive brand
of music making that long positioned them as two of the most respected
MCs in the movement. It also vividly illustrates the political character and
highly poetic use of social critique in rapero lyricism. Most immediately,

New Revolutionarn Horizons 129


"Las apariencias" voices in bold undiluted fashion the frustration and social
anger experienced by black youth, while introducing a key set of problemat-
ics around questions of citizenship recurrent in Cuban hip hop. A central
concern addressed here is the systemics of police harassment within Cuba's
new monetized economy. Although not explicitly sited, race and racialized
profiling are integral in the tema's critique. Allusions to being "squeezed,"
"reprimanded," and arrested by police for simply speaking with foreigners
evokes the experience of darker-skinned youth as discussed of being racially
marked as jineteros/as when in the company of foreigners.
Citing the sands of Cuba's famed tourist district Varadero-"en area di-
visa" (a dollar zone) and one largely off-limits at the time to Cubans-under-
scores the limitations of Cuban citizenship within the island's new market-
driven landscape. Rather than "coger una balsa" and flee to the United
States like so many from their seaside barrio, including one of Yosmel's
older brothers during the 1994 balsero crisis, Anonimo Consejo proclaim
their determination to remain faithful to Cuba through the struggles of ev-
eryday life-the same struggles, they point out, faced by their compatriots,
the police. While "the dollar has changed the way of thinking of many,"
they have stood fast in their support and belief in "the idea" of revolution.
Here, the duo's claim "I was born with the concept and the ideal of Jos6
Marti" is ripe with significance. The statement moors their demands for
fair and equal treatment by the police (and state) as black Cubans squarely
within the island's grounding narrative of nationhood. Such assertions of
citizenship-to be both black and Cuban-are in this sense implicit in the
very historical inception of cubanidad (Cubanness). Yet the emphasis here is
one centered on the "ideal" (rather than the "appearance") of Marti's vision
and the ensuing "idea" of revolution "at all [its various] moments" to which
Anonimo Consejo remain committed.
Overlapping frames of race and revolution, as discussed, have occupied
an important place among many black-identified members of Cuba's hip
hop community. Such framings, however, are often predicated on implicit
(or not so implicit) critiques of contemporary Cuban society and, by exten-
sion to varying degrees, the Cuban state itself. The emphasis here is on the
nationally imbricated ideals of racial equality and revolutionary struggle-
ideals understood as unrealized, if not significantly compromised, within
the current Cuban moment. The key tension lies then between the princi-
pled claims of a postracial revolutionary society and the quotidian reali-

130 CHAPTER THREE


ties of race as presently lived. Cuban hip hop thus emerges precisely amid
these incongruencies of race, nation, and revolution, while engaging those
same incongruencies from a vantage point of a racially positioned critique.
Within this context, discourses of revolution take on a marked racial signif-
icance; there is no "revolution" without racial equality and justice, the two
intrinsically joined at the hip (hop), so to speak.
Yosmel and Kokino's signature chant ";Anonimo Consejo Revolucion!,"
which both opens and closes "Las apariencias," is emblematic of their flam-
boyant use of revolutionary discourse and imagery in their music. This same
phrase, encircling an iconic image of Che Guevera's star-capped portrait, is
inscribed in the form of matching tattoos on the duo's right shoulders as
markers of their fidelity to, and embodied membership within, the revolu-
tionary nation. This discursive play on revolution finds further expression
in Anonimo Consejo's celebrated mantra "Hip Hop Revolution," a motto
that assumed collective resonance among many local raperos.
When asked about this call to revolution, Yosmel and Kokino explained
that their invocations of "revolution" were not in fact reducible to the Cuban
Revolution, at least not directly so. Rather, they directed me to the term's
dictionary definition referring to radical, progressively directed social
change. Such positions appear to differ from more explicit forms of Cuban
revolutionary identification voiced, for instance, by Magia and Alexey of
Obsesion. This is not to suggest that Obsesion did not share in the move-
ment's articulations with broader notions of revolutionary struggle. In the
case of Yosmel and Kokino, however, the emphasis seemed placed on al-
ternative revolutionary horizons, ones not necessarily beholden to national
proscriptive frames.
Internal Revolutions?
One potentially productive way to consider how raperos and their follow-
ers view their relationship to overlapping discourses of revolution is via the
oft-touted analogy of Cuban hip hop as a "revolution within a revolution."
The implication here is that hip hop is organic to, and ultimately operates
within, the broader terrain of revolutionary society-the struggle and ef-
forts of change therefore emanating from "inside" rather than "outside."
Such posturing is in line with refrains long voiced by many raperos that their
work is by no means positioned against the revolutionary project. Claims

New Revolutionarn Horizons 131


of this kind undoubtedly carry a certain tactical currency given the Cuban
state's general intolerance for public forms of dissent that might undermine
the holy trinity of la Revolucion, el estado, and el pueblo-one given embod-
ied authority in Fidel Castro's famed declaration "Dentro de la Revolucion,
todo; contra la Revolucion, nada" (Within the Revolution, everything;
against the Revolution, nothing) (see Castro 1961).
Yet on another level, as I have suggested, many raperos held genuine
degrees of identification with the ideals and principles of the Cuban Revolu-
tion, many ofwhich they were devoted to fight for and defend. Indeed, these
youth represent a generation of socially engaged artists shaped by socialist-
derived notions of egalitarianism embedded in revolutionary Cuban soci-
ety. Many saw their public role in this light as internal, socially productive
agents of change. Their stance resonates in this sense with strategies me-
diated by critically positioned intellectuals during the revolutionary period.
The Cuban cultural critic Desiderio Navarro argues, for instance, that such
intellectual currents are vital to the revolutionary process itself, suggesting
that their intervention,
far from being a threat to socialism, is its "oxygen," its "motor": a ne-
cessity for the survival and well-being of the revolutionary process. The
critical intellectuals believe that social criticism can constitute a threat
only when it is silenced or even met with reprisals, when it is confined to
a closed guild or institutional enclave, when it is placed in a communica-
tional vacuum under a bell jar, or-and this above all else-when it goes
unanswered or when, recognized as correct, it is not taken into account
in political practice. (Navarro 2002: 201)
One finds a similar analysis echoed in the words of Kokino, who qualified:
"Our critique or our protest is constructive. The idea of Anonimo Consejo
is not to throw the revolution to the floor. It is rather to make a revolution
within the revolution. It is to criticize the things, or to protest the things,
that are not well within the Cuban Revolution. But our objective is not to
harass or be destructive, but it is to make a new Cuba for young people."37
For many raperos like Kokino, demands for a socially and racially just
Cuba and broader world stem first and foremost from the principles em-
bodied within the promise of Cuban socialism. Their task, as expressed by
many, is to reveal and critique the limitations, contradictions, and at times
hypocrisy rooted in the chasm between the enduring claims and lived reali-

132 CHAPTER THREE


ties of Cuba's neoliberalized landscape, all toward the end of strengthening
Cuban society. The commonly expressed sentiment "somos constructivos,
no destructivos" (we are constructive, not destructive) resonant in Kokino's
response above speaks directly to this sense of social responsibility. Ariel
Fernandez Diaz similarly elaborated along these lines:
I think that hip hop takes on the necessary critique in our country to edu-
cate. I always say that the best way to be a revolutionary is to be critical,
you understand? The best form of art is the one that says what is good,
what is bad, what is harmful, or what is missing, this is valued, this is
critical, you understand? The position most revolutionary is to speak the
truth. Art has to say what is good and what is bad. If you hide your prob-
lems, or if you escape from them, nothing will be resolved.. .. Rap is a
music of resistance-it is fighting for rights that the revolution notes but
that society has not delivered.38
Among raperos and their followers, however, Cuba was not the sole
source of revolutionary inspiration. Over the years Yosmel and Kokino have,
for example, invoked the lives and struggles of African American radicals
such as Malcolm X, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Shaka Sankofa (Gary Graham),
as well as Nelson Mandela in their music. When I asked what sources im-
pacted their awareness of such black radicalism, the two cited Black Au-
gust's participation in previous festivals as a significant influence. As I will
discuss shortly, Black August was for the artists but one transnational route
of engagement with U.S. black radical traditions of discourse. As I came to
know Yosmel and Kokino, their music and evolving political sense of self
were also significantly informed by a more immediate locus of black radical
inspiration, Nehanda Abiodun. This was especially the case with Yosmel,
who, under Nehanda's tutelage, eventually took on the African-signified
name Sekou as an expression of his continued, ever-evolving efforts toward
critical black self-fashioning.

New Revolutionarn Horizons 133



Chapter 4.
Critical Self-Fashionings
and Their Gendering
What must whites think of the black who prides himself on his color?
-Jose Marti, La cuestion racial
El cimarron ya no tendras que huir en busca de nuevos horizontes.
[The cimarron now no longer has to flee in search of new horizons.]
-Anonimo Consejo, "Cimarron"
Although voiced a century apart, the citations above speak rather poet-
ically to Cuba's enduring tensions of race and national citizenship. Jos6
Marti, the celebrated late nineteenth-century criollo intellectual who gave
visionary form to the island's nonracial national foundations, poses a cau-
tionary query to black Cubans who might foreground racial identity over
the national. The consequences of such moves were soon laid bare in the
infamous "Race War" of 1912 involving the island-wide massacre of thou-
sands of Afro-Cubans in the wake of state efforts to eradicate the perceived
threat of an emergent Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party
of Color) and its calls for full citizenship rights for blacks within a new Cu-
ban republic. Echoes of this trauma abound; the Havana-based hip hop
duo Anonimo Consejo offer a present-day rejoinder to this history in the
redemptive figure of the African cimarr6n (maroon), whose radical pursuit
of black freedom and sovereign community is deemed no longer hollow.


As previously discussed, expressive realms such as music and the liter-
ary arts have long served as creative mediums through which Afro-Cubans
imagine alternative understandings of blackness in ways that varyingly ar-
ticulate with and diverge from a racially hybridized, if ultimately postracial,
cubanidad. Afro-Cuban efforts to navigate the historical constraints of a non-
racial Cuban nationhood have in turn had to grapple with a key dilemma
of citizenship: how to be mutually yet non-self-negatingly both Cuban and
black. Such discord evokes a certain contradictory "twoness" of Afrodias-
poric condition that W. E. B. Du Bois addressed so eloquently roughly a cen-
tury ago (Du Bois [1903] 1989). Although Du Bois was concerned in an im-
mediate sense with the struggle of post-emancipatory African Americans,
his reflections on black subjectivity and racialized marginality speak to the
wider hemispheric ambivalences of national belonging and citizenship lived
by African-descendant communities throughout the Americas.
For Afro-Cubans, mediating the enduring friction between blackness
and Cubanness as discussed has included efforts to reach beyond the is-
land's territorial and ideological bounds in the fashioning of coherent un-
derstandings of black Cuban selfhood. As with previous moments, Cuban
raperos have sought their own performative routes to such black alterity
through polyphonic claims to black citizenship via both the national and the
transnational. Indeed, it is precisely to these nuevos horizontes (new horizons)
that Anonimo Consejo's cimarron currently turns.
Pedagogies of Black Radicality
Between 2000 and 2002, a pair of rapero-affiliated spaces emerged in dif-
fering yet complementary ways as sites of racial politicization for a number
of key individuals in Havana's hip hop community. The spaces in question
were two informally organized "classes" geared toward redressing, in their
respective nationalist frameworks, themes of black radical struggle and his-
tory. These venues also provided meaningful dialogue between local rap-
eros and members of an older generation of black intellectuals, in this case
one Afro-Cuban and one African American in political exile. One individual
who embodied a vibrant confluence of these two spheres of black radical
(re)articulation was Yosmel Sarrias (aka Sekou Messiah Umoja) of Anon-
imo Consejo. His involvements in both classes were very much a critical
outgrowth of, as well as a significant contributing factor to, his ongoing

136 CHAPTER FOUR


political, artistic, and personal maturation as a prominent and highly re-
spected "old-school" Cuban MC.
In 2000 the African American political exile Nehanda Abiodun began
holding occasional gatherings in her home in one of Habana del Este's high-
rise apartment blocks. Stemming from an initial conversation with a visiting
U.S. college student friend, the gatherings grew out of a desire among some
Havana-area raperos for dialogue about legacies of African American strug-
gle and forms of radical organizing. As Nehanda described it:
That open space started out with rappers coming to me and asking me
about Malcolm X, asking me about the movement in the United States,
not only the Civil Rights Movement but also the Black Power Movement.
"What is the Black Liberation Movement? What was the participation of
white people? What was the relationship between various movements
in the United States?" they asked. And they were not only interested in
finding out about the history, my history, or their history in the United
States because we are all in this together as people of African descent,
but how that history pertains to them here in Cuba. And what it is that
they could use to create something here on this island without being
opposed to the status quo.1
When I asked about raperos' particular interest in the narrative of Mal-
colm X, Nehanda explained: "Malcolm X represents a certain militancy for
the freedom of black people; it's not only here in Cuba but it is all over the
world. He talked about unity as Marcus Garvey did, but in a language that
everybody could understand. He was defiant against the powers that be, and
he's a hero among many. My opinion based on my observations is that for
too long Cuba has been devoid of talking about their own heroes of African
descent. So youth therefore are looking for answers to certain questions."
When I encountered these gatherings in 2001 they had become fairly regu-
lar weekly events, drawing an informal collection of two dozen or so young
people composed of Cubans as well as an assortment of North American
college students from various educational programs in Havana. Although
these gatherings had an informal and often festive atmosphere, the meet-
ings were used for serious discussion of issues ranging from the imprison-
ment of African American political activists, to the workings of patriarchy,
to interracial dating and homophobia. These classes, as Nehanda referred
to them, regularly drew a core group of local raperos, and were unique in

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 137


providing a regular forum for cross-cultural dialogue around questions of
race, gender, and sexuality within comparative contexts of Cuba and the
United States. This kind of exchange had yet to occur in any significant way
elsewhere within Havana's hip hop community, and in my experience the
discussions were highly engaged and often impassioned as diverse perspec-
tives vied and were negotiated among group members.
The impetus and conceptual framing of these exchanges were shaped in
an important sense by Nehanda's commitments to a nationalist tradition
of radical organizing. These efforts, she explained, were simply an exten-
sion of her ongoing work as a black revolutionary. Just because she was now
in Cuba, Nehanda asserted, did not mean that her dedication to transfor-
mative change ceased to be an active part of her life. When I asked if she
viewed her classes as a space of politicization, she responded: "Oh, without
a doubt! I mean, why would I even have bothered? [Laughs] I am very proud
of those classes, not because I was involved in them but because ofwhat the
students, what those individuals within themselves created. I mean, I was
just a facilitator, but they created that space and made it what it was. And
not only did they take what they learned, but so many of them both here
and in Cuba pursued further investigations, further studies following their
involvements in the classes."
In the several gatherings I attended, MC Yosmel Sarrias of Anonimo Con-
sejo was consistently among the most outspoken of participants, Cuban or
otherwise. His engagements always struck me as especially thoughtful and
self-reflective. It was through these meetings that I first got a sense of
Yosmel's rather impassioned quest for personal growth and critical self-
education. Nehanda was no doubt an inspirational facet of this process.
Over the years she developed close relationships with both Yosmel and his
artistic partner Kokino, given in part the shared proximity of their neigh-
boring barrios in Habana del Este. Her involvement as a mentor figure was
clearly significant for the artists, in meaningful conversation with their
thinking, sense of black selves, and ultimately their music.
As an illustration of the mentor-like intimacy that Nehanda shared with
the two young men, sometime around 2002 she presided over a neo-African
ceremony in which the artists were anointed with new Afrikan-signified
names; Yosmel assumed the name Sekou Messiah Umoja and Kokino adopted
Adeyeme Umoja. While Kokino would continue to be known primarily by
his original name, Sekou, by contrast, came to fully embrace his new iden-

138 CHAPTER FOUR


tity as testament to his evolving sense of black selfhood. Marking this on-
tological shift on his physicality, Sekou soon added a large tattooed image
of Africa to his left shoulder encircled by the prose "Mi mente mi espiritu
y mi corazon vive aqui" (My mind, my spirit, and my heart live here). This
professed fidelity to Africa now sat opposite the previously discussed tattoo
of Che Guevara and accompanying slogan "Anonimo Consejo Revolucion"
that he and Kokino jointly displayed on their right shoulders.
Poetically revealing, these juxtaposing images reflected competing nar-
ratives of citizenship-one revolutionary Cuban and decidedly masculinist,
the other grounded in Afrocentric claims to a racial diaspora mediated in
part through a female mentor figure, Nehanda Abiodun. As such, these dis-
cursive intersections evoked a duality of nationalist lenses through which
Sekou mediated his evolving self-understandings as a black Cuban man.
Indeed, similar couplings of citizenship and their overlapping revolution-
ary belongings serve as key self-referential paradigms of black self-making
for many raperos. In Sekou's case, such alignment found performative and
varyingly gendered expression through their material inscription onto the
body itself.
While Nehanda's gatherings contributed to one nationalist current of
black self-fashioning within Havana's hip hop community, another peda-
gogic space emerged during the same period intended to redress the "other
side," so to speak, of Sekou's revolutionary shoulder. In 2002 Tomis Fernan-
dez Robaina, a bibliographic archivist and pioneering scholar of Afro-
Cuban history at Havana's Biblioteca Nacional de Jos6 Marti, initiated an
informal weekly class at the Biblioteca on themes of Afro-Cuban history.
Although he had offered similar courses in the past, this most recent class
evolved in dialogue with raperos themselves. Tomis's first introduction to
Cuban hip hop occurred in New York City when, during an academic stint
as a visiting scholar in 2001, he connected with the previously mentioned
group of touring raperos composed of Pablo Herrera, Ariel Fernandez Diaz,
Magia Lopez and Alexey Rodriguez of Obsesion, RCA's Julio Cardenas, and
(the then) Yosmel Sarrias and Kokino Entenza of Anonimo Consejo. As
Tomas explains:
In New York City I had an invitation to meet with these raperos and got
a sense of their music. I realized that something good was going on-I
didn't know exactly what, but I knew something was happening. When I

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 139


came back to Cuba, I began to attend hip hop concerts and pay attention
to the lyrics of the songs and I realized that they were doing something
that none of us who have been trying to expand the idea of the black
identity were able to do, or do it in the way they were doing it. They were
showing that blackness is something important, and that we can orga-
nize and defend blackness and our black ancestors.2
Among an older generation of Afro-Cuban intellectuals who had fought
for critical recognition of black culture and histories of struggle in Cuba,
Tomis eventually embraced hip hop as part of an ongoing continuum of
black political expression on the island. Rather, apropos, it was during a
2001 Havana roundtable held at the Union Nacional de Escritores y Artistas
de Cuba (UNEAC) on the Partido Independiente de Color that drew a collec-
tion of raperos and local Rastafari that Tomis decided to revive his course
on Afro-Cuban history at the Biblioteca.
While Tomis's work El negro en Cuba, 1902-1958 (1990) represented a pio-
neering scholarly treatment of the Partido during the revolutionary period,
renewed discussion of its significance among black intellectual circles at
the time was sparked by a 2000 Cuban publication of a Spanish translation
of historian Aline Helg's Our Rightful Share (1995) chronicling the party's
rise and the ensuing 1912 massacre. Helg later collaborated with the Afro-
Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando on Rolando's independent film Raices de mi
coraz6n (Roots of my heart) (2001), which represented the first major filmic
treatment of the Partido in Cuba. All told, these efforts sought to restore
the Partido from an obscured national memory while gesturing toward the
party's long-silenced call for an inclusive citizenship both for and as black
Cubans. Such reclaimation would in turn find creative resonance among
many a rapero.
Among those present that day at the Partido roundtable was Ariel Fernan-
dez Diaz, who, Tomis recalls, promised to encourage a number of friends to
attend the class. Regarding the subsequent involvement of raperos, Tomis
explained:
They were doing certain things already, but they hadn't realized that there
were many others who had done these kinds of things before. Many black
intellectuals and organizations in the past had done similar social cri-
tiques about racism and social inequality. But raperos and Rastafarians

140 CHAPTER FOUR


in Cuba didn't know about this. So I identify with the movement through
my involvement in teaching them about other black intellectuals who've
done what they're doing now. And by working with these people I was
trying little by little to encourage those who could teach other people.
The class, open to all, was held in an open-air corner of the Biblioteca Na-
cional's second-floor reading room. As small and informal as it was, the fact
that a class of this kind was held in a public institution like the Biblioteca-
a towering edifice abutting Havana's celebrated Plaza de la Revolucion-
reflected the Cuban state's recent opening to more public discussions of
racial themes within institutional spheres. Similar conversations were oc-
curring in places like UNEAC, where a well-attended symposium organized
around Nicolas Guillen's poetic theme "Color Cubano" occurred that same
year. On an average day Tomis's class drew roughly a dozen or so partici-
pants, the vast majority of whom were young men and women, almost ex-
clusively black or darker skinned. The core among those classes I attended
were graduate students, politically oriented artists, and a number of Rasta
and hip-hop-affiliated individuals, among whom Ariel, Sekou, and Magia
Lopez and Alexey Rodriguez of Obsesion were among the most consistent.
Predicated on Tomis's similarly titled work, the class "El negro en Cuba"
centered on black antiracist and antidiscriminatory activism during the
twentieth century prior to 1959,3 and sought to expand on his text's cen-
tral thesis: Afro-Cuban mediations of the island's historic tensions of race
and nationhood. Here the fundamental struggle framed by Tomis was one
tied to Afro-Cuban efforts to attain full citizenship rights within a Marti-
envisioned nonracial Cuba.
Foregrounding raced agencies in the making of Cuban national history
in this manner represented something of a revisionist undertaking aimed
at redressing historical omissions of Afro-Cubans as critical subjects from
Cuba's official past (Ferrer 1998a; Kapcia 2000; cf. Trouillot 1995). I under-
score critical here to foreground a distinction between Afro-Cubans as
positioned actors rather than consumable objects of historical processes
as they have all too often been cast within prevailing national scripts, be
they incorporative grammars of transculturation or folklore. Tomis's class
offered a space for precisely this kind of recuperative intervention, albeit a
notably male-centered one. Antonio Maceo, the Partido Independiente de
Color, the Afro-Cuban journalist Gustavo Urrutia, and more recent figures

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering  14I


such as the author-activists Juan Ren6 Betancourt and Walterio Carbonell
figured centrally within discussion, while narratives of black women's con-
tributions remained largely absent.
Gendering notwithstanding, Magia of Obsesion reflected on her experi-
ence of attending Tomis's class:
Back in technical school I got into arguments with my teachers and
the principal because they used racist expressions, but I only started to
develop race consciousness through hip hop culture, especially after a
workshop given by Tomas Robaina sometime between late 2001 and early
2002. He talked about the 1912 Race War in Cuba, the black leader Eva-
risto Estenoz [founding member of the Partido Independiente de Color],
the black massacre-it was a shock. I remember Alexey and I going away
feeling angry. (Rodriguez 2011)
Echoing similar understandings, Randy Acosta of the hip hop duo Los
Paisanos recalled the following about his participation in Tomis's class: "As
I started to attend the class I soon realized I was learning things I didn't
know about myself. I found a bit I didn't know, and I kept going. I came
to know things I wouldn't even remotely have known, things my family did
not know. One day we were asked if we knew anything about Evaristo Este-
noz, and no one knew who he was." When I asked why this was important,
Randy responded:
This is our history! It's the history here in Cuba that has to do with me,
one that I identify with. It's part of the [national] struggle and it's that
black part of me that fought and gave its part to the Cuban Revolution.
They always talk about [General] Maximo G6mez4-all the things he did
in developing war strategies and combat. But where is Antonio Maceo?
Where is the Partido Independiente de Color? Why not talk about these
people? They were people in Cuba's history and you know nothing of
their story. That's what we were talking about in class.5
As a partial outgrowth of such conversations, Randy and his artistic part-
ner Jessel Saladriga Fernandez aka El Huevo composed "Lo Negro" (The
Black). The song aimed at addressing stigmas attached to blackness viewed
as inhibiting affirmations of black identity among many Cubans of African
descent. As Randy explained, "Lo Negro" was intended as "a warning to

142 CHAPTER FOUR


blacks who don't want to be black due to long histories of disinformation."
Such concerns held personal resonance for Randy, who, as discussed ear-
lier, moved through hip hop to embrace a political sense of black identity
despite his light-brown color of skin. Indeed, as if to add exclamation to the
point, the duo riffin the chorus to "Lo Negro": "Negro, es mi pensamiento /
Negro, son mis movimientos / Negro, es como me siento / Negro, por fuera
y por dentro" (Black, is my thought / Black, are my movements / Black, is
how I feel / Black, outside and inside).
While reclaiming histories of black radicality may have been of mutual
interest to those in Tomis's class, interpretations of these narratives were
not necessarily always aligned. One dynamic that emerged involved subtle
differences in positionality between Tomis and some of the younger partic-
ipants in the course. For example, one afternoon Tomis turned to Antonio
Maceo's celebrated quote "Nunca pedir como negro, solo como cubano"
(Never ask as a black, only as a Cuban) to underscore the ways Afro-Cuban
struggle has long been predicated on citizenship claims within a nonracial
national logic as opposed to calls for racial autonomy (cf. de la Fuente 1999;
Ferrer 1999). While speaking with Sekou after class, he told me he took is-
sue with Tomis's suggestion, drawn from Maceo's statement, that Afro-
Cubans were implicitly Cubans before they were black. In contrast, Sekou
responded definitely, "Soy africano antes de todo" (I'm African [first] before
all). In later conversation along similar lines, Alexey Rodriguez of Obse-
sion suggested he too considered himself a negro before his Cubanness-
something I found a bit surprising at the time, given Alexey's strong iden-
tification with and fidelity to the nationalist ideals of the Cuban Revolu-
tion. In both cases these statements suggested evolving forms of self-
identification, if not multiple citizenship claims, rooted in notions of racial
diaspora that transcended both the territorial and discursive bounds of
Cuban nationhood.
An important nuance of difference between Tomis and his younger class
participants was generational. Now in his sixties, Tomis is from an ear-
lier generation of Afro-Cuban intellectuals socialized and trained during
the height of the Cuban Revolution. As such, his identity as an intellectual
and as a black man is deeply intertwined with the rise of the revolutionary
project in complexly lived ways. As a gay-identified, light-brown-skinned
man who would commonly be read as mestizo, Tomis often spoke of his

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 143


long fight for recognition as a gay black man within exclusionary circles that
might otherwise deny him entry on both grounds. Full inclusion and ac-
ceptance of his multiply queer subjectivity-that is, black and gay-within
the prevailing frames that have long rendered these markers of difference
ideologically incoherent with the revolutionary project (Allen 2011; Arenas
1993; Bejel 2001; de la Fuente 2001; Gonzalez Pag6s 2004; Lumsden 1996;
Saunders 2009; Sawyer 2005) was thus a committed facet of Tomis's intel-
lectual politics and scholarship (cf. Fernandez Robaina 1996).
Among Sekou, Alexey, and others, however, such nationally moored com-
mitments to inclusion did not necessarily articulate in the same kinds of
ways as those of an older generation. In the immediate sense, these young
people are coming of age at a moment in which the grammars of racial ma-
teriality have assumed new levels, if not pernicious forms of lived exclusion
and disenfranchisement vis-n-vis an evolving neoliberal landscape. Within
an increasingly market-oriented Cuba where ambivalences of race and na-
tionhood are arguably at their highest level in revolutionary memory, there
may indeed be a greater urgency for racially grounded languages of identity
that contest and ultimately supersede national parameters of nonracialism
that tend to obfuscate and/or deny antiracist forms of redress. These young
people therefore can be seen as seeking new, transnationally expansive so-
cial imaginaries-whether through hip hop or Rastafarianism-in ways
that clearly translate into alternatively structured kinds of affective feeling.
Generational differences being what they were, it was also clear that class
participants were accessing historical material to which they otherwise had
little other recourse. Such archival reclamations in this sense helped shape
present-day black claims to citizenship within a now-expanded historical
frame of Cuban nationhood.
In an effort to address such recuperations, Sekou soon composed a new
tema titled "Afrocubano," which quickly assumed a privileged position in
Anonimo Consejo's performance repertoire. The song builds on an inno-
vative background track composed by Nicolas Nocchi (aka Miko Niko), a
Paris-based producer with a working history with Cuban raperos6 that fused
Afro-Cuban percussive elements with somber harmonies and choral lines.
Lyrically, the tema sweeps through a largely male-centered homage to black
resistance figures and narratives of Cuba's history and beyond. Opening
with the cause and following demise of the Partido Independiente de Color,

144 CHAPTER FOUR


"Afrocubano" locates the duo as spiritual inheritors of an ancestral legacy
of black struggle.
"Afrocubano"
Benny Mor6, ibae
Zoila Gilvez, ibae
Evaristo Estenoz, iba6
Gustavo Urrutia, ibae
Aponte, iba6
Antonio Maceo, iba6
A nuestro martires del Partido Independiente de Color, iba6
Pedro Ivonnet, iba6, yo con usted
Por la justa causa morire.. .
Benny Mor6, ibae
Zoila Gilvez, ibae
Evaristo Estenoz, iba6
Gustavo Urrutia, ibae
Aponte, iba6
Antonio Maceo, iba6
To our martyrs of the Independent
Party of Color, iba6
Pedro Ivonnet, iba6, I'm with you,
I will die for a just cause ...
The tema launches with a ritualized evocation of black historical figures
starting with the immortal Benny Mor6, Cuba's famed vocalist of popular
song. More is followed by Zoila Gilvez, a soprano vocalist of classic training
from the early twentieth century who, daughter of a mambi colonel under
Antonio Maceo, was denied full recognition and professional success in
Cuba due to her brownness of skin. With this segue, Anonimo Consejo turn
to a string of resistant figures including Jos6 Antonio Aponte, alleged con-
spirator of the early nineteenth-century slave rebellion, Antonio Maceo and
the leaders of the Partido Independiente de Color, Pedro Ivonnet, and Eva-
risto Estenoz-all key historical focal points of Tomis's class. Each name
is followed in turn by the ritualized refrain ibae, a truncation of the Yoruba-
derived phrase ibae bay tonn uttered at the start of Ocha-Lucumi ceremonies

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 145


to invoke the presence and participation of ancestral spirits. A connection
with the present is then marked through the duo's professed fraternity with
Ivonnet's commitments and heroic martyrdom in dying "for a just cause."
Within this narrative, moreover, Antonio Maceo's racial subjectivity is re-
cuperated from dominant Cuban frames that have sought its historical era-
sure or hybridized assimilation into a multiracial and ultimately nonracial
national body.
While Ivonnet and his compadres are referenced in nationalist terms
as "our martyrs," this same history-and by extension that of Sekou and
Kokino-is grounded within broader diasporic narratives of black liber-
atory struggle through these figures' evocation as "guerreros de Africa"
(warriors of Africa). References to Zumbi and Ganga Zumba, leaders of
Brazil's famed seventeenth-century maroon community Quilombo dos Pal-
mares, in turn provide subsequent linkages to Afro-hemispheric histories
of resistance beyond Cuba's territorial bounds. Repeated allusion to Ras-
tafari imagery have a similar diasporic impact. Although, as mentioned,
some raperos began during this period to wear dreadlocks as body-centered
markers of black cosmopolitanism, Sekou's growth of locks and attention
to a more vegetarian-centered "ire" lifestyle stemmed from direct involve-
ment with the island's Rasta community (cf. Hansing 2001) and reflected
a growing influence of Rastafarianism in his life and sense of black self-
hood.7 The refrain "Erguidos ante la policia / Dreadlocks p'arriba / Orgullo
fortalece nuestra fila" (Standing [tall] before the police / Dreadlocks raised
up / Pride fortifies our position) is emblematic of such extranational sym-
bolism as defensive posture.
Yet as the song's title implies and as is reiterated throughout the chorus
line "Afrocubano soy yo, soy yo" (Afro-Cuban I am, I am), Anonimo Con-
sejo's central claim to identity and historical rootedness is as Afro-Cubans.
Indeed, to bring closure, the tema concludes with "shout-out" tributes to
a number of contemporary black Cuban figures such as the eminent cul-
tural historian Rogelio Martinez Fur6, the filmmaker Gloria Rolando, and
Tomas Fernandez Robaina himself. In a cadence similar to the song's open-
ing salvo, each name is followed by chants of "achi!"-a Yoruba phase tied
to divine productive force of the orishas-with declarations of "Sekou and
Adeyeme!" and "Anonimo Consejo!" bringing the tema to conclusion. In
choral chants proclaiming, "La lucha continua / Hoy, microfono cultura /
Anonimo defiende, los ancestros acentnan!" (The fight continues / Today,

146 CHAPTER FOUR


microphone culture / Anonimo defends and the ancestors reinforce us!),
Anonimo Consejo assert their claim to this continuum of Afro-Cuban rad-
icality within broader Afro-hemispheric fields of emancipatory struggle.
Thus while Tomis's class may have been an informative experience in
Sekou's penning of "Afrocubano," the transnational dimensions that un-
dergird the tema's revisionist renderings of Afro-Cuban subjectivity and
historical experience clearly also draw inspiration from other diasporic
sites of black life and meaning. As previously discussed in the case of Obse-
sion, who claim a mantle as modern-day mambises and heirs of the fighting
force's liberatory tradition, critical recuperations of Afro-Cuban historic-
ity vis-n-vis legacies of racial disenfranchisement find thematic recurrence
within lyrical realms of Cuban hip hop.
When considering the artistic scope of innovation along such lines, the
work of Hermanos de Causa demands rightful attention. Drawn from the
adjoining barrios of Cojimar and Alamar, respectively, the duo of Soandres
del Rio and Alexis "el Pelon" Cantero were long recognized among the most
poetically sophisticated and politically uncompromising of old-school rap-
eros. A key trope employed by Hermanos de Causa as alluded to in the intro-
ductory opening involves the satirical resignification of blackness as social
commentary on Cuba's current incongruities of race and national belong-
ing. Although garnering scholarly attention elsewhere (Fernandes 2006;
M. Perry 2004; West-Durin 2004), one of Hermanos de Causa's lauded te-
mas that warrants brief mention here is "Tengo" (I have).
First performed around 2000,8 "Tengo" plays upon venerated Afro-
Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen's famed 1964 poem of the same title celebrat-
ing black social gains under the revolution's early efforts to address Cuba's
legacies of racial inequality. Guillen's "Tengo" offers a rhythmic refrain of
gratitude for all "I (now) have" (tengo) as an Afro-Cuban thanks to the rev-
olution, a parable collectively etched in Cubans' imagination through the
poem's canonic teaching in state-run primary schools. Working transgressively
with these parameters, Hermanos de Causa offer a subversive inversion of
Guillen's "Tengo" by foregrounding the limitations of rights and access
that Afro-Cubans currently hold within the island's new monetized realms
of racial exclusion. In the duo's rendering, Guillen's "I have" is figuratively
transposed to "I lack" as testament to the lived constraints of black Cuban
citizenship at the millennium's turn.
As another poignant illustration of Hermanos de Causa's satirical play

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 147


4.1. Mc Soandres del Rio of Hermanos de Causa. Photo by Sahily Borrero
on blackness, I return to their "Lagrimas negras" (Black tears), cited in the
introduction. Signifying on a classic bolero-son of the same title popularized
in the 1930s by the troua bandleader Miguel Matamoros of Trio Matamoros,
Hermanos de Causa's translation of"Lagrimas negras" turns from the original
composition's ode of romantic sorrow to offer a stinging commentary on the
quotidian contours of racism in present-day Cuba. The tema opens with an
upbeat sample clip of a popular mid-198o version of "Lagrimas negras" by
the venerated salsa band Conjunto Rumbavana. The tone abruptly shifts as
a brassy salsa tempo gives way to a relaxed hip hop beat accompanied by a
sparse melody accented with percussive conga riffs. Unhurried, Soandres's
voice eventually chimes in to reframe the terms of "Ligrimas negras" by
placing black life amid Cuba's current social malaise at the narrative center.
Opening with "1Yo! Yo de frente, todo el tiempo realista / No digas que
no hay racismo donde hay un racista" (Yo! I'm in front, all the time a realist
/ Don't say there isn't racism when there is a racist), Hermanos de Causa
claim a position as truth tellers deconstructing the lived "ironies" of race in

148 CHAPTER FOUR


Cuba. Testifying "No me niegues que hay oculto un prejuicio racial que nos
condena y nos valora a todos por igual / No te dejes enganar los ojos de par
en par, no te dejes enganar" (Don't deny that there's a hidden racial preju-
dice that condemns us and values us all as equal / Don't be fooled, eyes wide
open, don't be deceived), the duo take aim at the intrinsic contradictions of
racial life versus nonracial fictions.
Thus juxtaposed to the romantic melancholy expressed in the original
"Ligrimas" composition, Hermanos de Causa speak of the "black tears" of
racial marginalization, criminalizing gazes, and a dichotomous invisibility
and hypervisibility of Afro-Cubans within an increasingly monetized Cuba.
Here the narrative pivots from blackness as the site of racialized fear-
"Black delinquent, legendary concept / Seen as the adversary in whatever
hour"-to blackness as an active field of subjectivity, one "heavy armed,
thick caliber, high precision / Strongly impacting white targets with my
vocation."9 In doing so the artists offer an unapologetic resignification of
blackness in ways that unmask the current incongruency of race and Cuban
citizenship while foregrounding blackness itself as a consequent site of so-
cial agency and contest, one in this sense "demostrando como siempre lo
que hay" (demonstrating as usual, what's going on).
Fraternal Elaborations
Yet as Hermanos de Causa's gender-marked name and masculinist posture
reminds us, the prism through which race is lived, imagined, and perfor-
matively expressed through hip hop is often a highly gendered one. In the
case of Anonimo Consejo and others, reclaiming a black radical past is fre-
quently predicated on appeals to masculinist narratives of heroic valor as
groundings for reimagining the terms of afrocubanidad in male form. Such
recuperations are thus intimately tied to performing a black masculine pres-
ent. Although conversant with the outer-national, these masculinist fram-
ings are deeply meshed with those of Cuba's broader male-centric traditions
of national identity and citizenship.
As alluded to earlier, from their very inception ideals of Cuban nation-
hood and citizenship have been heavily rooted in masculine tropes of armed
struggle for national redemption (Ferrer 1999; Gonzalez Pag6s 2004), a tra-
dition fervently elaborated during the post-'59 period. Under revolutionary
formulations from Jos6 Marti to Fidel Castro, the citizen-as-soldier is cast

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 149


as the quintessential Cuban subject vis-n-vis a continuum of anti-imperialist
struggle aimed at remasculinizing an otherwise emasculated prerevolution-
ary Cuba (cf. Schwartz 1999). For his part Marti was compelled in the end
to affirm the very valor of his citizenship by taking up arms during the in-
dependence struggle, only to be killed (and posthumously elevated to mar-
tyrdom) amid his initial foray into combat. As Emilio Bejel (2001) among
others has argued, masculinist language and imagery were embedded in
Marti's nationalist writings as the rhetorical basis for a redemptively liber-
ated cubanidad.
This mythification of the guerrilla-as-national-subject, to borrow from
Antoni Kapcia (2000), finds an ever-enduring form in the masculine image of
Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his celebrated ideal of the "new man" as the iiber-
revolutionary protagonist (Guevara [1965] 1970, cf. Saldafa-Portillo 2003).
Elaborating on cultures of machismo long integral to Cuba and the broader
Spanish Caribbean (de Moya 2004), this institutionalization of the masculine
was therefore instrumental to the revolutionary imagination, one emphati-
cally heteronormative if not homophobic in practice (Allen 2011; Arenas 1993;
Bejel 2001; Fowler 1998; Gonzalez Pag6s 2004; Lumsden 1996; Saunders 2009).
Revolutionary efforts to increase women's participation in the workforce
coupled with broader gender equality promotion through institutions like the
Federaci6n de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC) and the 1975 Family Code (aimed at
equitable labor in the domestic sphere) notwithstanding, male privilege and
swaggering machismo remain durable fixtures of Cuban life.
While raperos' pursuits of self-crafting circulate within economies of
the Cuban heteromasculine, it is notable that male MCs often differentiate
themselves from other currents of black masculine performance conspic-
uous in Cuban popular music and culture. Surfacing during the 1980s and
1990s, Cuba's salsa-derived dance music timba emerged as another import-
ant site of racially charged music making and popular commentary amid
Cuba's evolving neoliberal ambivalence (Perna 2005; Vaughan 2012). Eclips-
ing hip hop's fan base and rates of commercial production and revenue,
timba's driving, often-frenetic cadence has long been dominated by black
male artists who frequently appeal to sexualized play and lyric innuendo
heavily centered on the gazed female body.
Echoing similar lines posed by U.S. black feminist critiques (cf. hooks
2003; Wallace 1979), Ariana Hernandez-Reguant suggests such celebrations
of hetero-virility offer symbolic currency through which young Afro-Cuban

150 CHAPTER FOUR


men exercise masculinist notions of power within a public sphere that oth-
erwise affords few alternatives (Hernandez-Reguant 2005). Yet while these
projections might contest revolutionary prescriptions of normative sex-
uality on some levels, they also reinscribe heteronormative privileging of
Cuban machismo. Indeed, when articulated with race, such lines of practice
may also reinforce enduring representations of Afro-Cubans-in both male
and female form-as nonnormative sites of a primal hypersexuality (cf. Al-
len 2011; Gonzalez Pag6s 2004). The more recent phenomenon of Cuban
reggaeton-to which I will return-that eventually usurped significant
space and artistic talent previously occupied by hip hop as well as timba,
draws on similar modes of black heteromasculinity channeled in important
part through a sexualized bracketing of women's bodies (cf. Baker 2011).
By contrast, the spectrum of black masculinity displayed by many
Havana-area raperos has tended to shy away from explicitly sexualized per-
formance and lyric content. One possible mediating factor lies in varying
sites of dialogue among artists that complicate monolithic claims of a black
heteronormative male as the privileged subject of Cuban hip hop. Tomis
Fernandez Robaina and the literary critic Roberto Zurbano-long two of
the most actively engaged of an older generation of Afro-Cuban interlocu-
tors vis-n-vis local raperos-are either queer identified or queer conversant
black men. The largely male ranks of Havana's MCs have therefore had to
reckon with alternative frames of black masculinity that these men have
brought to bear on notions of and conversations about afrocubanidad. In
related conversation, the assumed stability of the heteromasculine within
rapero circles was further disrupted when rumors circulated in 2003 that
one highly respected old-school Havana MC was bisexual.10 While poten-
tially shattering a veneer of heteronormativity, in Tomis's view the episode
failed to redress underlying homophobic currents within Cuba's hip hop
community. As he explained to me on the heels of the rumor:
I would like to hear one rapero who's not gay, a man singing about the
rights of gays, that they have the equal right to share space too. I think
they all know that I'm gay, they accept and respect me, and that is some-
thing. But I don't know if the audience or gay raperos are prepared to
speak publicly about their sexual orientation. That would be something
important for the movement; it would be something that could really
enrich the movement.

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering  151


Tomis's scholarship on gender and sexuality via realms of Afro-Cuban
religiosity is informative here regarding the privileging of the heteromas-
culine within broader Afro-Cuban vernacular spheres (Fernandez Robaina
1996, 2005). Concerning gendered prescriptions within many Afro-Cuban
religious communities, heterosexual men are often licensed within social
hierarchies and ritual practice in ways that supersede if not exclude women
and homosexual men altogether.
One salient expression of such scriptings is that of the Abakui, a religious
fraternal society with roots among black dockworkers in the ports of Havana,
Matanzas, and Cardenas whose linguistic lineage can be traced back to sim-
ilar all-male sacred societies among the Efik and Efu-speaking peoples of
the Cross River delta region of Nigeria (Miller 2005; cf. Cabrera 1958; Ortiz
1950, 1951)." The Abakui are noted to shun any expression of the effeminate
among initiates, and homosexuality is largely prohibited (Fernandez Robaina
1996, 2005; cf. Sublette 2007). Yet Tomis's work in the area suggests degrees
of fluidity; sexual contact between Abakui and other men may be cautiously
permissible as long as the Abakui maintains the dominant or active top po-
sition (Fernandez Robaina 1996: 205) .12 Such flexibility resonates with Jafari
Allen's discussion of the "macho" dominant self-designation among some
same-gender-loving Afro-Cuban men who do not necessarily self-identify
as homosexual (Allen 2011). In both cases, however, the performative sem-
blance of the heteromasculine nonetheless remains largely intact.
Drawn from poor and working-class urban barrios, the Abakui are often
associated in the popular Cuban imagination with malevolent realms of mar-
ginalidad and appending claims of violent criminality grounded in enduring
conceptions of an afro-primal (Ortiz [1906] 1973; cf. Maguire 2011; Miller
2005). Although highly secretive in ritual practice, the Abakui do nonethe-
less garner degrees of admiration, if at times guarded, within urban realms
of Afro-Cuban life, particularly with regard to working-class paradigms of
respectable masculinity. Among such currents the Abakui hold a notable
resonance within cultural spheres of Cuban hip hop. At the everyday level
of the vernacular, the expression "asere" that rapero men commonly use to
greet and mutually mark one another is drawn from an Abakui expression
similarly used as a ritual salutation between initiates.13 For instance, the
now well-worn expression " Qu6 bola asere?" (roughly, What's up, brother?)
has assumed proverbial status through its iconic association with rapero-
speak. While such mimetics suggest an intimacy of Afro-Cuban literacy

152 CHAPTER FOUR


shared by male raperos vis-n-vis the Abakui and conjoined scripts of black
working-class masculinity, the quotidian use of the address also engenders
its own meanings of homosocial fraternity among Cuban MCs.
Rapero affinities with the Abakui may articulate at more immediate
levels as well. While in conversation a friend mentioned in passing that a
mutual hip-hop-affiliated friend was an initiate of the Abakua. While I had
known this person for a number of years, I had never heard any reference to
his membership by him or anyone else. Given the fraternal society's insular
nature, I was not sure if it was appropriate to inquire about the rumor. In
a later conversation I did in fact ask my friend if there was any truth to the
claim. Without much hesitation, he affirmed, "Si asere, yo soy Abakui, soy
oboneku6," intermingling the everyday Abakua-cum-rapero address asere
alongside the more esoteric obonekui for Abakui initiates. When I asked how
comfortable he would be if I commented on his membership, he responded
that it would be fine, clarifying that while the society's sacred rites were in-
deed secret, one's individual membership as a 5dhigo-using a more widely
used term for fraternal members-was not necessarily so.14
DJ Alexis D'Boys explained that although his family was not particu-
larly religious, he had long felt pulled toward the realms of the sacred. It
was, however, during a conversation amid a religious consultation with a
babaliwo that sparked his curiosity regarding the Abakui, leading him to
seek out more information about the fraternity. Alexis recalled a particularly
meaningful trip during this period to the municipality of Regla to attend a
ceremonial funeral for a recently deceased Abakui member. Describing his
experience, Alexis explained:
I went to the ceremony and saw a tremendous amount of discipline and
closeness between all the brothers there. And I was like "wow," these
brothers are very serious! For me this planted the idea of joining this
community. But there are a number of things that must be shared about
you before you can become part of the religion. So one day I presented
myself to a group [of members] and said I wanted to become part of this
secret community. They then took a year inquiring about me including
visiting my family, because if your family doesn't agree you cannot be-
come part of this religion. So they visited my grandfather's house and
asked my grandmother about my family, because one of the require-
ments is that you have to come from a family with a good father.

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 153


We say "Buen padre, buen hijo, buen hermano y buen amigo!" (Good father,
good son, good brother, good friend). Being a good father and a good
son is fundamental, this is very important in this religion. . . . So they
came to my house to meet my family and my parents were a bit nervous.
They had heard that this religion was violent, that they killed and mur-
dered people, what have you. When my grandmother asked me if I was
sure I wanted to be part of this religion, I said, "Yes, I'm sure," and I was
eventually invited to join. So I along with fourteen other brothers were
initiated on December 4, 1994-a date I will never forget.15
Despite family concerns, the Abakui's promise of sacred fellowship, fra-
ternal discipline, and embedded ideals of respectable masculinity appar-
ently resonated with Alexis's own yearnings for belonging as a young Afro-
Cuban man. Similar echoes of admiration find artistic form in "Abakua," a
composition by Obsesion's Alexey Rodriguez released on the group's 2011
album, El Disco Negro. Something of a tribute to the Abakui and by exten-
sion Alexey's home barrio of Regla as a central locale, as mentioned, of
Abakui tradition since the mid-nineteenth century, the track opens with a
sample of an iconic Abakui enkame or ritual call-and-response chant. For an
interesting and indeed resonant comparative note, interpretations of this
same enkame are performed by Dizzy Gillespie in the opening to his classic
"Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac" (1967), the diasporic syncretics of which grew
from Gillespie's collaborative history with Afro-Cuban rumbero and Abakui
member Chano Pozo.
In Obsesion's rendering, the opening enkame melds into a background
of melodic hip hop beats inflected with a sparse fusion of conga phases and
Cuban guitar chords, as Alexey riffs:
"Abakua"
Una de las mayores virtudes que puede tener un hombre es la
descripcion ...
Pero Abakui es q'manda, oye!
Siempre seri una buena oportunidad para ofrecerle mi respeto y no
ofenderle a Abakui
En Regla se fund6 la primera sociedad, cosa de la que estoy orgulloso,
yo soy de allM!

154 CHAPTER FOUR


Muchos tabues y alrededor de esta linda religion, primero invito a
conocer antes
de dar opinion
Buen padre, buen hijo, buen esposo, buen
amigo!
Esto es pa' lo que la llevan de verdad, los que no distorsionan su
verdadera esencia ...
El Abakui no es malo, lo hacen malo
las personas
Respeta para que te respeten ...
One of the greatest virtues that a man can have is how he defines
himself...
But Abakua is in charge, hey!
It will always be a good opportunity to offer my respect and not offend
the Abakua
In Regla the first society was founded, something that I'm proud of,
I'm from there!
A lot of taboos surround this beautiful religion, first I invite you to
know it before you offer your opinions
Good father, good son, good husband, good friend!
This is for those who truly carry the truth, not the ones who distort its
true essence ...
The Abakui are not bad, it's people who make it bad
Respect so they'll respect you ...
Amid a tone ofveneration and repeated calls for "respect," Alexey offers re-
dress to what is viewed as distorted popular understandings of the Abakua.
Countervailing odes to the fraternal society as disciplined exemplars of a
respectable masculinity resonate throughout.
Cultural layerings between raperos and the Abakui need, however, to
be viewed within broader histories of Abakui interface within realms of
Cuban popular music (Leon I991; R. Moore 1997), a particularly intimate
expression of such being Afro-Cuban rumba (Acosta 2003; Miller 2000;
Sublette 2007). In addition to syncretic inflections of Abakui drumming,
dance, and vocal styles, rumba traditions reflect a highly heterogendered
performance structure that similarly privilege men as congueros (drummers)

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 155


and broader practitioners of rumba song and dance (Knauer 2008). Drawing
on such legacies, artists such as Chano Pozo, Arsenio Rodriguez, and Igna-
cio Pineiro16-all translational figures of Afro-Cuban musicality into the
wider Afro-Atlantic-were notably also initiates of the Abakua. Might rap-
eros then be elaborating on similarly gendered histories and musically ar-
ticulated routes of the Afro-Cuban? Clearly, currents of black working-class
heteromasculinity that resonate at the levels of music making and everyday
social practice are integral elements of a fraternalism that undergirds much
of the social fabric of Havana's hip hop community. Or at least this may
appear to be the case for those who are male and performatively straight.
Black Feminist Queerings
Cuban hip hop's masculinist leanings are of course far from free of gendered
complications. The participation of women within, and in close conversa-
tion with, the movement has worked in various ways to decenter and ulti-
mately queer the community's otherwise male-centric focus (cf. Fernandes
2006, 2007; Saunders 2009). As cited earlier, the all-female trio of Instinto
were among the key pioneers of women's involvement in Havana hip hop.
Although the group's members, Doricel Agramonte, Yudith Porto, and Yanet
Diaz, moved to Spain around 2002 and later disbanded, I recall their music
fusing harder-edged riffs over R&B-styled background vocals. While plac-
ing black-women-centered narratives at the heart of their temas (see Pacini
Hernandez and Garofalo 2000; West-Durin 2004), Instinto often employed
sexualized play and innuendo as featured theatrical tropes. Often donning
formfitting outfits for shows, the trio used sexual provocation as a mode of
social commentary and critique along intersecting lines of race and gender.
Yet such stagecraft seemed in the end to conform to, rather than complicate,
conventional Cuban representations of heteronormative female sexuality.
With the increased participation of Cuban women in hip hop over the
years, the performative style and range of female voices expanded as well.
An important marker of this growth was the proliferation by the early 2000s
of concerts and other events in Havana dedicated to the evolving vitality of
raperas (female raperos) within the movement. In addition to female solo-
ists such as MCs Yula and Mariana,17 a number of all-female groups arose
during this period including Explosion Femenina, Sexto Sentido, and La
Positiva, many of them evocative of Instinto's sexualized play though with

156 CHAPTER FOUR


a seemingly more deliberate eye toward a commercial draw. The spoken-
word vocalist Telmary Diaz, formerly of the hip-hop-fusion band Free Hole
Negro, and later Interactivo collective, also emerged amid this period as a
dynamic performer both within and beyond Cuban hip hop. A few pioneer-
ing women, moreover, eventually ventured into DJing, key among whom
was DJ Leidis Freire, a longstanding member of the Vedado-based Diez y
Diecinueve crew.
One individual active in supporting the growth and development of fe-
male artists was the African American political exile Nehanda Abiodun.
With firm commitment and intellectual grounding in U.S. black feminist
thought and practice, Nehanda often sought to foreground dimensions
of gender and sexuality through her engagements with artists and Hava-
na's broader hip hop community. Interminglings of gender and sexuality
via wider frames of black liberatory struggle were, for instance, recurring
themes of discussion during her informal class gatherings. Although less
intimately involved, her fellow exile Assata Shakur has also long been a pres-
ent and highly admired figure within rapero circles. These women provide
living exemplars of black radicality rooted in female subjectivity and broader
black womanist traditions of revolutionary activism. Nehanda and Assata
have in this sense helped expand and varyingly decenter the largely male-
focused vistas of black radical imagination among Havana-area raperos.
Such gendered queerings assumed important resonance among many
female MCs. One evolving current among some artists involved interwoven
critiques of gendered, sexualized, and racial forms of power in ways that
challenged hip hop's otherwise masculinist orientation, while confronting
broader domains of raced patriarchy in the Cuban everyday. Yet rather than
simply reflecting forms of consciousness and ways of being sui generis,
such voicings emerge in conversation with black womanist subjectivities
that found animated evolving form through the expressive space of hip hop.
Commenting on an apparent shift among female artists away from earlier,
more conventional displays of female sexuality, Nehanda explained: "What
has evolved since then are women who haven't negated their sexuality but
are very sexy in their own right. I mean they are not pumping with sex. These
are beautiful women, not sexy but beautiful women who are very secure in
their ability to handle their own and not falling into the trap of being, you
know, the ultra-sexy rapper, but real women who are rappers and saying,
'We have something to say as well!"'

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 157


Indeed, when considering women's space and intervention within rapero
circles, a pioneering artist who deserves important recognition is Magia
Lopez of Obsesion. As mentioned, Magia's subjectivity as a black woman
became an increasingly vocal and politicized component of her music and
public persona. While her artistic partner Alexey has been long the pri-
mary scribe and producer of many of Obsesion's temas, Magia has over the
years assumed a more active role in asserting her creativity within the duo's
music-making process while critically developing her own artistic voice as
a woman. Here a central and elaborating theme in Magia's work targets ra-
cialized frames of gendered discourse and practice historically ascribed to
black and darker-skinned Cuban women. By way of Afrocentric clothing
and flamboyantly natural hairstyling, Magia celebrates an unapologetically
black womanhood in her own terms. In doing so, she offers a performative
counterpole to prevailing norms that privilege the lighter-skinned mulata
as the celebrated and highly sexualized object of a racially transculturated
Cuba.
Yet wider economies of sexuality as interstitially lived with those of race,
gender, and class remain critical concerns of redress. Magia's artistic growth
along these line finds eloquent expression in her solo tema "La llaman puta"
(They call her a whore), in which she gives an impassioned account of the
struggles of young women involved in Cuba's tourist-driven sex trade. Al-
though race is not referenced explicitly, it is evoked allegorically as Magia
interweaves her narrative with choral chants in ritualized Yoruba to Ochun,
the female orisha most strongly associated with feminine sexuality. Sung to
the polyrhythmic play of the sacred bati drums of Ocha-Lucumi ceremony
used to invoke the orishas, the tema opens as follows:
"La liaman puta"
La llaman puta
para todos no es mis
que una mujerzuela
disfrutando el hecho de ser bonita
iLoca! Carne que invita
que provoca ...
iCuantas no van por ese camino!
Y entonces la llaman puta ...

158 CHAPTER FOUR


They call her whore
for everyone she is no more
than a loose woman
enjoying the fact of being pretty
Crazy woman! Flesh that invites
that often provokes ...
How many don't take this road!
So for that they call her whore ...
Forced to do what you don't want to
you avoid the idea,
But misery has an ugly face even if you don't believe it ...
Your body assumes the responsibility and
they call her whore ...
Society throws the hook and you
bite the bait ...
Magia's empathy with the narrative's protagonist and circumstance is
poignant. The bleak scenario painted here of female sex work is largely one
of structural victimhood in which women are not only "forced to do what
you don't want to," but are shunned for doing so. With few other alterna-
tives, the body is seen as an exploitable resource within globally inflected
markets of sexual consumption. While the suggestion "society throws the
hook and [they] bite the bait" could be read as undervaluing questions of
agency, Magia is singing against more dominant Cuban representations
of jineteras (female sex workers) as joy-seeking materialists whose par-
ticipation in sex work is steeped in pathologies of moral compromise (cf.
Cabeza 2004; Fusco 1998). Alternatively, Magia offers an image of these
women as social casualties of Cuba's neoliberal turn afforded few other
means through which to access the island's life-essential, globally pinned
currency.
While melancholic refrains to Ochun are employed to call on the ori-
sha's feminine presence and aid in defense of these women, the intimacy
of Magia's appeal to Ochun is mediated through her own subjectivity as a
black woman. Although Magia is not herself a practitioner of Ocha-Lucumi,
she chooses to invoke the female orisha in liturgical Yoruba to ground her
woman-centered narrative within a language of Afro-Cuban sacred life.
Magia's performative affinity with both female sex workers and Ochun is

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 159


thus rooted in a confluence of gendered, racial, and class constraints that
bind all within and against broader fields of patriarchal power.
As one of the most active and accomplished MCs transcendent of gen-
der lines, Magia's tenacious work over the years has garnered considerable,
if at times complicated, respect within Havana's hip hop community and
broader island-wide movement. Yet despite an increasingly independent
voice and organizational autonomy, as one long identified with her artistic
partner (and now former husband) Alexey Rodriguez, Magia has had to
negotiate perceptions of her artistic identity as one indebted to a male-
female coupling.
Following on the heels of Magia, a later generation of all-women groups
and female soloists arose during the early 2000s whose collective efforts
have further intervened within hip hop Cubano's fraternal space. One in-
fluential set of female voices to emerge and representing a relatively radical
challenge in this regard was Las Krudas. Garnering significant scholarly
attention over the years (Armstead 2007; Fernandes 2006, 2007; Guillard Li-
monta 2005; M. Perry 2004; Saunders 2009, 2010; West-Durin 2004),18 Las
Krudas, or "the raw ones," are a lesbian trio of Afrocentric vegetarian fem-
inists who entered Havana's hip hop scene around 2001. Prior to their in-
volvement in hip hop, the highly creative trio of Olivia "Pelusa" Prendes and
sisters Odaymara "Pasa" and Odalys "Wanda" Cuesta were active in street
theater, most notably as members of a colorful troupe of stilt walkers who
regularly performed in the heavily touristed area of Havana Vieja. Within
a few months after Krudas made their hip hop debut, Pasa described the
group's orientation to me in this way: "We're a female trio of new hip hop
with a new consciousness, a new understanding about the role of women
within this movement of hip hop. We classify our music as superground.
So I am here with Pelusa and Wanda fighting, writing, and working to have
our music heard to help, to open the mentality and the consciousness of
this movement. We feel it's very important that they listen to our words."19
Pasa's reference to the trio's music as "superground" plays upon the
U.S.-derived expression "underground" commonly used by raperos to dis-
tinguish between what is viewed as commercially compromised pop hip
hop that predominates U.S. markets and the less adulterated, politically
oriented forms that remain true to hip hop's socially committed roots. Less
accessible or popular, the latter is thus deemed underground. The expres-
sion has in fact been central to ideological debates within rapero circles

160 CHAPTER FOUR


4.2. Mc Odaymara "Pasa" Cuesta of Las Krudas. Photo by the author
regarding the evolving challenges and future directions of Cuban hip hop
writ large (cf. Fernandes 2006). The pivotal issue revolves around whether
individual artists-if not ultimately the movement as a whole-would "sell
out" their political convictions to an ever-encroaching Cuban marketplace.
As a discourse of authenticity, to remain underground implies a resis-
tance to processes of commercial cooptation viewed as corruptive of hip
hop's utopic promise. Such positions are hence implicitly rooted in critiques
of consumer capitalism. Indeed, working from the figure of Mickey Mouse
as a metaphor for the social vacuousness and commercialism associated
with U.S. popular culture, many Cuban Mcs express derision for what they
see as the "miki miki" (i.e., Mickey Mouse) tendencies in much of commer-
cial hip hop in the United States. As I discuss in the following chapter, such
critiques and their underlying anxieties unfold with a particular urgency as
hip hop artists have had to compete with the rise of Cuban reggaet6n.
Reminiscent of linguistic word-play strategies that Jamaican Rastafari
employ to subvert standard English phrasing (Pollard 2000), Pasa's allu-
sion to Krudas as superground further underscores the overtly political,
in-your-face nature of their feminist-directed intervention, an intervention

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering  161


targeted at expanding the movement's largely male-centered "mentality
and consciousness." Commenting further on the group's inspiration, Pasa
continues:
This is my race, this is my color, this is my people, and yet the movement
greatly lacks female representation. The community is made up of both
black women and black men, and so we have to represent black women.20
So we're supporting the movement, particularly the women because we
share different realities. Some [in the movement] may think that we are
all the same, no. There are different realities, different truths, different
experiences that women have given their sex and their gender.
Pasa's concern over a dearth of black women's representation within
Cuban hip hop recalls similar challenges leveled by U.S. black feminists re-
garding the male-centric leadership and masculinist character of the U.S.
black freedom movements of the 1960s and early 1970s (E. Brown 1993; Wal-
lace 1979). By foregrounding the particularities of black female subjectivity
and experience through the differentiated ways that racial oppression is
both gendered and sexualized, Pasa, like black feminists before, contests
the heteromasculinist claims of a unified subject of struggle on which Cu-
ban hip hop-if not the Cuban revolutionary and broader national project
itself-is largely predicated. Conversant with an analytics of intersection-
ality (Collins 1990), Pasa explained: "I feel that it is an impossibility to talk
about racism without talking about machismo. [In the past] machismo was
a facet of slavery, understand? It's also a form of oppression. And so our
temas talk about these things."
Claiming a black lesbian-feminist vocality within the movement's largely
masculinist and heteronormative lines in this way renders critically audible
questions of sexuality and homophobia in addition to those of race and gen-
der. Such interventions evoke earlier challenges by black lesbians and other
feminists of color in the United States who worked to decenter both black
liberation and white feminist movements through a radical, often sexual-
ized politics of difference (cf. Combahee River Collective 1986; Moraga and
Anzaldna 1981).
A queering poetics of identity is itself signified in the very name the trio
have chosen for themselves. As the artists described it, the name Krudas-
again, the female "raw ones"-was initially chosen to mark the group's ad-
herence to vegetarianism (i.e., raw food), which they view as an important

162 CHAPTER FOUR


political facet of their alterity as raperas. At the same time, the artists refer to
an unadulterated female "rawness" that they and their lyrics embody; theirs
is an assertive in-your-face performance style that refuses to conform to
patriarchal framings of Cuban women as objects of heteromasculine gaze.
Pasa explains: "I think we also call ourselves Las Krudas because our im-
age is a bit difficult to qualify under established classifications. Within the
culture of hip hop it seems that our image is very powerful. Because in real-
ity women that I have seen tend to be delicate, very refined, and passive-
women for men, as usual, understand? So we are another type of thing. We
are not niki, chiki, nor miki."
Indeed, Krudas, with their dreadlock-adorned full-figured bodies, un-
compromising women-centered lyrics, and highly theatrical performances,
represented a fairly radical departure from the dominant images of the Cu-
ban feminine-"women for men, as usual"-as well as the standard mas-
culinist hip hop fare. Afrocentric adornments of black womanist identity,
moreover, are performatively inscribed by the women in the form of tat-
tooed images of West African cowrie shells and renderings of the Egyptian
ankh symbol associated with creative female energy, all of which stand in
bold contrast to conventional racial and sexually normative gendered prac-
tice byway of "niki, chiki, [or] miki."
Pelusa recalls that Krudas' early performances were often greeted by
fellow raperos and attending audiences with silence, mouths wide, eyes
glazed. There did indeed seem to be an initial coolness among many male
MCs I knew toward the trio when they first began performing in the early
2000s. When asked about Krudas, one prominent rapero commented along
the lines, "Ellas no tienen ningnn tipo de flow" (They don't have any type
of flow), referencing the all-important verbal dexterity or "flow" that MCs
exhibit in performance. It was notable that rather than citing lyric content,
attention was paid to Krudas' supposed lack of technical proficiency or
"skills" as the means of dismissing their artistic if not broader political sig-
nificance as performers.
Yet there clearly was no avoiding Las Krudas' spectacular stage presence
and provocative, womanist-centered message propelled through theatrical
plays of music and performance style. As illustration, one of Krudas' sig-
nature temas, "Eres bella" (You are beautiful), recorded on their debut 2001
CD, Cubensi, offers a biting assessment of sexualized gender oppression vis-
n-vis Cuba's neoliberal malaise. The tema opens with the following salvo:

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 163


"Eres bella"

Cantarte, tema dedicacion
Dedicado a todas las mujeres del mundo
A todas las mujeres que como nosotras
estin luchando
A todas las guerreras campesinas urbanas
A todas las hermanas
Especialmente a las mis negras
Especialmente a las mis pobres
Especialmente a las mis gordas ...
Artificios de risas y postizos son
Continuacion del cuento colonialista
No te cojas pa' eso
Deja esa falsa vista ...
4Qu6 nos queda?
Prostitucion, seduccion
Esto es s6lo una costumbre de edad para
Ayudar a nuestras gente economicamente
En este mundo tan material
No somos nalgas y pechos solamente
Tenemos cerebro, mujer
Siente, siente ...
Sing, dedication song
Dedicated to all the women in the world
To all the women like us who
are fighting
To all the urban peasant guerrilla women
To all the sisters
Especially to the most black
Especially to the most poor
Especially to the most fat ...
Fake laughs and implants are
a continuation of the colonialist tale
Don't buy it
Move away from that false point of view ...

164 CHAPTER FOUR


What is left for us?
Prostitution, seduction
This is only a tradition of our times
to help our people economically
In this very material world
We are not only breasts and ass
We have brains, woman
Feel, feel ...
The tema thus begins in celebratory homage to a universal notion of
women's militancy and struggle within which the trio locate themselves.
Promptly, however, a more immediate affinity is claimed with those women
black, poor, and, yes, fat. Herein lies a central line of critique within the
song's text-the patriarchal objectification and normative conditioning of
black Cuban women's bodies and forms of subjectivity (cf. J. Butler 1993)
While the refrain "Fake laughs and implants are a continuation of the colo-
nialist tale / Don't buy it" speaks to such disciplinary effects, it draws lines
of articulation between these practices and fields of colonial governmen-
tality in ways that historicize black female subjugation via broader histories
of anticolonial/anti-imperialist struggle-narratives on which the Cuban
revolutionary national project is itself grounded.
Such maneuvers evoke radical black feminist Jacqui Alexander's call for
critical "pedagogies" aimed at deconstructing historical linkages between
colonialism, citizenship, and intersecting realms of gender and sexual-
ized oppression (Alexander 2006). Yet Krudas' cautionary "Don't buy it"
implicates a certain market rationale within these economies of power as
currently lived. Krudas, in turn, call for a rejection of such self-objectifying
gendered prescriptions, celebrating alternatively their full-figured bodies
in oppositional stance as a key performative facet of their queering inter-
ventions. The trio's later composition "La gorda" (Fat girl) takes on female
body aesthetics front and center as a queer(ing)-feminist salutation to non-
normative fatness, one that triumphantly declares in its chorus hook, "iLa
gorda ha llegado!" (The fat woman has arrived!).
Such queering alterity recalls what Jos6 Esteban Munoz has termed a
politics of disidentification employed by U.S. queer performers of color as
a means of decentering heteronormative economies of aesthetic value and
desire. As a "phobic object," to borrow from Mufoz's discussion of the per-

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 165


formance artist Marga Gomez's use of feminine masculinity, fatness in this
sense is "reconfigured as sexy and glamorous, and not as the pathetic and
abject spectacle that it appears to be in the dominant eyes of heteronor-
mative culture" (Munoz 1999: 3). Krudas' efforts in this sense seek to per-
formatively disidentify with and thus transgressively challenge normative
truth claims rooted in both whiteness and heteronormativity through an
alternative "worldmaking" as black lesbians (Munoz 1999: 200). The temas'
rhetorical query as to whether racism operates within a "maldita y machista
sociedad" (wicked and macho society) underscores those articulations of
racism and sexism as subjectively lived by Afro-Cuban women. In declar-
ing "No hay verdadera revolucion sin mujeres" (There is no real revolution
without women), emancipatory projects-including those of national rev-
olutionary struggle-are deemed hollow without the critical recognition
and active participation of black women.
As narrative foil, "Eres bella" evokes the condition of Cuba's female
sex workers, who represent some of the most acutely targeted subjects of
racially imbricated forms of sexual objectification in a monetized Cuba.
Possibly more directly than Magia's "La llaman puta," Krudas' identifica-
tion with these women and their circumstances is grounded in the first
person: "Yo tambien como to he hecho cosas mezquina / Yo tambi6n como
to he fregado por dos pesos que sonaban en cualquier esquina /Yo tambi6n
como to he sido forzada y llevada sin mi voluntad a fornicacion" (I like
you have paced street corners for two pesos / I like you have been forced
and taken against my will to fornicate). Such are the material conditions in
which a raced female sexuality becomes a key if not sole source of exploit-
able capital for these women.
"What is left for us?" they ask. "This is the only tradition of our times / To
help our people economically in this very material world." Departing from
such market-driven interpolations, black women's self-redemption lies in
the recognition that "We are not only breast and ass / We have brains." In-
deed, rather than corporal sites of phallocentric consumption, Las Krudas
call on women to simply "feel" who they are for themselves, melding other-
wise juxtaposed realms of affect and intellect in an embodied realization of
female subjectivity.
When asked about their openness about their sexuality when they first
entered the hip hop scene, Pelusa explained that although they harbored
some caution regarding public identification as lesbians, it was apparent

166 CHAPTER FOUR


from the very start that they were queer. While the trio may have experi-
enced some coolness from other artists at the onset, their vigorous involve-
ment and evolving presence ultimately garnered them space and significant
respect among many quarters of Havana's hip hop community. Indeed, Las
Krudas eventually collaborated with and/or shared performances with a
range of Havana's most established male artists. Their first album Cubensi
(2007), moreover, involved artistic partnerings with producer Pablo Herrera
and MCs Michael Oramas and Andy Yensy Oruna of Junior Clan. Collabo-
rative exchanges of the kind suggest lines described by U.S. cultural critic
Mark Anthony Neal in his call for new hip-hop-informed scriptings of black
masculinity that both confront and move beyond heteropatriarchal privi-
legings (Neal 2005).
Such transgressive aspirations have resonance beyond hip hop. Drawing
on extensive work with Las Krudas and broader realms of black lesbian
life in Havana, the U.S. sociologist Tanya Saunders suggests that despite
recent openings by the Cuban state and its institutions to more public rec-
ognitions ofnonnormative sexualities, Cuban lesbians of color struggle for
public space and affirmation while negotiating added challenges of racial
and gendered marginalization (Saunders 2010). Such limitations, Saunders
argues, tend in the end to (re)produce queer privileges along male and
white-racial lines, while reinforcing heteronormative modes of femininity
and accompanying lines of sexual morality. Las Krudas' asserted visibility
and vocality thus seek to engage and expand upon nonnormative spheres
of race, gender, and sexuality within Cuba's wider everyday.
Krudas' feminist-centered queerings did not always resonate uncom-
plicatedly with other female artists, however. I recall tension, for instance,
arising during a 2006 workshop on women in hip hop as part of a hip hop
symposium organized by Magia Lopez and Alexey Rodriguez of Obsesion.
During one exchange, Pasa suggested that the domestic sphere of child-
rearing and heterosexual partnering constrained the liberatory possibilities
of straight women as both artists and activists. Implicit in her charge was
a privileging of queer female subjects as agents of more radical kinds of
creative undertaking. At this juncture Magia chimed in, voicing discom-
fort with the idea that straight female artists were in effect compromised
politically by their sexuality. Pasa responded by affirming her respect for
Magia and her work as a central figure and pioneering woman in the move-
ment. She did, however, add that as a performer partnered with her then-

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 167


husband, Alexey, Magia could not be seen as occupying a fully autonomous
position as a female artist.
Although I had been aware of tensions arising between Magia and Las
Krudas in the past, I was also mindful that Magia and Alexey's success (and
strategic agility) in navigating institutional state-run structures and re-
sources engendered political costs among some in the hip hop community
who were more wary of state collaborations. While there may indeed have
been additional issues informing this particular exchange, a queer critique
ofheteronormative confines was clearly at the center of Pasa's commentary.
Another related set of intrafemale dialogues occurred around 2005. As
part of Las Krudas' ongoing work within Havana's hip hop community, the
trio were instrumental in helping form a performance collaborative of fe-
male hip hop artists dubbed Omega Kilay, aimed at promoting women's
participation and visibility within island hip hop.21 In addition to Krudas,
the collective included the long-active member of EPG&B MC Magyori "La
Llave" Martinez, the graffiti artist Yanelis "Nono" Valdez, and DJs Leidis
and Yaribey "Yary" Collia. As DJ Yary explained, it was during an all-female
concert amid an annual state-sponsored Cubadisco Awards that a consensus
emerged among performing artists to "shoot for something new, something
more powerful, a union of strength. So we decided to focus in one direction
and say, 'Let's create a project among us women who rap underground, be-
cause there're already others who do commercial fusion music.' As we were
the most prominent underground artists, we decided to join together. We
defended more or less the same interests, the same rights; we had the same
aspirations and everything was good and flowing well and solid."22
Along these lines, a summary of Omega's stated goals involved calls to:
- reflect the sociopolitical experiences of "Third World" Latinas;
- encourage the development of Cuban women;
- search for peaceful ways to liberate women; defend women's rights;
and eradicate machismo, domestic violence, and social, sexual, and
racial forms of discrimination;
- promote the development of festivals and events dedicated to Latin
American female rappers;
" promote the expansion of hip hop in Cuba and throughout the world;
" educate the public on themes of sexuality; and
" obtain greater incorporation of women within Cuban hip hop.23

168 CHAPTER FOUR


While advocating a kind of Third World feminist praxis and transna-
tional citizenship (Alexander 2006; Mohanty 2003; Uma 1997) by way of hip
hop activism, there may have been some divergences among Omega mem-
bers around more individuated levels of difference. During a 2006 interview
with MCs Magyori and Nono and DJ Yary, who were performing largely as
a trio at the time, the artists expressed some ambivalence regarding the
centrality of gender and feminist critique in relation to their work and self-
identity as artists. As Nono elaborated: "Our songs reflect everything, not
just feminism, it is not so important. What's important is to give our mis-
sion to our music. Each one of us has our own message, but the main mes-
sage is for us to be seen as artists, equal to all, not just women artists, but
like a normal artist-we are all equal."
Magyori added that she had a long history of working closely with male
artists as the sole female member of EPG&B, a space in which she claimed
to have felt neither compromised nor constrained artistically as a woman.
DJ Yary clarified in turn that she did not consider herself a feminist, imply-
ing that such a belief would invoke a separatist position she claimed not
to embrace. All three women stressed the notion that they had garnered
respect from their male peers and broader public through hard work, ded-
ication, and artistic talent rather than as women per se. Speaking of the
collective's membership, Yary explained:
The fact that we all belong to Omega Kilay shows that we are all here to-
gether and agree in many respects. The very fact that we were all together
means that there is a tie between all of us as artists and that we all respect
each other. Our purposes and intentions are largely similar though the
only difference is that Las Krudas are inclined toward the stronger side
of feminism here in Cuba. Being Third World, black, and overweight
has influenced them and they have fought hard. My story would not be
that, right? I talk about other things because, well, I have not suffered the
same ways as they have. Everyone has experienced different things, each
one has our own experience and we always translate them into positive
messages.
Though not referenced directly, Yary's comments suggest varying loca-
tions among Omega's members along differential lines of sexuality. Embed-
ded, for instance, in the commentary above of Yary and the other women is
an apparent tendency to associate feminism with a lesbian subject position,

Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering 169


from which all three women seem to distance themselves. While offering
a possible misreading of feminist epistemology, these women nonetheless
illuminate an evolving range of self-reflexive conversation both about and
through questions of gender and sexual difference-ones that no doubt owe
much to Las Krudas' work. Krudas' interventions in this sense have been
productive in introducing vocabularies of nonnormativity into spheres of
Cuban hip hop otherwise largely devoid of such critical grammar. Their abil-
ity to forge alliances with both male and other female artists across lines of
gender and sexuality testifies to the queering effects of their work-precisely
the kind of disruptive intervention that Tomis Fernandez Robaina advo-
cates above. It is hence through multivocal claims to inclusive citizenship
at overlapping levels of the national and transnational that new, critical un-
derstandings and ways of being Afro-Cuban come into active focus. Hip
hop is in this sense instrumental in aiding such self-refractive undertakings.

170 CHAPTER FOUR


Chapter 5.
Racial Challenges and the State
Late one night following a local hip hop concert in the barrio of Vedado,
I sat with a few friends in a nearby park reminiscing about the evening's
events while sharing a few cajitas (small packaged boxes) of Los Marinos
Paticruzado rum. Amid our musings, I noted my companions, Sidney
Anson, DJ Alexis D'Boys, and MC Michael Oramas of Junior Clan, were
adorned with an interesting collage of Afrodiasporic imagery. In succes-
sion, the trio sported T-shirt portraits of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, and
the Black Panther Party accompanied by an assemblage of cowry shells, an
Ethiopian Coptic cross, and red-, black-, and green-beaded necklaces and
wristbands. Attached to DJ Alexis's hat sat a small pin of Africa awash in
the same nationalist triad of colors given celebrated form by Marcus Garvey
and his call for black redemption through African repatriation. All stood in
syncretic harmony with a set of mini-stereo headphones dangling around
Sidney's neck (see figure 5.1). This Afro-Atlantic bricolage suggested a kind
of black and expressly masculine cosmopolitanism in which these young
men participated and literally stitched themselves within as contemporary
Afro-Cubans. As discussed, black Cubans have long engaged transnational
circuits of cultural commerce in the crafting of black social imaginaries and
lines of political affinity (Acosta 2003; Brock and Castafeda Fuertes 1998a;
Childs 2006; Fernandez 2006; Guridy 2010; Jacques 1998; J. Moreno 2004).
This, of course, is not new.


5.1. Sidney Anson, DJ Alexis D'Boys Rodriguez, and Mc Michael Oramas.
Photo by the author
For my friends and many of their peers, however, hip hop offered a global
expansiveness that both reflected, and was responsive to, the imperatives
of a Cuban present formed at a shifting, racially imbricated confluence of
history, nation, and an expanding market economy. The ways these young
Cubans choose to self-identify and define themselves as black per se were
rooted in social meanings fashioned in part through embodied style and
musical practice. These men thus participated in their own transnational
markets of racial consumption, yet ones directed toward particular affective
ends. Indeed, to be negro/a in this context is not simply the result of being
materially interpellated as such, but rather self-ascribed positions and po-
litically marked possibilities from which to move and act.
The political grammars through which raperos refashion blackness in
and of themselves, moreover, threaten the very stability of Cuban nonra-
cialism long central to the island's nationalist projects both past and pres-
ent. Recalling the nonracial groundings of Jose Marti, black Cuban identity
claims with the slightest of political implications have been viewed as a
counternational peril to the enshrined integrity of nation before race. Such

172 CHAPTER FIVE


perceived defiance carried real political consequences in both pre- as well
as post-1959 Cuba, with the 1912 state-sponsored massacre and dissolution
of the Partido Independiente de Color embodying the most violent of his-
torical expressions. One need not be familiar with rapero lyric allusions to
these legacies to recognize the ways these artists evoke similar calls for full,
non-self-negating inclusion and citizenship within the Cuban nation.
Raperos' explicitly modern claims to a black cosmopolitan globality, more-
over, also disrupt nationally bound narratives like those of state-promoted
folklore that tend to mark blackness, when recognized, as a "traditional" cul-
tural holdover ofan earlier moment-one autochthonously rooted in Cuba's
racially transculturated and therefore ultimately de-raced national past. The
diasporic amalgam of black signifiers that my drinking companions donned
on that post-concert evening clearly superseded in the most celebratory of
terms such national-temporal constraints.
Yet beyond the immediate circumstances of their making, what impacts
and kinds of articulations might these practices and their broader interven-
tions animate within wider spheres of Cuban life? Or in a more politically
direct sense, what has been the revolutionary state's position vis-n-vis Cu-
ban hip hop and its racially situated voicings? To what extent might raperos'
critical affirmations of black difference complicate in both form (identity)
and function (lyric-based critique) utopic claims of a Cuban postracial ex-
ceptionalism that would otherwise seek to silence social difference for the
greater revolutionary and national good?
State Maneuvers
As previously noted, the revolutionary state and its institutions have occu-
pied an ambivalent and often shifting role in relation to hip hop's develop-
ment on the island. By varyingly restricting and facilitating access to U.S.
popular music, while providing fragmentary support during the transitional
growth of la mofa into hip hop Cubano, the revolutionary state's early en-
gagement can generally be seen as one of cautious tolerance. As alluded to
earlier, it was the state-run Asociacion Hermanos Saiz (AHS) that eventually
took the lead as institutional liaison with the island's hip hop movement.
The increasingly active role ofAHS in successive hip hop festivals after 1999,
however, signaled a strategic shift in state involvement. To recall, Grupo
Uno, the hip hop collective headed by Rodolfo Rensoli that launched the

Racial Challenges and the State 173


first Cuban hip hop festival in 1995, approached AHS in 1997 with the aim
of securing institutional support for subsequent festivals held in Alamar's
amphitheater. While this move ultimately extended Grupo Uno's organiza-
tional leadership of the festival for a few additional years, it also marked the
beginning of an escalating governmental stake in the evolving space and
future direction of island hip hop.
A key figure in this early confluence of interests was Roberto Zurbano,
an Afro-Cuban writer, literary critic, and then vice president of Hermanos
Saiz, whom Rensoli first approached regarding governmental support for
the festival. In conversation with Zurbano he recalled that part of Grupo
Uno's initial appeal from an institutional standpoint was the collective's
proposal to expand the local festival to a province-wide event. Zurbano
added that it was a subsequent invitation by Rensoli to meet with local rap-
eros in Alamar, however, that sparked his interest in hip hop at a deeper per-
sonal level. Although he had no previous exposure to rap and had found the
Alamar scene somewhat disorganized, Zurbano told me he was intrigued by
what he experienced during his visit:
Right away I found that I had a strong affinity with these young people.
I understood what they wanted, what they were saying. They brought
some music to me and I began to hear their lyrics and their music. As a
matter of principle, when I take something on I do it thoroughly, and so
I wanted to inform myself about rap. So I began searching for literature
on rap and read some bibliographic materials though unfortunately not
much because there's very little on rap, at least here in Cuba. And then
somehow I eventually became involved in the organizing committee for
the event.1
The event to which Zurbano refers was the 1997 Cuban hip hop festival in
Alamar, which marked AHS's entree into hip hop as a collaborative organizer
of the annual festival alongside Grupo Uno. From that point on, La Asocia-
cion-as it became known to members of Havana's hip hop community-
became the principal and increasingly invested site of institutional contact
between the revolutionary state and the island's evolving hip hop move-
ment. As a key initial mediator of this engagement, Zurbano's curiosity and
affective "affinity" with local raperos extended well beyond institutional
concerns. Through a range of intellectual activities including scholarship
(cf. Zurbano 2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2009) and eventual editorial directorship

174 CHAPTER FIVE


of the state-run hip hop publication Movimiento,2 Zurbano became a pivotal
interlocutor and advocate for Havana's hip hop community, frequently act-
ing as intermediary between the movement and varying state-run cultural
institutions.
As one of an influential handful of Afro-Cuban intellectuals who would
foster important relationships with Havana-area raperos, Zurbano's evolving
institutional positionality-with AHS, the Union of Cuban Writers and Art-
ists (UNEAC), and his former directorship of the publishing wing of Casa de
las Americas-while largely respected, also drew ambivalence from some
of the movement's younger, more institutionally cautious members. Such
circumspection spoke ofa broader ambivalence of positionality Zurbano oc-
cupied as an institutionally situated Afro-Cuban and intellectual progeny of
the socialist revolution whose efforts, while potentially transcendent of in-
stitutional functionality, remained to an extent circumscribed by state inter-
ests. These tensions, as discussed in chapter 6, eventually gave rise to an ep-
isode of political fallout that once again underscored the political stakes of
antiracist advocacy amid ongoing Cuban legacies of regulatory nonracialism.
Reflecting on the earlier moment of state engagement with hip hop,
AHS's mission, in Zurbano's words, was aimed at integrating "new cultural
forms within enduring frameworks of the nation, and national and politi-
cal culture, opening up utopian possibilities and new forms of expression"
(Zurbano 2009: 144). Regarding Cuban hip hop, this translated into "identi-
fying talented rap artists, legitimizing their activities, improving their social
recognition, supporting their initiatives, and incorporating them into more
established cultural spaces" (Zurbano 2009:145). To again paraphrase Fidel
Castro's oft-cited "Inside the Revolution, everything. Against the Revolu-
tion, nothing," the operational subtext of AHS's engagement with hip hop
thus seemed one aimed at incorporation. Although such an agenda may in-
deed have been on the horizon in the late 1990s, successive hip hop festivals
continued to be organized by Grupo Uno on the most meager of resources,
provided in large part through local municipal sources (Hoch 1999). Hence
despite AHS's official cosponsorship of the festival, state commitments to
hip hop remained in practice more akin to guarded tolerance than active
support. Whereas raperos would continue to struggle for official recog-
nition and greater access to state resources and space, the revolutionary
state's view of the movement generally remained that of a faddish, inorganic
cultural phenomenon that would eventually fade.

Racial Challenges and the State 175


A critical shift in perspective, if not implicit strategy, occurred in May
1999. Cuba's then-influential minister of culture Abel Prieto called a meet-
ing in Havana with representatives of both rapero and rockero communities
to convey the state's official recognition of rap and rock music as legitimate
forms of Cuban cultural expression. One individual present at the meeting
was Pablo Herrera, who remembers harboring apprehension about the shift
in position. Recounting an exchange during the meeting, Pablo recalls:
What I told Abel Prieto [at the meeting] was, "Senior Ministro [laughs],
you and I know that the minute you decide to stop Cuban hip hop you can,
like an electrical switch, just shut it down. You can just stop the current
from going there-stop the whole thing and shut it down." The president
at the time of Hermanos Saiz, Fernando Rojas, said to me that I was being
a bit apocalyptic. And when the minster decided to close the meeting he
referred to my question and said that in the past, "We [the state] have had
to power down certain things because we felt like they were not viable with
the agenda that we have as a government."3
In a public ceremony held just a few weeks later, Prieto reportedly de-
clared: "We have to support our Cuban rappers because this is the next gen-
eration of Cubans and they are saying some powerful things with this art. I
am responsible for giving this generation the freedom to claim their power
culturally" (Hoch 1999). From this point on the state took a conspicuously
active interest in hip hop, with the Ministry of Culture under the direction of
Abel Prieto serving as the central coordinator of efforts to incorporate hip
hop within institutional realms of revolutionary national culture.
Another meeting later that same year involving Minister Prieto that may
have also played into the state's pivot on hip hop was attended by a visiting
Harry Belafonte (cf. Baker 2011; Levinson 2003). An important difference,
however, was that this gathering involved Fidel Castro himself. A bit of
background here. Sharing a history with Cuba predating the 1959 triumph
of the revolution, Belafonte's artistic work as a performer and Caribbean-
born native found fertile grounding in the vibrancies of Afro-Cuban music
making.4 At the same time, a life of progressive activism spanning U.S. and
international involvement provided Belafonte a perspective on the post-1959
period that helped frame a history of critical engagement with Cuba's rev-
olutionary project (Belafonte and Shnayerson 2011). It was during a trip in
December 1999 to attend Havana's annual International Film Festival that

176 CHAPTER FIVE


Belafonte first came into contact with local raperos, an experience that ap-
parently left a mark and shaped the terms of a subsequent conversation with
Castro and Prieto.
As Belafonte recounts in his memoir, while at lunch at the stately Hotel
Nacional:
I noticed a group of blacks who told me they were rappers. I said I hadn't
known that Cuba had rappers. After all, rap is in your face, by definition.
How could they be true to rap's spirit in Castro's Cuba? They couldn't per-
form in Havana's clubs, they acknowledged; to the country's elite, they
didn't even exist. But they did perform underground, often for hundreds
of people. That night, [my wife] Julie and I went to hear the ones we'd
met. We were amazed. Of course we didn't understand every word and
idiom; rap is hard enough to follow in English, much less in a second lan-
guage. But a translator helped us follow the gist, and I fully appreciated
the passion behind what I was hearing.
The very next day, Julie and I had lunch with Fidel, along with his min-
ister of culture, Abel Prieto, a tall, very handsome, very Spanish-looking
hippie with long hair and blue eyes. We started talking about blacks in
Cuban culture, which gave me the opportunity to bring up the black rap-
pers we'd heard the night before and what a pity it was that they could
only perform underground. I could see that Castro had only the vaguest
idea of what rap and hip-hop were, so I gave him a crash course in how
they'd swept the planet, how they not only dominated the international
music industry but had so much to say about the social and political is-
sues of the day. For Castro to be unaware of how much Cuban rappers
were adding to that conversation was truly a pity-not least because I
could see how a U.S.-Cuban cultural exchange in rap and hip-hop might
start a dialogue between the two countries. Fidel turned in some baffle-
ment to the minister of culture. "Why are these artists afraid to perform
in Havana?"
Prieto had to admit he didn't know much about rap or Cuban rappers,
let alone black ones. To Fidel, free speech wasn't so much the issue as
racism; if black artists in Cuba were being repressed, that undermined
Castro's no-prejudice policy. Lunch was over, so we stood up to take our
leave. "Where are you going?" Fidel demanded. I suggested we might
head back to our protocol house. "No, no, no. I want you to come with

Racial Challenges and the State 177


me and tell me more about these rappers." (Belafonte and Shnayerson
2011: 360-61)
In Belafonte's understanding, questions of race were front and center in
the exchange as well as a potential factor in a political disconnect between
Cuba's leadership and local raperos. Reflecting similarly on the episode,
Nehanda Abiodun recalls:
The first thing [Belafonte] did was meet with them in the Hotel Nacional,
and it was an open forum-all rappers were invited, it wasn't a select
group. [This was 19997] Yes, this was '99 in December. And to the credit
of the rappers they didn't hold back. And Harry just listened, he just lis-
tened to it all. The next thing he did was attend this small concert and
party that was held just for him. But after Harry listened to the music
of the hip hoppers he had a meeting with Fidel. And he said that what
started out to be just a lunch with Fidel turned out to be a ten-hour meet-
ing, and a large part of the discussion was on hip hop. [Ten hours?] Yes,
ten hours!'
In a subsequent return to Havana in 2002 Belafonte again met with lo-
cal MCs, though this time the assemblage was hosted by the newly inaugu-
rated state-run Agencia Cubana de Rap (ACR). Parts of this exchange are
documented in a 2004 article, "Encuentro entre amigos," published in the
Agency's Movimiento magazine, where themes of race and blackness serve as
central points of national and generational translation between Belafonte
and a score of Afro-Cuban raperos. Thus an official shift did indeed appear
to occur yet one involving multiple players, but let us avoid getting too far
afield.
Returning to that 1999 juncture, Hermanos Saiz eventually assumed full
administrative control of the Cuban hip hop festival, usurping the previous
leadership of Rensoli and others in Grupo Uno. While there were reported
charges of financial improprieties on the part of Rensoli and Grupo Uno as
the basis for their state-sanctioned removal as festival organizers, it seemed
fairly apparent to many at the time that the driving motivation behind AHS's
administrative takeover of the festival was political. By 2001 a new public
face of the festival emerged during a high-profile press conference held in a
swanky lounge bar atop the Teatro Nacional (National Theater).
On the podium, bookended by Pablo Herrera and Ariel Fernandez Diaz,

178 CHAPTER FIVE


sat a collection of institutional figures including Hermanos Saiz's then vice
president Fernando Leon Jacomino. As La Asociacion's key liaison with Ha-
vana's hip hop community at the time, Jacomino had established a fairly
respectable reputation among many MCs. Fairly quickly, though, Jacomino
disappeared from the scene. His position was filled by Alpidio Alonso, Her-
manos Saiz's new national president, who had recently been transferred to
Havana from the eastern city of Santa Clara. The shifting of responsibility
from the vice presidential to presidential rank ofAHS represented a further
ratcheting up of the state's engagement with hip hop, one now led by a unfa-
miliar outsider. Assuming a direct and fairly aggressive hands-on approach,
Alpidio eventually established working relationships with a number of key
figures in Havana's hip hop community. In the end, however, many of these
associations were marked by tension if not distrust.
When I asked about the evolving role of the state with regard to Cuban
hip hop, Alpidio explained that the responsibility of Hermanos Saiz was
to help incorporate raperos and their work within institutional structures
that would support and channel their creative energy more directly within
the revolutionary process. He spoke of raperos as among la vanguardia (the
vanguard) of the revolution, explaining that hip hop was in many ways "in
front of the institutions" in terms of their social vision regarding Cuba's
current challenges. As such, he concluded, the institutions-and by exten-
sion the revolutionary state-needed to pay greater attention to what rap-
eros were voicing through their music. Somewhat echoing this position, in
response to an interview query as to whether AHS saw itself as providing
official space for hip hop, Alpidio responded: "I would prefer if the question
was asked directly to the raperos themselves. But yes, Cuban rap has found
through AHS a space to speak, to be part of the Revolution. And it spreads
a revolutionary message and committed one, because their texts express it
this way" (Mantienzo 2004: 1). Despite Alpidio's expressed concern about
not speaking for raperos, it became apparent that Hermanos Saiz's new-
found interest in hip hop was tied to managing the public face-if not the
organizational character-of the movement. The official press conference
for the 2002 hip hop festival stands here as a vivid case in point.
Held in Havana's International Press Center in the commercial heart
of the thoroughfare of Calle 23, a small collection of middle-aged white
men-once again sandwiched between the younger and darker Pablo
Herrera and Ariel Fernandez Diaz at either end-sat on the stage before

Racial Challenges and the State 179


a packed audience. At the center, Alpidio directed the proceedings while
Pablo and Ariel appeared less as active participants than perfunctory win-
dow dressing for the event. The dozen or so MCs who showed up for the
press conference lined the back wall, looking on rather detached at the un-
folding spectacle onstage. This disconnect was later noted by Pablo, who
commented on how telling it was that one of the purported authorities on
hip hop, an older white man whom no one seemed to recognize, repeat-
edly mispronounced the names of the artists slated to participate in the
upcoming festival. Following the press conference, Ariel put it to me this
way: "black music, white people, same ol' shit." Apparent inconsistencies
between these statements and Pablo and Ariel's actual participation (or at
least the official semblance of such) in the press conference spoke again to
a certain tenuousness they now maneuvered as members of Havana's hip
hop community with institutional access. As I explore momentarily, Ariel's
evolving positionality as one betwixt and between the movement and the
state carried a particularly charged set of complexities.
A tone of paternalism presided over much of the press conference in
which Alpidio and company seemed set on conveying the message "These
are our Cuban youth [as silent(ced) as they are], and the state is here to pro-
vide." In line with moves that denied autonomous voice to Cuban MCs, any
mention of race was conspicuously absent from the press conference. Such
omissions became standard practice in practically all official references to
hip hop by the Cuban state and its institutions. An incorporative discourse
of "our youth" was deployed strategically in state pronouncements, thus
avoiding any public acknowledgment of the racial currents that underpinned
much of the movement. To do so would expose the present urgencies of race
and Cuban nationhood, a subject the revolutionary leadership remained re-
luctant to openly address. Official couchings of raperos as "our youth," more-
over, were reminiscent of state paternalism directed at black Cubans during
the earlier revolutionary period (cf. de la Fuente 2001). Here the post-1959
canonization of Nicolas Guillen's poem, "Tengo," as a celebrated ode of in-
debted black gratitude to the revolution assumes added levels of resonance-
ones nonetheless challenged by Hermanos de Causa's revisionist interpre-
tations (see chapter 4).
The state's institutional ante vis-n-vis hip hop was raised considerably,
however, with the establishment of the Agencia Cubana de Rap (ACR) un-
der the Ministry of Culture in late 2002. Prior to this moment the only in-

I8O  CHAPTER FIVE


stitutional outlet available to a select few raperos was membership in the
previously mentioned state-run empresa Benny More, an "auto-financed"
agency designed to promote and provide a minimal wage to performing
artists associated with popular dance music (cf. R. Moore 2006b: 91-92). As
one of the few MCs associated with ACR, Magia Lopez of Obsesion recalled
her early experience with the empresa:
So in 2000 after many battles, four [rap] groups managed to enter the
empresa Benny Mor6 and were recognized as professional. But in reality
we were without work and wages for a long time, because this empresa
did not know how to promote or market our work. They had over twenty
years of marketing primarily popular and traditional music and we [rap-
eros] were basically a quite different thing.6
Dedicated explicitly to hip hop, La Agencia, as it became known within
rapero ranks, assumed the responsibility of representing a select number of
hand-picked rap groups with whom it coordinated performance activities
such as concerts and tours. The initial ten groups incorporated into ACR's
portfolio were Alto Voltaje, Anonimo Consejo, Cubanos en la Red, Cuban-
itos, Doble Filo, Eddy-K, Free Hole Negro, Obsesion, Papo Record, and
Primera Base. Appointed to head ACR was Susana Garcia Amoros, a black
woman in her early forties who had previously worked as an institution-
based researcher with a specialization in Afro-Cuban literature. Although
her appointment as a black woman appeared strategic, many noted that
she had no background in music administration, let alone familiarity with
hip hop. In this light Susana was viewed by some as not much more than a
funcionaria or state functionary within Cuba's larger bureaucratic apparatus.
As Ariel Fernandez Diaz mused in conversation: "I mean, you need to ask
where did Susana come from, the communist party. So when Susana had a
decision on the table that needed to be made, something that required she'd
have to choose between the hip hop movement and the communist party,
she would choose the communist party."7
In describing the objective of ACR, Susana explained that the agency was
formed to promote and commercialize hip hop talent within its portfolio. It
was generally understood that a key criterion used in identifying artists for in-
clusion was tied to their perceived commercial viability, a mandate read criti-
cally by some. As a designated auto-financiado (self-financed) state organ, ACR
was designed to draw on the potential revenue of its talent pool to finance

Racial Challenges and the State 181


its operational costs. As Pablo Herrera suggested to me at the time, the for-
mation of ACR in his view was ultimately linked to state interests in farming
out Cuban hip hop to an international marketplace. He likened such moves
to state efforts to "pimp" hip hop for commercial gain. Arrangements of the
kind had already occurred with the ever-growing numbers of Cuban musi-
cians now traveling abroad in the wake of an international boom in Cuban
music since the mid-199os following the Buena Vista Social Club phenome-
non. In some of these early scenarios the Cuban state was reported to have
garnered upward ofo50 percent of artists' overseas earnings (Watrous 1997).
Those in decision-making positions were, moreover, no doubt aware of
the commercial potential of Cuban hip hop given the international success
of Orishas, a French-produced rap group of Havana expatriates, including
two former members of the pioneering hip hop trio Amenaza, whose debut
album A lo cubano (2000 Universal Latino) surpassed the platinum mark in
Europe and sold over 50,000 copies in the United States.8 The collaborative
brainchild of the Paris-based hip hop producer Nicolas "Miko" Nocchi and
the Cuban MC Flaco Pro Nunez, a key factor in the album's international
appeal was the astute coupling of identifiably "Cuban" musical elements
such as son, rumba, and traditional Cuban vocal styles with rap lyricism
and hip-hop-informed beats. In dialogue with au courant packagings
of Cuban blackness, however, economies of race were also central to the
project's commercial branding from inception. From the savvy choice of
"Orishas" (gods), to the stylized incorporation of Yoruba-derived chants
of Ocha-Lucumi and Afro-Cuban percussive lines, to a graphic darkening of
the artists' portraits on the album cover, a cultivated "Cuban" aesthetics
of blackness was integral to the group's international marketing strategy.
An ubiquitous sonic presence in the streets of Havana immediately fol-
lowing the album's debut, Orishas returned to Cuba in December 2000 and
January 2001 for a series of sold-out concerts. The explosive nature of the
events and broader commercial possibilities of Cuban hip hop no doubt
caught the attention of the revolutionary leadership. While most Havana-
based raperos I know were generally critical of what they viewed as Orishas's
overtly commercial nature, many also respected, if not envied, the high-end
production qualities of their music. Some, moreover, acknowledged that
Orishas's commercial success may have opened new commercial prospects
for them both at home and abroad.
When I spoke with the ACR director Susana Garcia Amoros about the

182 CHAPTER FIVE


significance of hip hop in Cuba, she made the repeated point to distinguish
island hip hop from its originating cousin in the United States. Susana
emphasized that raperos had begun developing their own style of dress,
gestures, and textual thematics that reflect a distinctly Cuban sensibility.
Throughout she referred to raperos as los j6venes (the youth) who, she sug-
gested, were contributing to a deepening of understanding of Cuban soci-
ety, "pero," she added, "en una forma constructiva" (but, in a constructive
way) within the revolutionary process. When asked about racial dynamics
within the movement, Susana responded: "Here in Cuba you can speak
about pigmentation or coloration, but you cannot talk about 'the races' be-
cause in reality we are all mixed."9 Her response seemed to me a bit incon-
gruous at the time given her previous research background in Afro-Cuban
literary themes.
Susana then qualified that in terms of skin color, yes, the majority of rap-
eros are darker skinned but, she emphasized, there are also those "mds daro"
(lighter skinned). I added that in my own experience with the community,
race appeared to factor into hip hop beyond simply questions of skin color,
pointing out the salience of black racial identity themes and self-practice
within the movement. At that she let the issue rest without further comment.
While Susana may have had cause to be cautious with me as a yuma (for-
eigner) and a Yankee at that, her avoidance of racial complexities seemed tell-
ing. Thus in noted contrast with the commercial packaging of Orishas, race
seemed largely expunged from La Agencia's official discourse on hip hop.
One of the early projects Susana undertook in her new role as director
of ACR was to accompany Magia Lopez and Alexey Rodriguez of Obsesion
along with MC Edgar Gonzilez of the hip hop duo Doble Filo during a 2003
U.S. tour. Doble Filo's other artistic half, MC Yrak Saenz, was denied the
required permission to travel by Cuban immigration. While no official rea-
son was given, one possible factor may have been a concern that the artist
might refuse to return to Cuba at the conclusion of the tour. Such anxi-
eties were heightened given the previously mentioned rapero "defection"
episode during a 2001 tour to New York City. Although the 2003 tour was
organized and funded entirely through a collaboration of Miami- and New
York-based arts organizations,10 the Cuban Ministry of Culture negotiated
Susana's inclusion as official state chaperone. Susana's addition did indeed
put an official face to (and within) the tour, while establishing a new degree
of institutional coordination of hip hop as a whole.

Racial Challenges and the State 183


While Obsesion as one of the most accomplished of Cuban hip hop
groups was officially represented by La Agencia, many other talented, more
critically postured groups in Havana conspicuously were not. I recall one
exchange in particular that exposed some related tensions around ACR's
operational nature. During a discussion at a public colloquium organized in
2003 as part of the now state-run Cuban hip hop festival, MC Soandres del
Rio of Hermanos de Causa took the floor to challenge what he saw as ACR's
exclusionary nature. The critique was directed at Alpidio Alonso, who ear-
lier that day had defended La Agencia against other charges given Susana's
noted absence from the colloquium, the first held during her new tenure as
director. Alpidio responded by arguing that it was impossible for the agency
to represent all groups, suggesting it was ultimately a question of resources.
Soandres countered by asking Alpidio ifhe knew his name or to what group
he belonged, which Alpidio conceded he did not. At this, Soandres con-
cluded that institutional claims to "represent and support" hip hop were at
best woefully out of touch, if not in the end implicitly suspect. Soandres's
charge reflected a broader disillusionment and distrust shared by many in
the community toward the new rap agency and broader institutional efforts
to engage island hip hop. Even Magia and Alexey, who were among the cele-
brated "stars" of La Agencia, soon grew critical of the office's workings.
In truth, the revolutionary state and its institutions held resources that
raperos long sought, resulting in something of a paternal relationship (if
episodic and largely strategic) between the Cuban state and hip hop artists.
In the immediate years following its establishment, ACR, in conjunction
with Hermanos Saiz and the Instituto Cubano de la Musica, organized a
range of hip hop concerts throughout Havana alongside the first national
hip hop tour involving Obsesion and Doble Filo in 2004. During this period
raperos and their music, long invisible in state-run media, began appear-
ing-albeit within certain constraints-on television, radio, in print, and
on the Internet. Under Hermanos Saiz auspices, between 1999 and 2003 the
annual hip hop festival expanded from a three-night event in Alamar to a
five-day, multisited program throughout greater Havana involving colloquia
and art exhibitions in addition to music performances. The concurrent rise
of weekly shows at Caf6 Cantante and La Madriguera marked a further ex-
pansion of Havana-based raperos' access to officially sanctioned space and
resources.

184 CHAPTER FIVE


An increasingly central player in this elevated state engagement was Ariel
Fernandez Diaz. In addition to holding court alongside Pablo Herrera as DJ
Asho at Caf6 Cantante's Saturday afternoon showcases and evening pefas
at La Madriguera-both under AHS's auspices-Ariel assumed a position
within Hermanos Saiz in 2000 as hip hop events coordinator and official
state liaison with the movement.11 Although bringing a minimal peso salary,
this move catapulted Ariel, already something of an organic intellectual fig-
ure within the hip hop community, into an official state capacity. Ariel later
described his new position as a move from "the margins to the center," one
broadly analogous in this sense to state incorporations of Cuban hip hop
as a whole. Among his new responsibilities, Ariel became the lead person
for leasing state-owned audio equipment for hip-hop-related music events.
One case in point in late 2001 involved the informal Vedado street venue
of Diez y Diecinueve, during which the hip hop collective EPG&B organized
an afternoon concert with a local assortment of invited artists. As the man
of the hour, Ariel coordinated the event's audio needs, which in classic Cu-
ban fashion arrived a couple of hours late. Yet unlike previous times when
police forced the street crowds converging at this intersection to disband,
officers were conspicuously absent amid the public spectacle of black bod-
ies and music. This scenario reflected a new level of state tolerance and
material support for hip hop, a development in which Ariel now played an
informative role.
In addition to promoting music-related events including those in his role
as DJ Asho, Ariel's institutional position afforded him new intellectual out-
lets and resources as an impassioned advocate for hip hop in Cuba. A major
undertaking along these lines was his editorial directorship of Movimiento, a
glitzy state-financed magazine dedicated to Cuban hip hop published under
the auspices of ACR and the Instituto Cubano de la Musica. Launched in
2003, the project pulled together an eclectic array of hip-hop-affiliated indi-
viduals, the vast majority ofwhom were Afro-Cuban. Among those involved
were journalists, photographers, intellectuals, graphic designers, and hip
hop artists who collectively exercised fairly open editorial control over the
magazine's content.12 Under Ariel's directorship through 2005, Movimiento
published four issues encompassing a wide range of articles and imagery
relating to island hip hop. As a journalist, Ariel also contributed a broad
selection of articles and other material to the magazine. The project as such

Racial Challenges and the State 185


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5.2. Journalist, DJ, and events producer Ariel Fernandez Diaz.
Photo courtesy of Ariel Fernandez Diaz


represented an important moment of critical triangulation between the hip
hop movement, Afro-Cuban intellectuals and artists, and state resources via
an institutionally facilitated medium.
In conversation about his new position with Hermanos Saiz, Ariel ac-
knowledged that his thinking had recently shifted with regard to his long-
standing distance from the state and "the revolution." Now, he implied,
he saw things somewhat differently. When I asked whether he shared a
greater level of identification with the state given his new involvement, Ariel
responded:
Of course, completely. [What changed?] I don't know, my thinking is
deeper, my struggle is deeper, my political understanding is more pro-
found. Before, when I started, the only thing important was that rap
could be in Cuba, that it could be heard in Cuba. Now I'm interested in
what role rap can have in the political life of the country, no?. . . Many
people complain about the state but there are things that the state does
that may harm five or six people, but benefit many. It's very complicated,
understand? It's very complicated to understand.13
During the years I knew Ariel, his thinking and positionality seemed to
be constantly evolving in ways that often involved wresting with conflicting
tensions. In describing his newfound responsibilities working with Her-
manos Saiz, the internal seeds of some of this discord were apparent.
My mission is to be an artist, to be human-think for it, work for it.
This is the same mission of the movement itself. I am fighting to be a
messenger between the Cuban institutions and the artists, understand?
I arrived at the Cuban institutions-the Minister of Culture, Asociacion
Hermanos Saiz-because raperos wanted that. I am there to fight be-
cause raperos want concerts, discs-for these kinds of things. [Like a
bridge?] Yes, like a bridge. I do not desire that people create an identity
for me apart from the movement, no. I think that people intend for me to
have a role within the movement. I don't want people to think that I want
to be a "mogul" like Russell Simons. Sincerely, if I'm a leader or the face
of the movement about many things, I always have to respond to what
the movement itself wants.
Although on the surface these remarks may suggest otherwise, Ariel's
comments betray an ambivalence that he occupied as a middleman caught

Racial Challenges and the State 187


between hip hop and the state. Ariel's need to repeatedly assert his fidelity
to the movement reflected the potentially compromising position he now
occupied. While Ariel and, to a lesser degree, Pablo Herrera have served
varyingly as intermediaries between the state and the hip hop movement,
their positionality as advocates and artistic producers grew organically out
of long-term engagements within Havana's hip hop community. Most rap-
eros I knew highly respected Ariel and his tireless, if at times seemingly ob-
sessive, efforts over the years to promote the cause of island hip hop. This,
however, did not mean that Ariel's (or for that matter Pablo's) relationship
with Cuban MCs and others affiliated with the movement was free from
complexities and tensions.14
While many recognized the instrumental role Ariel played in securing
needed state-related resources, this did not translate to unguarded trust of
the Cuban state and its institutions. Ariel in turn seemed cognizant of how
he, as an employee of Hermanos Saiz, might be implicated by concerns
regarding state modes of intervention. Indeed, one well-positioned per-
son within the movement once playfully likened Ariel to "a house negro" in
Hermanos Saiz. In truth, over time Ariel grew increasingly conflicted about
his position. He often complained about the frequent arguments he would
wage with the Hermanos Saiz's leadership over the direction of his work
and the movement itself. Ariel eventually expressed frustration and mount-
ing misgivings about continuing his involvement (i.e., employment) within
AHS, including his desire to break from Hermanos Saiz and organize his
own hip-hop-related projects independent of the state. The challenge, of
course, was how and with what resources. Although he gradually created
distance between himself and AHS and would eventually resign from his
position, for that moment in the early to mid-2ooos Ariel was caught at the
epicenter of an ongoing dance between hip hop and the state as both grap-
pled with a rapidly changing Cuba.
Shapings of a Black Public Sphere
It is important to consider the interplay between Cuban hip hop and the
revolutionary state in light of a set of confluences beginning in the 1990s
that gave rise to an apertura or "opening" on the part of the Cuban state to
a wider public range of social and artistic expression along with broader
recognitions of social difference (cf. Dilla Alfonso 2002). The revolutionary

188 CHAPTER FIVE


state's relatively more tolerant position on homosexuality, though clearly
with limitations (see Saunders 2010), stands as one example of such open-
ings during this period (Bejel 2001). Many cite the Third Congress of Cu-
ba's Communist Party in 1986 as something of a watershed event in this
direction (de la Fuente 2001; N. Fernandez 2001)." Signaling a measured
reopening of public discussion of race after long silencings,16 Fidel Castro
acknowledged the persistence of racial discrimination during the congress's
closing, pointing to the scarcity of blacks, women, and youth within the
party's leadership. His call for redress eventually gave rise to a two-fold in-
crease of nonwhite membership in the party's Central Committee following
a purge of older committee members (de la Fuente 2001; Dilla Alfonso 2002;
C. Moore 1989).17
The party's Fifth Congress in 1997 drew renewed attention to the con-
tinued scarcity of blacks in the party's ranks, again raising questions of ra-
cial exclusion within Cuba's political structures (Perez Sarduy and Stubbs
2000). Although a decade apart, these declarations occurred during signif-
icant periods of economic anxiety, the first involving a national effort to
"rectify" recent market reforms and their social impacts,18 and the second
amid an ambivalence regarding neoliberal expansion and the very moment
and circumstances under which the Cuban hip hop movement was finding
its footing.
Recalling state broachings of the topic of racism in the early years of the
revolutionary period, Alejandro de la Fuente observes that black intellec-
tuals played an important role in pushing public terms of debate on the
issue (de la Fuente 2001: 260). Within this more recent historical frame, I
suggest that raperos played a similar contributing role in reopening public
dialogues on race and blackness in the early 2000s. Here a dialectic play of
sorts occurred between hip hop as a new space of racial articulation in both
form (racial subjectivity) and practice (race-based critique), and the Cuban
state in its efforts to manage the terms of such expansive contest. What
then in a more explicit sense were the working dimensions of this interface,
and in what ways might raperos' and other aligned actors' efforts align with
periodic openings and subsequent retreats of state-sanctioned space (cf.
Cabezas 2009; Corrales 2004)?
I suggest that black and darker-skinned raperos were in fact active in
shaping a nascent black counterpublic at the millennial turn rooted in a
black political difference and antiracist advocacy within an otherwise non-

Racial Challenges and the State 189


racial national imaginary. Taking a lead from Michael Dawson (1995), I draw
on Nancy Fraser's notion of subaltern counterpublics as competing sites of
social and political expression vis-n-vis the often marginalizing effects of
official public spheres. For Fraser, such counterpublics frequently challenge
"exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles
of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech" (Fraser 1990:
61). While conventional notions of a public sphere associated with liberal
democratic societies (Habermas 1989) may not operate as such within rev-
olutionary Cuba, where domains of public engagement have been largely
channeled and regulated by state-run institutions, this does not mean that
alternative modes of public expression and dialogue do not exist. Indeed,
the recent rise of a relatively cantankerous Cuban blogosphere is illustrative
of such expanding alterities to state-mediated realms of public discourse
(see Duong 2013). Efforts to give Cuban voice to an emergent black counter-
public have similarly required alternative, nonformal means of public en-
gagement and redress.19
Integral to this new moment of Afro-Cuban parlance, Cuban hip hop
can be seen as operating precisely in this sense as an alternative site of black
public enunciation. Here raperos' voicings and attending modes of black
self-crafting have been instrumental in pushing critical discussions of race
and class into realms of Cuban public discourse. Where else in revolution-
ary Cuba, for instance, might one stand before upward of three thousand
black youth and engage publicly in critiques of racial exclusion and racially
directed police harassment? Perhaps Cuban timba and more recent reggae-
ton, whose artists and fan bases also draw heavily from Afro-Cuban youth,
may also offer public sites of social critique via realms of popular music (cf.
Baker 2011; Hernandez-Reguant 2004; Perna 2005; Vaughn 2012). While these
genres represent vibrant locales within an expanding field of racially inflected
expression-ones in varying conversation with hip hop themselves-neither
timba nor reggaeton articulate the explicit racial claims or antiracist advocacy
found in hip hop.
Black-identified raperos as such maneuvered in somewhat vanguardist
terms vis-n-vis Cuba's spectrum of racial politics at the millennial turn, oc-
cupying critical ground within a broader unfolding present of Afro-Cuban
political articulation. The evolving lines of this confluence have been noted
by others (Fernandes and Stanyek 2007; M. Perry 2004; Saunders 2009),
including historian Alejandro de la Fuente, who, citing raperos among

190 CHAPTER FIVE


key agents, has likened such developments to a "new Afro-Cuban cultural
movement" that encompasses "musicians, visual artists, writers, academ-
ics and activists shar[ing] common grievances about racism and its social
effects" (de la Fuente 2008: 697; see also de la Fuente 2010).
An important marker of hip hop's weight in this dialogic mix involved a
growing interest in raperos and their art by a small but active Havana circle
of Afro-Cuban intellectuals, a particular current of which was composed
by an older generation. The filmmaker Gloria Rolando was among such
interlocutors who, in addition to other involvements, collaborated with
Anonimo Consejo in developing her film Raices de mi coraz6n (Roots of my
heart) and its exploration of the Partido Independiente de Color. The so-
cial psychologist Norma Guillard Limonta, whose research centers on black
women via overlapping dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality, also
shares an important history of engagement with hip hop. Guillard Limonta
has been particularly interested in the role ofwomen within the movement
and has published scholarly articles along these lines including a piece in
Movimiento magazine (Guillard Limonta 2005). The ethnomusicologist Gri-
zel Hernandez Baguer, with the Cuban Center for Investigation and De-
velopment of Music (CIDMUC), has similarly taken a long-term scholarly
interest in island hip hop (Hernandez Baguer, Casanella Cu6, and Gonzalez
Bello 2004), as has the journalist Joaquin Borges-Triana (2004). The Afro-
Cuban poet and literary figure Victor Fowler, for his part, has also made
frequent contributions to Movimiento in the form of brief reviews of recent
Cuban publications on racial issues (Fowler 2004a, 2004b). Movimiento in
this sense was instrumental not only as a forum for documenting hip hop's
Cuban rise, but also as an emergent space for Cuban conversations on race
through the organizing frame of hip hop itself.
A more intimate level of intergenerational engagement involved Tomas
Fernandez Robaina and Roberto Zurbano, who, in addition to their collabo-
rative involvements with the movement, have published scholarly commen-
tary on island hip hop (Fernandez Robaina 2002; Zurbano 2004a, 2004b,
2006, 2009). Sharing some thoughts amid a conversation about hip hop's
Cuban relevance in 2006, Zurbano elaborated:
Issues of race, gender, class, and notions of sexuality are being reflected
in hip hop here in Cuba in terms of making a series of projections, not
only in the fields of aesthetics and the arts, but also in the ideological

Racial Challenges and the State 191


field.... Hip hop is subverting ideas, critiquing a way of life in which
a new Cuban economy creates a lot of marginal subjects and spaces-a
new economy where there are mutually exclusive terms, excluding
spaces, excluded subjects. In this sense they are producing discourses
that are not only artistic but also social. They have taken a social dis-
course and rearticulated revolutionary values within which they have
been trained and educated.
These are the utopic horizons for possible rescue that they are fight-
ing for. And in this sense I find they are a vanguard not only because of
the social critique embedded in the text of their songs, but also how they
live a discourse that is a critique of the social ills of today, Cuba today-a
global society. The most interesting thing is that the social criticism that
they are making is shared by many who feel oppressed in other parts
of the world such as other black people, the poor, the oppressed, those
crushed under the culture of neoliberal capitalism.20
Zurbano's comments underscore an appreciation for hip hop's vangard-
ist possibilities not only in terms of seeking "rescue" of the revolutionary
promise in the face of the exclusionary challenges of the neoliberal mo-
ment, but possibly more so regarding raperos' globally expansive revision-
ings of utopic possibility.
Another individual of note echoing similar lines of appraisal is Gisela
Arandia, a prominent Afro-Cuban researcher and journalistically trained
scholar of contemporary black issues affiliated with the Union of Cuban Art-
ists and Writers (UNEAC). Gisela was instrumental in launching UNEAC's
previously mentioned "Color Cubano" project in 2001 as a forum for writers
and artists-the majority of whom were Afro-Cuban-to reflect upon and
debate issues of racism, black media representation, and the role of Afro-
Cubans in revolutionary society. The project drew its name from Nicolas
Guillen's famed yearning for a postracial Cuban future embodied in the cel-
ebrated verse "Algun dia se diri: 'color cubano"' (One day it [Cubanness]
will be known as: "Cuban Color") from his 1931 poem "Songoro cosongo."
In revisiting the theme, the forum was illustrative of recent institutional
openings to relatively more public discussions of race,21 openings in which
Afro-Cuban intellectuals again played an active role. Reflecting on hip hop
and its relevance to broader conversations on race in Cuba, Gisela explained
to me:

192 CHAPTER FIVE


In this sense debating the issue [of race] is where we are at this moment.
This means we have to advance the issue beyond the taboo-the subject
starts to speak and voices begin to emerge. In this context the rap move-
ment is extremely important because it allows us to look at very specific
things and recognize the problems. Ifyou were always told before, "Here
there is no racism," and then a rap song tells the story of police in the
streets asking you 15,000 times for your ID card while not stopping some
other white boy, right then and there the specifics are condemning.
Now, what is important is that raperos make alliances with people and
seek a broad spectrum. Of course they elect their own leaders and I'm not
pretending to be incorporated into the movement because, of course,
there is a tremendous distance between us, principally generational and
intellectually. But of course they deserve support because they are a front
in the fight against racism. This is important because in essence they
introduce an antiracist discourse.22
For Gisela, a key space of exchange with raperos and others around hip
hop occurred during a series of annual colloquiums organized as part of
Hermanos Saiz's expansion of Cuba's hip hop festival. Unlike earlier years
when the event drew an informal gathering of no more than a handful of
raperos, since 2000, when I first participated, the colloquium grew into a
multiday program drawing Cubans and foreigners alike around commen-
tary and analysis of hip hop as a new Cuban phenomenon. In addition to
Hermanos Saiz, participating state organs included UNEAC and El Museo
de la Musica (The Museum of Music), reflecting increased institutional rec-
ognition of hip hop as well as ongoing efforts to frame its official terms
of debate. These public forums were often charged grounds for exchange
around issues like racism, identity, and questions of citizenship-all read
against the social backdrop of hip hop. Whether intentional or not, the col-
loquium's shift toward a more formal academic exchange in the end tended
to marginalize raperos as participants. While MCs filled the seats listening
to others, including myself, pontificate about them and their music, they were
rarely if ever on the podium themselves. This did not, however, inhibit many
from making their voices heard.
During a panel organized as part of the 2002 colloquium, Ariel Fernan-
dez Diaz-who himself played a key role in organizing the colloquium in
his official capacity with AHS-offered a rather blistering critique of racial

Racial Challenges and the State 193


representation used in print advertising packaged for the foreign tourist
market. Using imagery culled from this media, Ariel underscored the invis-
ibility of black Cubans within much of the promotional literature or, when
present, framed in racialized caricatures reproductive of folkloric or "colo-
nial" portraiture. In juxtaposition, Ariel offered a collection of Cuban rap
lyrics exemplary of the movement's black political currents. His tone was
unapologetic and represented something of a milestone at the time in its
public voicing of hip hop's racial orientation. In spite (or precisely by way)
of his institutional capacity, Ariel contributed to a shattering of the official
silence around hip hop's racial dimensionality, an issue that at the time still
remained largely outside sanctioned state discourse and acknowledgment.
Discussions of this kind provoked an interesting set of exchanges. At
one point a middle-aged black man from the audience addressed a panel,
complaining about what he viewed as a misguided emphasis by raperos
on issues of racial identity and racism. He suggested that Cuban MCs were
merely, and uncritically, reproducing discourses prevalent in U.S. hip hop
that were largely inorganic to Cuba. His concerns, however, failed to res-
onate with the audience, the majority of whom where themselves raperos
who had long affirmed their Cubanness as artists.
On another colloquium day, Sekou Umoja of Anonimo Consejo addressed
the colloquium from the floor, complaining that the enduring invisibility
of Afro-Cuban figures compelled black youth to look elsewhere for "our
heroes," citing the examples of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In Sek-
ou's view, blackness had in essence been disenfranchised from Cuba's na-
tional narrative. Building on themes of racial disenfranchisement, Sekou
continued by citing his inability as a "Cuban" to travel freely "dentro mi
propio pals" (in my own country) following the recent implementation of
travel restrictions to regulate internal migration on the island.23 While these
laws were primarily designed to limit in-migration to Havana from eastern
provinces at a time of growing regional inequality, such regulation often
involved racially coded surveillance and policing of darker-skinned palestinos
(or others filling the bill), as immigrants from the eastern Oriente region
are commonly termed. Shortly after his remarks, Sekou was pulled aside by
the president of Hermanos Saiz, Alpidio Alonso, who chastised him for his
comments. During their exchange, Alpidio could be heard reminding Sekou
not to forget the heroics of Jos6 Marti and Antonio Maceo and their mar-

194 CHAPTER FIVE


tyred struggles for a nonracial Cuba, the tone of which seemed to suggest
that Sekou should simply be thankful.
Additional voices active during this period of expanding dialogue in-
cluded a small group ofyoung Afro-Cuban intellectuals and artists, some of
whom first came into contact with raperos while attending Tomis Fernan-
dez Robaina's "El Negro en Cuba" class in the Biblioteca Nacional. Coming
of age amid the same ambiguities and frictions of the period, many among
this emerging generation of thinkers and cultural producers shared with
their rapero peers a similar set of critical perspectives on race and social
power as lived in the current everyday.
One such member of this generational cohort was Yesenia S6lier, a thirty-
something social psychology-trained researcher from Havana's Centro Juan
Marinello whose work at the time centered on race and racial identity in
Cuba. A key focus of Yesenia's scholarship-and one in conversation with
Sekou's challenge above-addressed absences of historical memory vis-
n-vis race on the part of both Afro-Cubans and Cuba's broader national
imaginary. She suggests that such gaps, far from being incidental, are ac-
tively produced through the ideological workings of national discourse (see
S6lier 2002). Not surprisingly, Yesenia's work eventually drew her to hip
hop. Rather than a detached researcher, Yesenia's involvement with Hava-
na's rapero community ranged from coauthoring an academic article with
Pablo Herrera on hip hop for the prestigious Casa de Las Americas (Her-
rera and S6lier 2003), to performing poetry alongside a collection of female
MCs during a Havana hip hop concert in 2003.24 On more overtly artistic
grounds, the photographers Diamela "Ife" Fernandez, Ariel Arias Jimenez,
and Javier Machado Leyva have all shared relationships with Havana-area
raperos. Their involvement in documenting moments and broader ongoing
elaborations of island hip hop have included contributions of images and
production skills to Movimiento magazine.
Among this peer group of hip-hop-conversant intellectuals and artists,
Roberto Diago Durruthy, known professionally as Diago, stands as a partic-
ularly high-profile figure.25 As a relatively young, internationally renowned
Afro-Cuban painter who has exhibited extensively in Cuba and abroad, much
of Diago's work explores contemporary themes of race, racial identity, and
racism, often fusing Afro-Cuban religious motifs and racially marked text in
ways some have likened stylistically to Jean-Michel Basquiat (Mateo 2003).

Racial Challenges and the State 195


Diago had been a key figure in the groundbreaking 1997 group show Keloids,
organized at Havana's Casa de Africa by the visual artist Alexis Esquivel, ex-
amining Cuban themes of race and racism. Building on subsequent Keloids
shows in 1999 and 2010, an updated rendering of the exhibition that also
included Diago's work Queloides/Keloids: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary
Art, curated by Alejandro de la Fuente and Elio Rodriguez Valdez, traveled
to the United States accompanied by a handsome, essay-laden catalogue
(de la Fuente 2010). Underscoring the resonance of hip hop in the dialogue,
Hermanos de Causa's Soandres del Rio was invited to perform during the
exhibition's 2010 U.S. opening in Pittsburgh.26
My first introduction to Diago was in Tomis's class, where he was often a
highly engaged participant in discussions. Like Yesenia S6lier, it was in this
setting that Diago initially came into dialogue with raperos. Although never
coming to full fruition, there was talk at the time between himself, raperos,
and others in class about organizing a collaborative presentation around
the course's racial thematics. When later interviewed by a Cuban journalist
regarding the centrality of racial critique in his work-which was framed
by the journalist as exemplary of a new generation of black intellectuals-
Diago responded by drawing parallels between himself and raperos in terms
of a "carga agresiva" (aggressive charge) that characterized the kind of in-
your-face challenges and unapologetic claims to black racial subjectivity
central to both locales of artistic work (Mateo 2003: 25).
At the same time, Diago became something of a celebrated son of Cu-
ba's new openness to overtly "black" forms of artistic expression, secur-
ing a highly coveted solo show in 2002 at Havana's new, relatively palatial
state-run Museo Bellas Artes. In conjunction with the show, a well-attended
symposium was coordinated around his work's racial thematics, drawing a
high-profile assemblage of Afro-Cuban intellectuals including eminent cul-
tural historian Rogelio Martinez Fur6 and celebrated poet Nancy Morejon.
The symposium was officiated by the then cultural minister Abel Prieto,
who, among a new generation of institutionally groomed intelligentsia aris-
ing in the 1990s,27 had been something of an early advocate for greater state
openness to more plural, antidogmatic forms of cultural production (see
Davies 2000). Strategic as it may have been, this policy apparently extended
to raperos, given Prieto's key role in mediating the state's institutional shift
regarding hip hop.
Yet overtures to a relatively more tolerant climate toward cultural ex-

196 CHAPTER FIVE


pression and the arts again corresponded with an increasingly commodity-
driven national landscape, one heavily dependent on the commercial pack-
aging of identifiably "Cuban" (and often racially marked) cultural forms
and bodies. Diago's rise and accompanying state responsiveness may in
this sense speak to an articulation of global markets, emergent sites and
forms of black social expression, and the Cuban state's seemingly strategic
recognition and institutional opening to both.
In the case of hip hop, the widening of institutional space and resources
within which raperos operated after 1999 did not occur simply through a be-
nevolence of state paternalism. Rather, these openings emerged within an
evolving confluence of factors, including raperos' own labors to win space
within an elaborating moment of Afro-Cuban enunciation coupled with
market expansions that carried their own assimilative logics. By accommo-
dating the critical arts, the Cuban state may have sought to manage poten-
tial challenges to the nonracial status quo by incorporating hip hop within
the structural and discursive folds of revolutionary national culture while
at the same time hedging on possibilities of its commercial draw. Although
such efforts may have had restrictive effects, it is also evident that raperos
along with allies were able to exploit openings to pose critiques and expose
contradictions in both discursive and material realms of everyday Cuban
life. Yet how sustainable, in the strategic end, was this negotiated balance?

Racial Challenges and the State 197



Chapter 6.
Whither Hip Hop Cubano?
This is my life, my life is hip hop, hip hop's my culture, I am hip hop! This is my
culture, the culture of my family and culture of all my brothers. And for all the
brothers who are ready to fight for hip hop, I'm at your side. Hip hop's my life,
wherever I am, until I die. Hip hop will continue here in Cuba. And they'll kill
me for saying it but hip hop here in Cuba will never die.'
-DJ Alexis D'Boys
Robin Moore has documented the ways Cuba's nueva trova movement of the
late 1960s and 1970s underwent transformation from a youth-centered mu-
sic steeped in social commentary to a prominent state-sanctioned symbol
of national revolutionary culture. In ways analogous to raperos albeit of
an earlier generation, trovadores were inheritors of a revolutionary history
and culture who, while embracing many of the ideals of state socialism,
questioned the ways and extent to which such ideals were addressed during
the early revolutionary period. Initially the Cuban state was not particularly
receptive to such query, launching a period of intimidation directed at a
number of the movement's key figures, including Pablo Milan6s and Silvio
Rodriguez (R. Moore 2006b).
By the early 1970s, however, a shift occurred that culminated in the for-
mation of the Movimiento Nacional de la Trova (The National Trova Move-
ment) under the Ministry of Culture in an effort to integrate a previously


autonomous artistic movement within institutional folds of the state. While
such developments provided nuevos trovadores much-needed access to
state-controlled resources like performance venues, studio time, and dis-
tribution networks, Moore notes that the arrangement impacted the move-
ment's independence ofvoice. Artists' work was now under tighter scrutiny;
if one did not tread lightly one faced the possibility of losing state favor. As
Moore explains, "Trovadores thus walked an ever more delicate line between
fidelity to a government that now supported them and fidelity to them-
selves and their own points of view" (R. Moore 2006b: 157). The example
of nueva trova hence begs the question as to whether raperos faced similar
challenges regarding their evolving relationship with the Cuban state and its
institutions. When considering such comparisons, two interwoven factors
distinguish hip hop in historically significant ways. Unlike nueva trova of
the previous moment, raperos' mediations of state power were complicated
by the ascendancy of the Cuban marketplace as well as the (related) political
salience of race among many leading artists.
In a pioneering 2000 article, " Poesia urbana? O la nueva trova de los no-
venta" (Urban poetry? or The nueva trova of the nineties), published in Cuba's
youth-oriented periodical El Caiman Barbudo, Ariel Fernandez Diaz similarly
evokes parallels between hip hop and nueva trova. In the piece, Ariel offers
a spirited defense of the cultural legitimacy of hip hop in Cuba, while un-
derscoring raperos' revolutionary engaged role-like nuevos trovadores be-
fore-as critical commentators on the complexities and ambiguities of Cuba
at the millennium's turn. While in his words raperos "make revolution with
their texts, and educate with their poetry," they remain "misunderstood, cen-
sored despite carrying the truth in their hands" (A. Fernandez Diaz 2000).2
In advocating for official space and recognition for hip hop, Ariel may not
have foreseen the range of implications such moves ultimately engendered.
What did become clear for many early on, however, was that a patronage-
based relationship with the state required compromises and degrees of de-
pendency that threatened autonomous music making and artistic control.
In reality, what limited resources the Cuban state and its institutions did
provide were far from adequate for meeting raperos' most basic produc-
tion and performance needs. Given the limitations at both the political and
material levels, many Cuban MCs sought entrepreneurial means to develop
alternative, non-state-related strategies for production, performance, and
distribution of their music. The crafting of background beats and voice

200 CHAPTER SIX


tracks in makeshift home studios became increasingly possible through the
proliferation of personal computers and an evolving range of consumer-
based production software like Pro Tools, Cakewalk, and Fruity Loops. Such
technological developments were critical given the lack of access to state-
run recording studios and the prohibitive cost of private or quasi-private fa-
cilities such as Silvio Rodriguez's Abdala Studios in Havana. Coupling these
home studios with CD-burning capacity, growing numbers of raperos were
able to distribute music through informal channels at concerts and eventu-
ally the Internet. Collaborative projects were pursued as well. In 2005 a hip
hop collective dubbed El Cartel, composed of a handful of Havana's most
celebrated "underground" artists, released an independent CD project pro-
duced by Pablo Herrera.3
Obsesion's Magia Lopez and Alexey Rodriguez along with their then-
producer Yelandy Blaya collaborated with the duo Doble Filo in an indepen-
dent venture labeled La Fabri-K. Ventures undertaken under the moniker
included a 2002 CD release, a series of domestic and international tours,4
and the 2005 launching of an annual multiday Hip Hop Symposium that
combined workshops with nightly performances by MCs from both Cuba
and abroad. Although the creative impetus and organizational energy be-
hind La Fabri-K was largely independent, a number of early projects under
its auspices remained dependent to some degree on state resources or in-
stitutional collaborations.
By 2004, however, it was apparent that the Cuban state's expansion of
support for hip hop after 1999 was clearly on the wane. An early indication
of this move was the abrupt postponement by the state-run Asociacion Her-
manos Saiz (AHS) of the tenth annual hip hop festival just a few days prior
to its August start. The western portion of the island had recently suffered
heavy damages from Hurricane Charley, and all public resources were said
to be directed toward the recovery effort. While the postponement may have
been justified under these circumstances, many within the hip hop commu-
nity cried foul, sensing politics rather than material circumstances as the
underlying rationale. Such sentiments found voice in the 2006 documentary
East of Havana by the U.S. filmmakers Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Meno-
cal, which focused on the lives of three Cuban MCs in preparation for, and
ultimate resentment over, the canceled August festival.5 The film vividly cap-
tured a growing moment of disillusionment and frustration these and other
artists felt regarding the Cuban state and its declining support for hip hop.

Whither Hip Hop Cubano?  201


RI c>C

r   K1

6.1. DJ and events producer Alexis D'Boys Rodriguez. Photo by the author
While the festival was eventually held that November, the shift in timing
and resources led to a marked reduction compared to past levels of organi-
zation, attendance, and participation among Cuban Mcs and invited artists
from abroad. Again breaking from the long-standing August tradition, the
2005 festival, held again in November, also paled in comparison in size and
scope with previous years. More significantly, the 2005 festival represented
the final year of the state's support for the annual event. The anticipated
festival for 2006 was abruptly canceled, again with oblique references to
resource limitations due to seasonal hurricanes, and no alternative plans
in the end were offered. Many read this move as a definitive signal that the
Cuban government was no longer invested-to the extent and under the
terms it had been-in a patron-based relationship with Cuban hip hop.
It was during this period that another effort emerged to carve out alter-
native space for island hip hop in a small open-air amphitheater in Parque
Almendares-a lush green oasis on the sleepy banks of the Almendares
River dividing Havana's barrios of Vedado and Miramar. Initially launched
in 2003, project Almendares Vivo (Almendares Live) was hosted by DJ Alexis
"D'Boys" Rodriguez, who, along with the venerated Afro-Cuban musician

202 CHAPTER SIX


Gerardo Alfonso, conceived the venture as an alternative festival for local
MCs denied competitive entrance to the larger state-run festival.6 By 2006
the multiday event drawing local MCs and a small collection of foreign art-
ists ran in lieu of the canceled state-run festival, and was billed as an "auton-
omous" (that is, authentic) expression of hip hop's underground talent on
the island. While the project initially operated with the nominal support of
the Cuban Ministry of Culture, a significant part of the event's funding was
provided by sources external to the island. As DJ Alexis explained in 2006
while in preparation for the upcoming festival:
The institutions don't provide funds for this kind of event, they're not
interested in supporting us so we have to do for ourselves. They do not
want hip hop culture nor do they have any interest in hip hop culture.
What they want is to eliminate it. You know it's like being treated like a
child; they say "you cannot do this."
So what we are doing here is to show them that we have discipline,
that we are not undisciplined, that we have awareness and knowledge
of music, culture, and respect for humanity. We are not, as they say, "la
calle" [the street]. We are of the street, but people with respect and dis-
cipline, and they have to recognize this and eventually pay attention. So
we're fighting and everything planned for the upcoming festival will hap-
pen. And for those who say, "There isn't going to be a Havana hip hop
festival because there is no hip hop," forget about it! This will happen!
My work this year has been about showing there's indeed a hip hop move-
ment and that hip hop here in Cuba is very disciplined. Forget about it,
my brother, pa'lante! [forward!], we can no longer sleep. You can try to
shut the mouths of people but we will not allow hip hop culture here in
Cuba to be exterminated, that's impossible! What we have to do we'll do,
brother. We will continue fighting and this will not stop.
Elaborating on the festival's organizational nature, Alexis added:
Many thanks to all international artists and activists who are coming to
participate and help us not only in terms of money, but also with mate-
rials to support the movement here in Havana and to make this event an
educational expression of hip hop. For it is not only a marathon of MC
performances-we have conferences, workshops, and documentaries.
This is not just a festival but more an educational encounter. Anyone

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 203


interested in knowing about graffiti, you will see a space for them, the
history of graffiti. Anyone who wants to know how to be a DJ, you'll see
a person who teaches DJ workshops and the history of DJ culture. This
is a big project, so big it's going to last for four days from August 17to 20.
But all the background, all the help and labor has been from Toronto, the
United States, San Francisco, Venezuela, and Europe.7
Thus in the absence of state support-at one time both circumstantial
and likely strategic-Alexis underscores the instrumentality ofextranational
resources in enabling Almendares to operate, enterprisingly so, as auton-
omous space of Cuban cultural production. These comments bring again
to focus those global circuits of cultural and material exchange so vital to
raperos' crafting of alternative modes of both identity and maneuver. Yet
Alexis's remarks also speak to a disparaging paternalism he attributes to
institutions and the broader Cuban state in their dealings with hip hop. His
reference to a pejorative labeling of raperos as "la calle" (the street) again
indexes racialized discourses of marginalidad that have long positioned
black Cubans outside the normative parameters of a modern euro- or ra-
cially transculturated Cuba. Such claims as discussed are often hinged to
enduring notions of cultural primitivism and urban criminality mapped
onto Afro-Cuban bodies, and subsequent calls for rehabilitative interven-
tion by the revolutionary state (see chapter 1). For DJ Alexis, the realms of
music making provided a critical means and space through which to medi-
ate such institutionally translated materialities of race.
Indeed, in conversation one afternoon following a hip hop rehearsal at
Parque Almendares, Alexis recalled his introduction to the violin as a young
Afro-adorned boy by his great uncle, Rafael Lay Apesteguia, bandleader of
Cuba's famed Orquesta Aragon. Enamored with the instrument, Alexis pur-
sued it with such fervor that he eventually gained entrance to Havana's pres-
tigious Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA, or National School of Art). Alexis
explained that during his training one of his (white) violin instructors ad-
vised him to switch to percussion because, as he was told, "violins were for
white people, while blacks were naturally better at percussion." Alexis cites
this incident along with others at ENA as experiences that eventually pushed
him away from the violin and into hip hop's fold as a break-dancer, then DJ,
and ultimately an events producer.
It was, however, another more recent encounter at the convergence of

204 CHAPTER SIX


race and music that appeared to carry additional pained costs for Alexis.
During the closing day of a 2003 reggae festival in Parque Almendares cele-
brating Bob Marley's birthday that drew large numbers of Cuban Rasta,
uniformed police and undercover officers raided the crowd for alleged
marijuana use. Scores of young black men were arrested, many targeted
for wearing dreadlocks. During the melee police reportedly mocked and
taunted attendees with racially charged language (Fontanar 2003). While
tied to a wider state government crackdown on marijuana use in 2003,8 the
raid aligned more broadly with market openings and expanded state efforts
to police and regulate its citizenry in often racialized ways amid the flux. In
the raid's immediate aftermath Alexis, who was one of the organizers of the
festival, and a number of other young black men sheared off their dread-
locks to avoid future bouts of racial targeting. The fact that one of Alexis's
close peers, the brother of a prominent rapero, was picked up in the raid and
imprisoned for an extended period carried particularly charged resonance
for both him and Havana's wider rapero community.
As discussed, the recent cultivation of dreadlocks by young black men
and more limited numbers of black women was used as a style practice to
mark and performatively embody Cuban blackness in new globally con-
versant and indeed Afrocentric ways. Regimens of state policing sought
to regulate such black self-fashionings by reining them back within secure
national bounds of racial conformity. Although emotionally distressing,
Alexis explained that the cutting of his and others' dreadlocks was tacti-
cally necessary given the heightened moment of racial surveillance and tar-
geting. Resonances abound; this episode recalled a previous moment of
racial regulation in the 196os when the Cuban state banned Afro hairstyles
(C. Moore 1989), the era's celebrated aesthetic of black power and beauty
made globally conversant-rather ironically in Cuba's case-by the likes of
Angela Davis and others.
It is therefore not surprising that early encounters like those of his school-
ing and ongoing grievances of raced policing informed a distrust Alexis held
for the Cuban state and its institutions, one that no doubt found expression
through his commitments to hip hop. In this light, Alexis's repeated call
for the need to demonstrate raperos' disciplined character operates on at
least two overlapping levels of vindictive defiance. In an immediate sense,
asserting raperos' capacity to move in an autonomously organized fashion
legitimizes it as a viable, self-sustaining cultural movement in the face of

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 205


what Alexis describes as state attempts to exterminate it. Yet at a broader
discursive level, raperos' ability to organize apart from state institutions
challenges those claims and related state paternalisms that relegated black
Cubans to the margins as uncultured wards of a grand Cuba in need of inter-
vention and guidance (cf. de la Fuente and Glasco 1997; de la Fuente 2001).
For Alexis and others, Almendares promised not only an autonomous space
for hip hop's creative self-fashioning but also emancipatory possibilities for
a vindicated black alterity.
Rise of Reggaeton
By 2006 an additional unease voiced by Alexis and others in relation to re-
treats of state support coupled with the island's ongoing marketization in-
volved an emerging, and increasingly competitive, space of music making,
reggaeton.9 While I had been familiar with the broader Spanish-Caribbean
phenomenon for some time (see Rivera, Marshall, and Pacini Hernandez
2009),10 it was in Santiago de Cuba in the eastern province of Oriente that
I first encountered Cuba's emerging reggaeton scene in 2001. I had been
spending time at the Ateneo Cultural Antonio Bravo Correoso, a municipal
cultural center on Calle Felix Pena near Santiago's popular (and touristed)
Parque Cespedes. Ateneo's open-air patio hosted a weekly pefa in which
local MCs performed before a modest audience of devoted hip hop heads.
A small equipment room doubling as a rehearsal space and video screening
room served as a central gathering point for area raperos. The project was
overseen by Luis Gonzales, who, while not an MC himself, was an instru-
mental figure in Santiago's hip hop community, one smaller and signifi-
cantly more resource strapped in comparison to Havana's given its distance
from centers of tourism and circuits of capital and cultural trade. As was
the case with hip hop's early formation in Havana, Santiago's hip hop scene
evolved out of local rectos competitions, an improvised street-level variation
of U.S. breakdancing (C6sar Jimenez and Tissert 2004).
A central concern resonating through the Ateneo at the time related to
the recent rise of reggaeton artists who were accused, rather resentfully,
of siphoning away what limited resources and fan-base local raperos had
struggled to build. Historically indebted to the Afro-Caribbean by way of
circulatory labor immigration and commerce between Haiti, Jamaica, and
Barbados (Carr 1998), the port of Santiago and the broader Oriente region

206 CHAPTER SIX


have long been celebrated (or alternately scorned) as the more caribe5o-
read darker-region of the island. Given this, it is no surprise that reggae-
ton's Caribbean arc first found receptive grounding in Santiago. Exempli-
fied in the work of pioneering santiaguero raperos such as Caf6 Mezclado,
Regimiento, and Chucho SHS, reggae-infused rhythms and vocal styling
were a common facet of Santiago hip hop, marking a regional sound dis-
tinct from that of Havana to the west. Many artists grew up with reggae as
an everyday staple of their musical landscape, its presence fed by AM radio
broadcasts from neighboring Jamaica given Santiago's relative proximity.
One pioneering group of note that embraced such caribenida was the trio
Crazy Man. Formed in the late 199os, Crazy Man's MCs fused the frenetic
lyricism of Ruben Cuesta Palomo with the beat-box skills of Omar Pla-
nos Cordovi, alongside Aristey Guibert, whose raggamuffin11 vocal style and
lyric sprinklings of English reflected his familial roots in Jamaica by way of
Guantanamo. As Aristey mused in conversation, "Cuba y Jamaica, Jamaica y
Cuba, es lo mismo" (Cuba and Jamaica, Jamaica and Cuba, it is all the same).12
In something of a coup, in 1999 Crazy Man were the first hip hop artists to
perform in Santiago's otherwise folklore-centered Festival del Caribe (also
known as Festival del Fuego). A narrow and ultimately exclusionary focus on
Afro-folkloric music, dance, and religious practice within the state-run festi-
val was in fact a long-standing grievance among Santiago raperos. Reflecting
on this disparity, Crazy Man's Ruben explained: "Here in Santiago rap is not
considered part of our tradition, and it seems [the institutions] don't want to
stray from tradition. But time passes, music changes, and young people don't
want to be limited to tradition. In the end, though, the government wants to
restrict the influence of what they see as foreign music."
Within an institutional privileging of "traditional" formulations of Afro-
Cuban expressive culture, hip hop's extranational claims to a black global
cosmopolitanism are indeed disruptive of such nationally framed, tem-
porally delineated constraints. Yet for Rub6n it was ultimately by way of
reggaeton-that hybridized Spanish-Caribbean melding of reggae and hip
hop-that such regulatory prescriptions were eclipsed.
Around 2001 MC Rub6n left Crazy Man to launch a solo career under the
name Candyman, playing a pioneering role in what would become Cuba's
reggaeton explosion that soon swept west toward Havana. Responding to
those who would argue that his sound was somehow foreign or inorganic to
the island, Ruben early on countered: "Listen, reggae is part of the culture of

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 207


Oriente. I've been listening to reggae since I was very young. I'm Cuban and
I have my own message. And I like to deliver my message with melody, with
swing [con swing]. And because of this I choose to express myself through
reggae, the message for me is more direct with reggae."
Beyond questions of style, Ruben's departure from Crazy Man-and in
essence from hip hop more broadly-marked in his words an end of an
era, one signaled in important part by a shift in performative focus. Unlike
the self-consciously political language of social critique central to many of
his rapero peers, Candyman's entree to Santiago's nascent reggaeton scene
drew heavily on themes of sexual play and heteromasculinist grammars of
pleasure centering on body and dance. I recall hearing of local authorities'
efforts to regulate Candyman's public performances, which were attracting
growing numbers of highly enthused dancing teenagers, for his perceived
lewd and lascivious content. It is not surprising that once he broached the
space of state-run television, Ruben is reported to have altered his lyrics for
broadcast (Gonzilez Bello, Casanella Cue, and Hernandez Baguer n.d.), a
negotiation not unfamiliar to many a rapero (cf. Fernandes 2006). Articulat-
ing with gendered lines first laid and globally popularized by Puerto Rican
reggaeton artists (Jim6nez 2009; A. Moreno 2009), sexualized celebrations
of the heteromasculine thus emerged as a key performative facet of Cuban
reggaeton from inception.
While signaling an apparent shift from hip hop's more overt emphasis
on politically centered lyricism, appeals by Candyman and other early reggae-
toneros to the sexualized body were not necessarily devoid of embedded cri-
tique. The ethnomusicologist Geoffrey Baker suggests that reggaetoneros'
attention to body-centered pleasure and celebrations of the material can
be read in part as a generational counterpoint to eroding socialist ideals of
labor and productive citizenship, ones reflective of a broader disenchant-
ment with revolutionary ideology among Cuban youth in light of expanding
market conditions (Baker 2011). Somewhat similar claims, as discussed in
preceding chapters, have been made in relation to Cuban timba regarding
the music's exaltation of black heteromasculine prowess by way of a phallo-
centric eroticism and material flamboyance (cf. Hernandez-Reguant 2005;
Perna 2005; Vaughan 2012). Yet as potentially contestive of revolutionary
convention, such performances as I have suggested may in the end repro-
duce rather than undermine dominant representations and hierarchies of
gendered and racial difference.

208  CHAPTER SIX


Analytic tensions aside, or possibly precisely through them, it is clear
that reggaeton tapped into a particular resonance among large numbers
of Cuban youth at the millennial turn, the vast majority of whom were in-
cidentally black and brown. The music's emphasis on dance rhythms and
the moving body was undoubtedly an important facet of its youthful appeal,
one channeled largely through sexualized modes of corporal pleasure. As
scholars of the Afrodiasporic condition have noted, the play and politics
of pleasure have been central to the ways Afro-descendant communities
have sought transcendent celebration of human resilience and freedom,
both through and ultimately beyond the body (Cooper 2004; Davis 1999;
Gilroy 1990; Kelley 1997; Reed 1998, cf. Lorde 1984). At the same time it is
unquestionable that market logics were also key to the rise and rapid spread
of reggaeton on the island.
Shortly after my return to Havana from Santiago in 2001, I had a conver-
sation with Osmel Francis, a business savvy forty-something Afro-Cuban
who had recently returned to Havana after living in Spain for many years.
Osmel was the creative force behind the recently formed Cubanos en la
Red, a commercially minded hip hop group in which he, flanked by a col-
lection of significantly younger MCs, performed a somewhat comic self-
parody as an elder rapero. Osmel expressed excitement at the time about
the idea of bringing Ruben, or Candyman, to Havana for a series of perfor-
mances as a way to introduce habaneros to the energy of Santiago reggae-
ton. His entrepreneurial read was that the music would explode in Havana's
larger music-crazed market, and he wanted to be sure to be part of it. It
was shortly thereafter that Candyman made his first wildly received tour
of Havana, launching him as one of Cuba's most successful and enduring
reggaetoneros. His music, however, had preceded him by informal routes
of circulating CDs and audio cassettes that had found their way to Havana.
It was a relatively short time before Santiago reggaeton worked its way
into the fabric of Havana's streets, enabled in part by the city's enterprising
networks of bicitaxis (three-wheeled bicycle taxies) whose strapped-on boom
boxes eventually carried reggaeton throughout Havana's urban interior (see
Baker 2011; Gonzalez Bello, Casanella Cue, and Hernandez Baguer n.d.).
In this sense reggaeton's westward march echoed early waves of lore em-
anating westward from Oriente-the celebrated launching point of both
Cuba's nineteenth-century independence struggle as well as its revolution-
ary Movimiento 26 de Julio led by the Castro brothers and others. Some

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 209


within Havana's hip hop scene had already experimented with reggaeton-
esque fusions. S.B.S (Sensational Boys of the Street), an early commercially
oriented, internationally marketed trio with a party-centered vibe, were
possibly the first to do so. Numerous others in Oriente's wake would follow.
Splintering off the pioneering hip hop trio Primera Base in 2002, Cu-
banitos 20.02 embraced the reggaeton wave and rode it to relative commer-
cial gain with their 2003 album Soy Cubanito. Not surprisingly, Cubanos en
la Red also adopted a reggaeton-focused sound around the same period.
Both Cubanitos and Cubanos en la Red were, moreover, among the initial
artists incorporated into the newly formed state-run Agencia Cubana de
Rap (ACR), charged with the commercial promotion of Cuban hip hop do-
mestically and abroad (see chapter 5). Among the ten original members of
ACR, three sets of hip hop artists-Eddy-K, Alto Voltaje, and intermittently
MC Papo Record-shifted their focus (or, in the minds of some, "jumped
ship") toward the increasingly popular and ultimately more commercially
lucrative reggaeton. Eddy-K emerged as one of the island's preeminent reg-
gaeton groups, frequently performing abroad in Mexico and Europe with
the crew's lead MC, Eduardo Mora, and DJ Jos6 Antonio Suarez eventually
leaving Cuba to settle in Miami.
Although this pivot toward reggaeton was by no means limited to mem-
bers ofACR,13 this did not preclude the play of strategic interests on the part of
the Cuban state. While it may indeed be true that the state viewed reggaeton,
as it once did hip hop, with uneasiness as a music genre culturally antago-
nistic to revolutionary ideals (cf. Baker 2009; Gonzalez Bello, Casanella Cue,
and Hernandez Baguer n.d.), reggaetoneros did eventually gain visible insti-
tutional footholds in state-run radio and television. For its part, ACR, long
viewed by many a rapero with varying degrees of caution, was by 2006 com-
monly perceived as abandoning hip hop altogether in favor of the more com-
mercially promising-and possibly less politically menacing-reggaeton.
Sanctioned space and resources once occupied by hip hop, limited as they
might have been, now seemed to shift in the direction of reggaeton in ways
that aligned with the island's broader market turn.
In the wake of such developments, DJ Alexis D'Boys offered this analysis
of the state's swing:
Folkloric music and culture have become a commercial trade, and the
[state] institutions themselves have become commercial. They provide

210 CHAPTER SIX


space, but these spaces are in commercial places. As a result this culture
has lost a lot of its roots, at least here in Havana much has been lost. And
now the same thing is happening to hip hop. The [Cuban Rap] Agency
has participated in this and I always knew it intended to exterminate hip
hop by commercializing it. And that's what's happening now to hip hop
in Cuba. It's not dead, but it's missing a lot of talent, and it's lost the co-
hesion it once had in the 'gos until, say, 2002 because of this institution,
and it's partly to blame for this. Many raperos are now doing reggaeton
because of the Cuban Rap Agency, so they're destroying the culture of
hip hop by commercializing it.
When I asked specifically what he thought of reggaeton's rise in Havana,
Alexis offered:
Compadre, look, for me, I'm not against reggaeton. For me reggaeton is
dance music, a popular music for dancing. Reggaeton is a music that's
now in fashion, it's for people to dance, to forget problems, prejudices,
and things, and think a bit more about materialism-it's made for this.
They [reggaetoneros] are people who have no interest in changing the
world. The problem here in Cuba is that reggaeton is a product of the de-
spair of hip hop artists who have neither space nor attention, they aren't
respected as musicians. So what's happened is that they have gone for
the easy way, for reggaeton, where they're given space. The music is com-
mercial and they're not talking about political issues or situations. What
they talk about is "the party," and people have gone for that because the
institutions have opened their doors and they're paying people to per-
form in those places.
The Cuban Rap Agency has ten groups that used to do hip hop, but
only two now remain. My respect to them, Anonimo Consejo and Ob-
sesion, but all of the other groups are doing reggaeton. They're sent to
work outside Havana in tourist and commercial places and are paid for it.
That's their salary, they benefit from this. For me, it's a reggaeton agency,
not a rap agency, at least that's the way I see it, and my respect goes to
Anonimo Consejo and Obsesion, who, though involved, are struggling.14
Alexis's reading offers a cogent critique of state moves toward reggaeton
as those tied to the market and aligned interests to undermine the salience
of hip hop on the island. In particular, he suggests that an articulation of

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 211


state and commercial forces engendered new economies of exchange (e.g.,
tourism, commercial zones) within which long-excluded raperos could now
participate by way of reggaeton. To a dedicated hip hop purist, such com-
mercialization represented a fragmentizing anathema to a collective sense
of revolutionary commitment long sacred to many within the hip hop move-
ment. To Alexis the ultimate goal of this seemingly calculated state strategy
was the dissolution of hip hop all together.
Reflecting back on the moment from a distance, Ariel Fernandez Diaz
echoed a similar understanding regarding the state's shift toward reggaeton,
explaining: "Reggaeton exploded in this country and came into a Cuban
social narrative that had nothing to do with it. But people felt motivated to
make more easy music-not to talk about social issues, you know what I
mean?" When I asked if he thought the state played a part in the equation,
Ariel responded: "Definitely, I mean it was completely orchestrated. If the
government needed to choose between a movement that talks about issues we
have here in the country, the social issues and social difference that we have,
or people who talk about 'shake yo ass'? It's easier and more comfortable
for the government to deal with people who care about making money and
shaking booties. There're people who're trying to challenge the status quo
and intellectually challenge the government policies and political party, you
know what I mean?"
Regarding the commercial nature of the Agencia Cubana de Rap in par-
ticular, Ariel added:
One of the policies of the groups [in the ACR] is to make money. They
have to reach a certain amount of productivity and success, especially fi-
nancially; if not you can't be a member of la Agencia-you need to make
money and entertain people. So la Agencia was not trying to create space
to promote or spend resources on you because you're addressing issues
that need to be addressed. No, they're really not going to promote what
we were talking about because it was not in support of the policies or
politics of the revolution that they wanted people to have access to.15
Beyond simply an outcome of state interests, however, both Alexis and
Ariel suggest that artists harbored their own motives in gravitating toward
reggaeton, ones also tied, in short, to "making money." Such moves were
accompanied in their view by a depoliticization of the music and broader

212 CHAPTER SIX


movement as a whole in ways concurrent with the shifting focus of both
the state and the national economy. Amid this commercial flux, "the party"
has seemingly displaced "the revolution" as a central driving motif. More-
over, as Geoffrey Baker notes, in the artistic turn toward reggaeton many
former raperos "deprioritized their own blackness by eliminating explicit
racial discourse and aligning themselves with a broader musical culture in
which latinidad overshadows negritud" (Baker 2011: 281). Yet rather than a
corrective restoration of a purported nonracial orientation as suggested,
might such realignments and political deprioritizations of blackness artic-
ulate with evolving conjunctures of the state and marketplace? Is the exalted
underground that many raperos often spoke of indeed now in peril?
Deferring questions of race for the moment, to couch raperos' tack toward
reggaeton purely in terms of economic exigency or as the result of manipu-
lated guidance from state institutions may fail to capture the range of strate-
gies some artists have fashioned within an economy of shifting opportunities.
Many may undoubtedly have made rational decisions in light of new markets
for popular Cuban music and the performative black body itself." Scenarios
of this kind evoke a certain neoliberal rationale of self-directed individualism
moving in entrepreneurial pursuit of personal gain, analogous to the concur-
rent rise of state-promoted cuentapropismo (self-employment schemes) amid
an ever-receding socialist state. As Wendy Brown aptly suggests, neoliberal
forms of governance tend to figure "individuals as entrepreneurial actors in
every sphere of life," engendering them "as rational, calculating creatures
whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for 'self-care"' (Brown
2003:15).
In this light, raperos' prioritization ofindividuated market pursuit stands
in juxtaposition to more collaborative modes of political cohesion and sol-
idarity, precisely the kind of nostalgic loss Alexis laments with the rise of reg-
gaet6n. Such self-invested individualism similarly emerges in tension with
a collective ethos of racial affinity and antiracist contest long instrumental
among Havana raperos and their self-defined movimiento. Indeed, if one
can in essence individually "opt out" of the structural limitations brought by
racial positionality through market maneuver, then why not?

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 213


Departures to Diaspora

Flights to a more commercially viable reggaeton were not the only individ-
uated strategy available to enterprising raperos. Another factor impacting
social cohesion, and ultimately racial orientation, of Havana's hip hop com-
munity from the mid-200os was a growing exodus abroad of many founda-
tional members. Among Cuba's rich spectrum of artistic and athletic talent
there has long been a draw to leave the island in search of greater, more
lucrative professional possibilities afuera. This has increasingly been the
case since the economic shifts of the early 1990s. Consider for one the rash
of Cuban baseball players (or similarly, professional ballet dancers) who in
recent years have defected to the United States. In the case of hip hop, the
morphing of Havana's pioneering hip hop troupe Amenaza into the interna-
tional commercial sensation Orishas after members' relocation to France in
the late 1990s stands as a particularly poignant example of such early moves
among raperos. It was, however, the decision by MC Julio Cardenas of Rap-
eros Crazy de Alamar (RCA) not to return following a 2001 tour to New York
City that seemed to resonate most deeply within Havana's tight-knit rapero
circles (see chapter 2). I recall many at times conflicted conversations re-
garding the incident, ranging from criticism of Julio's decision as a self-
interested move that could complicate future tours, to those empathizing
with his move.
By the mid-2000s, mounting frustration and disillusionment with wan-
ing state support coupled with the broader deterioration of economic con-
ditions led to truncated artistic and social aspirations for many in the hip
hop community. Like many of their generational peers in Cuba, they too
imagined and sought the promise of new opportunities that life afield might
offer. One was Yaimir "Pitit" Jim6nez of Grandes Ligas and EPG&B fame,
who in 2003 immigrated to Sweden, where he continues his artistic career
as a commercial MC. It was by way of a foreign fianc6 visa that Pitit managed
(and likely financed) his emigration. As mentioned, fiance visas were the
primary means by which male hip hop artists in particular were able to leave
the island, a reality often linked to wider monetizations and corresponding
strategies of racially informed exchange (see chapter 1).
One of the biggest blows during this period was Ariel Fernandez Diaz's
decision to immigrate to New York City in 2005. To recall, Ariel, aka DJ
Asho, rose to prominence as one of the most influential members of Cuba's

214 CHAPTER SIX


hip hop community, eventually garnering a position as official hip hop li-
aison within the state-run Asociacion Hermanos Saiz. A committed fighter
for Cuban hip hop by way of radio, journalism, and events promotion, Ari-
el's decision caught many by surprise. In a conversation shortly after his
move, Ariel's tone was sharp as he spoke critically about what he viewed as
the Cuban state's manipulative dealings with the movement. His position
had thus evolved and shifted significantly since his earlier involvements, as
ambivalent as they may have become, with Hermanos Saiz (see chapter 5).
In short order a growing list of key Havana artists followed in exodus,
including Los Paisanos, Las Krudas, Pablo Herrera, and Alexis D'Boys, to
name a few. Rather than signaling an end to their artistic commitments,
many have continued to pursue their music and broader engagements with
Cuban-centered hip hop in often enterprising ways. Many have also man-
aged to maintain active connections with MCs on the island while develop-
ing vibrant networks of hip hop community in the diaspora. In addition,
among movements of artists between Cuba and abroad as well as among
those living within the United States, Canada, and Europe, electronic tech-
nology has played an important role in enabling artistic exchange and vir-
tual networks across spatial divides.
Artists have been particularly resourceful in mobilizing the Internet
and social media as a modes of organization in dispersal. There is an ever-
growing plethora of media sites like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Facebook
where raperos and their increasingly global supporters maintain ongoing
dialogue via trafficking ofvideos, images, and digitized music. Such creative
use of information technology is analogous to a kind of diasporic "bridge
building" championed at an earlier literary moment by a group of Cuban
writers (Behar 1996), whereby the global reach of electronic media is now
employed plank by cybernetic plank in forging transnational dialogue and
community. A difference here, however, is that rather than efforts to mend
long-standing cleavages between mainland and Cuban American exilio com-
munities, these current puentes are about diaspora in-formation enabled in
important part through subjectivities of hip hop. In light of descriptive
gazings by academics, journalists, and a growing host of foreign-produced
documentaries,17 many artists now employ digital technology to globally
circulate their own work and self-imagery.
Emigre life of course was far from struggle free. As with most global
South-North migrations, many found the transition to new lives fraught

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 215


with challenges. Notions that working-class Afro-Cuban MCs could simply
rely on their artistic talents in the commercial markets of the United States,
Canada, and Europe were quickly dispelled. The realities of being poor, ra-
cialized immigrants with often limited resources, levels of formal educa-
tion, and English-language skills meant that many had to work at low-wage
jobs to make ends meet. For instance, MC Julio Cardenas, formerly of RCA,
found employment as a restaurant delivery person in New York City while
honing his acting skills and developing a play drawn from his experiences
in Cuba. Former Obsesion member Roger Martinez, who immigrated to the
Los Angeles area in 2002, eventually attained trade skills as an electrician
while building a small in-home recording studio in his labored pursuit as
a hip hop producer and performer. The challenge often pitted dreams of
artistic success against the market-driven competitivism of the North.
Ariel Fernandez Diaz struggled for a number ofyears in search of gainful
music-related employment following his arrival in the New York City area,
despite a depth of experience and extensive contacts within local hip hop
and Latino music and activist circles. In the end Ariel has been successful
in piecing together an enterprising range of projects under the moniker
Asho Productions, including giving academic-targeted talks on Cuban hip
hop, hosting monthly music events at the Bronx Museum, having ongoing
Afro-Cuban-centered DJ gigs, and most recently helping coordinate U.S-
based Afro-Cuban-focused cultural tours to Havana.18 Alternatively, Cuba's
vanguard hip hop producer Pablo Herrera left the island for Scotland in
2005 on a scholarship to pursue a master's degree in sound design at the
University of Edinburgh. Despite distance, Pablo has sought to remain in
dialogue with Cuban hip hop via his academic work and blogging, including
collaborative work with Cuban artists in the diaspora such as the Madrid-
based fusion band Habana Aberita, as well as MC Randy Acosta, formerly of
Los Paisanos, who now resides in Barcelona pursing an active performing
career. Pablo has also maintained spiritual ties to Cuba, a connection per-
haps carrying added significance given the unfortunate recent passing of
both his parents. This connectivity, Pablo shared, is fed through his recent
mentioned initiation into the sacred rites of Ifi divination during repeated
trips to Cuba.
Among Cuban MCs, Las Krudas have been particularly resourceful in
translating and expanding their work abroad. Long based in Austin, Texas,
following a circuitous route through Russia, the all-female trio has astutely

216 CHAPTER SIX


6.2. Mcs Randy Acosta and Jessel "El Huevo" Saladriga of Los Paisanos.
Photo by Sahily Borrero
tapped into womanist, LGBT, and college performance circuits across the
United States, Puerto Rico, and Latin America. Krudas have been especially
savvy in using social media, video, community radio, and informal media
such as hand-printed T-shirts as promotional vehicles for their music and
broader queer-feminist advocacy. In addition to collaborative projects with
other Cuban Mcs in the United States, the artists have maintained a level
of involvement with islandside raperos by way of hip hop colloquia, work-
shops, and performance events in Havana. Regarding 6migre communities,
Oakland, California, emerged as something of a hub for emigrating raperos.
One notable figure in the mix is Leidis Freire, who has established herself
as a dance-music DJ with a strong hip hop and internationalist flair. Leidis
has also been instrumental in helping organize Bay Area performances for
touring island artists including Obsesidn. Also among Oakland's scene are
MC Magyori "La Llave" Martinez of Omega Kilay and MC Miki Flow (aka Mi-
chel Hermida Martinez), formerly of Alamar's Explosion Suprema, who has
remained a relatively active performer. The operative term here is relative.
With the possible exception of the French-produced Orishas, no Cuban hip

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 217


hop artist to my knowledge has yet to sign with a commercial music label
or secure much by way of a lucrative career as a performer. A select few who
made the crossover to reggaeton long ago, such as Eddy-K now in Miami,
also stand here as anomalies. In a word, the lucha (struggle/hustle) remains
a defining facet of life for many 6migr6 MCs.
Raperos' diasporic terrain is far from limited to the United States. Free
of U.S. travel restrictions, Canada has long been an important interlocutor
with the island's hip hop community, with Montreal and Toronto serving
as key nodes of intersection. One pioneer along these lines has been the
Montreal-based hip hop collective Nomadic Massive, whose multiracial/
lingual collection of MCs and musicians hailing from immigrant back-
grounds reflects Montreal's m6lange of new multiculturalism.19 The collec-
tive's Cuba connection stems from the founding member MC Lou "Piensa"
Dufleaux, who befriended Obsesion members Magia Lopez and Alexey
Rodriguez while living in Havana in the late 199os. Piensa's artistic direc-
tions as a MC and hip hop producer are in turn deeply indebted to his en-
gagements with Havana-area raperos. Performing first alongside Obsesion
during the 2000 Cuban hip hop festival, Piensa returned to the 2004 festi-
val with a group of Montreal artists including Haitian Canadian MC Vox
Sambu. This second foray provided the creative impetus to the founding
of Nomadic Massive, and the collective has subsequently made repeated
trips to Havana to perform alongside Cuban MCs in addition to organizing
a series of Canadian tours for Obsesion and others.
Concerning routes of emigration, however, rapero 6migr6s have tended
to favor Toronto, which boasts Canada's largest concentration of migrant
Cubans. Histories of artistic exchange with Toronto-based artists such as
Jamaican-born spoken-word artist Debbie Young, moreover, have helped
Cuban MCs find a receptive home within the city's music scene and broader
Afro-Caribbean topography. A key individual amid the vibrancy has been
Alexis D'Boys Rodriguez, who emigrated from Havana in 2007. Alongside
a day job at a computer recycling center, Alexis remains active as a DJ and
music promoter specializing in hip hop. Settled in a neighborhood near the
intersection of Oakwood and St. Clair Avenues long associated with immi-
grant communities of Italians, Jamaicans, and more recently Latinos, Alexis
tells of his early years in an apartment block he playfully baptized "Hotel de
Cuba" given the stream of Cubans cycling through over the years. Among
those sharing early domicile was Telmary Diaz, rapera and spoken-word art-

218 CHAPTER SIX


ist formerly, as mentioned, of the innovative fusion bands Free Hole Negros
and Interactivo. A native of Alexis's Vedado barrio, Telmary has had noted
success as a solo recording artist and touring performer across Canada, Eu-
rope, and more recently the United States.
In addition to periodic pefas with local artists, Alexis participated in
the 2011 Toronto leg of the commercially oriented Havana Cultura Tour.
Launched in 2009 as the brainchild of the British DJ Gilles Peterson and
sponsored by Cuba's quasi-corporate rum distillery Havana Club,20 the in-
ternational touring project involving young Cuban musicians served as a
global marketing venture for Cuban culture and tourism. The project's glitzy
English-language website, billing itself as "a global initiative to promote
contemporary Cuban culture,"21 offers flashy videos and profiles of numer-
ous Cuban artists, including a collection of raperos such as Anonimo Con-
sejo, Obsesion, Doble Filo, and Telmary Diaz. Along with an assemblage of
reggaetoneros, many of these artists are featured in a 2009 Havana Cultura
CD compilation recorded in Havana's state-run EGREM studios and a sub-
sequent 2011 Havana Cultura: Remixed album.
Globally attuned commercial interests in Cuban hip hop were not limited
to domestic state-private ventures, however. For a number of years Havana
hosted a national freestyle hip hop competition, the Batalla de los Gallos
(Cock fight), sponsored by the energy drink giant Red Bull. The Australian-
based company, which has built a multibillion-dollar global brand through
sponsorship of spectacular youth-centered competitions like extreme sports
and urban music contests,22 apparently recognized the potential marketing
value of Cuban MCs. With the winner to represent Cuba in Red Bull's crown-
ing Batalla of finalists from Latin America and Spain, a number of old-
school raperos served as judges with Doble Filo's Edgaro Gonzalez playing
lead host. In addition to their advertising worth, videos of the lavishly staged
one-on-one battles have garnered tens of thousands of hits on YouTube,
helping to promote individual artists (and Cuban hip hop) within the global
marketplace. Thus despite potential posturing otherwise, a confluence of
state and market interests aligned in ways that continued to claim hip hop,
at least in part, as a globally trafficable form of Cuban cultural capital-
an economy within which Alexis and other hip-hop-affiliated Cubans, both
home and abroad, were apparently actively conversant if not adept.

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 219


Los Aldeanos

In what ways has the flight of so many established raperos alongside Cuba's
monetization and the competing rise of reggaeton impacted the character
and vitality of Havana's hip hop scene? Some pioneering old-school artists
like Anonimo Consejo, Obsesion, and Hermanos de Causa's Soandres del
Rio23-despite the loss of his artistic partner Alexis "el Pelon" Cantero to
Spain-long "held it down" or continue to do so in Havana while taking
advantage of occasional opportunities to perform aboard. The moment,
however, has clearly given rise to a new generation of artists who fashion
themselves as inheritors of Cuban hip hop's underground urgency. Front
and center among these are artists Bian "El B" Oscar Rodriguez Gala and
Aldo "El Aldeano" Roberto Rodriguez Baquero of the highly provocative
duo Los Aldeanos (The Villagers). Since forming in Havana in 2003, Los
Aldeanos have built a reputation via live performance and a prolific range
of independently produced albums and videos as among the most critically
outspoken of MCs on the island. Such efforts have involved collaborative
work with allied artists such as the hard-edged rapero-cum-hip hop pro-
ducer Papi Humbertico (see chapter 1), who, through his home-based stu-
dio known locally as Real 70, has helped produce a number of the duo's
albums.
Yet unlike an earlier generation of artists who often chose more mediated
tones of critique, Los Aldeanos have embraced (and very much celebrate)
a more cynical and ideologically adversarial tone vis-n-vis the Cuban state.
Claiming a mantle as "revolutionaries," they view the revolutionary state
largely in irreverent terms as an autocratic, often-repressive regime and
principal progenitor of a range of social hypocrisies that mark the current
Cuban everyday. In one of their signature temas, "El rap es guerra" (Rap
is war), Los Aldeanos declare: "Always on the offensive / In defense of the
lives that nest wounded / Rap is war/ The fight is not lost / Free the captive
truth / Do not stand idle / Rap is war / They want us to fill our demos with
upbeat songs / But they forget that rap is war."24 This combative ethos finds
visual form in a matching set of large tattoos reading "El rap es guerra" that
adorn the forearms of both heavily tatted MCs. To further effect, in their
tema "Libertad" (Liberty), Aldeanos evoke enslavement as a metaphor for
contemporary life and citizenship in Cuba where all are beholden to the
state as master. Under such a regime, one is held a "slave to your nationality,

220 CHAPTER SIX


identity, and issues ... a slave of a fucked and slow agony ... a slave of your
duties, a slave of your rights," and ultimately "a slave struggling endlessly
without finding happiness.1"25
Not surprisingly, Aldeanos' provocations-and an additional set of
eventual circumstances, to which I will return-drew government atten-
tion. The Cuban state's approach to the artists had generally been one of
apprehension, variously restricting their access to state media, performance
space, and international travel. One particularly notable incident occurred
in 2009 when police reportedly entered the home of MC Aldo, briefly arrest-
ing him and confiscating his computer along with its trove of music compo-
sitions. The official charge for the seizure was lack of ownership papers, a
circumstance common to most computer owners in Cuba. Yet the episode
contributed to the duo's already-celebrated status among some circles as
a new voice of generational dissonance challenging state censorship and
restrictions on public speech, issues the artists themselves address critically
in their music. For one, the ever-vocal Havana-based journalist Yoani San-
chez closely chronicled and championed Los Aldeanos' cause in her multi-
lingual blog "Generacion Y" (see Sanchez 2009).
The transnational dimensions of such animus have been complicated.
During a 2010 Miami performance tour with the allied MC Silvito "El Li-
bre" Rodriguez, the artists were inundated by local journalists angling for
public denunciations of the Castro leadership and broader revolutionary
government (Hanken 2010). A similar scenario played out in 2002 during a
Miami tour involving members of Obsesion and Doble Filo, yet in both cases
the artists were fairly adroit at sidestepping incitement. Aldeanos' Miami
reception nonetheless remained couched by some within the Cuban exilio-
attuned media along lines examplified by a Miami New Times journalist who
wrote: "In the face of Cuba's pathetic, failed socialist experiment is a new
revolution, a cultural one, led by the youth of the island. It's nonviolent, it's
artistic, and a rap group called Los Aldeanos stands at the forefront" (Katel
2010).
While the duo have been vocal in their criticism of Cuban reggaeton
for its viewed commercial frivolousness and lack of political engagement
(Baker 2011), like many of their reggaetonero peers the artists come from
an emerging Cuban generation disillusioned with the incongruencies of the
revolutionary project at this expanding neoliberal moment. The degree of
irreverence that Aldeanos hold for state authority can be seen as reflective

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 221


of growing cynicism with the revolutionary state in its efforts to police and
regulate, in often autocratic ways, a new Cuban reality shaped evermore by
the terms of global capital. While Aldeanos may stake out a radically juxta-
posed position vis-n-vis reggaetoneros, both can be seen as generational
manifestations of the same historical juncture. Indeed, though the duo has
long contended with (and in many ways capitalized on) their outlaw status
with regard to limits of artistic freedom, reggaeton artists have also been
subject to state bannings from radio and television in apparent response to
a deemed offensiveness of sexually explicit lyrics (de la Hoz 2012). Ambigu-
ities linger. Despite Aldeanos' acclaimed dissonance, for instance, they long
remained coveted marketing tender of the state-private promotion venture
Havana Cultura.
A counterfoil to Los Aldeanos' antiestablishment posture can be seen
in the example of Magia Lopez of Obsesion, who assumed directorship of
the Agencia Cubana de Rap (ACR) in 2007.26 To recall, under the leadership
of the former director Susana Garcia Amoros, the ACR had acquired a poor
reputation among many raperos due in part to the expansion of reggaeton
artists within its fold. In conversation with Magia two years into her ten-
ure as director, she echoed Ariel Fernandez Diaz's earlier read in under-
scoring that part of ACR's shift toward reggaeton was tied to the agency's
auto-financiado (self-financed) nature, which obliged it to raise much of its
operational budget via the more commercial route of reggaet6n.27 In line
with a broader neoliberal turn, such entrepreneurial strategies spoke again
to the quasi-privatization of Cuba's public institutions in light of a withering
socialist state. Similar scenarios had long been in place for many state-run
research centers that sought alternative revenue streams through mandated
affiliation fees for foreign researchers like myself. More immediately, this
shift again underscores the linkages between economic expediencies and
political contingencies regarding the Cuban state's divergent dealings with
hip hop and more commercial, presumably less contestatory reggaeton.
Noting that there were currently only three reggaeton groups on the
agency's roster, Magia explained that one of her priorities as ACR direc-
tor was to recenter the institution's focus on and promotion of hip hop.
To such ends, she sought to push the agency toward a more participatory
model akin to her previous work under the collaborative umbrella project
La Fabri-K. Through the now-official auspices of ACR, Magia expanded in
both scope and institutional form the annual Hip Hop Symposium that she

222  CHAPTER SIX


and her artistic partner Alexey Rodriguez launched under La Fabri-K around
2001. Occurring in a number of subsequent years through 2011, the retitled
"Simposio Internacional de Hip Hop Cubano," involving local and foreign
participants, continued to offer evening performances along with daytime
workshops, discussions, and audiovisual presentations. The challenge here,
Magia acknowledged, was walking an often tricky line between independent
and institutional parameters.
When in 2011 I asked whether her relationship with folks in that wider
hip hop community had changed since her institutional move, Magia re-
plied, "Claro!" She explained that there were many expectations about what
she could and/or should do in the position, as well as presumptions that
much could be accomplished immediately. "Pero no es posible" (But it's not
possible), she offered, adding that an institution cannot easily be turned
around after five years under someone else's direction. Magia confessed
that she was having a challenging time getting things done administratively,
finding the institutional workings "terribly rigid and structurally inflexible,"
and concluded, "Es una lucha" (It's a struggle).28 Indeed.
When asked about the rise of Los Aldeanos, Magia underscored that the
artists represented a new generation ofraperos, implying that they drew from
a different historical moment within the movement. While acknowledging
the duo as highly talented and critically voiced MCs, Magia pointed out that
the two reside in the relatively affluent barrio of Nuevo Vedado, suggesting
that the artists were relatively more privileged than many within the move-
ment, affording them greater access to resources. Los Aldeanos have indeed
been remarkably savvy in terms of music and video production, much of
which now circulates globally on the Internet by way of YouTube, Facebook,
and a range ofweb pages and sites. An extensive selection of the duo's music
can now be downloaded commercially on iTunes and amazon.com.
This global exposure, and ultimately commercial marketing, of Al-
deanos' music and particular brand of posturing has brought significant
international attention along with a notable following abroad. El B's famed
freestyle skills receive worldwide attention via YouTube videos of his bouts
as Cuba's two-time national champion of Red Bull's Batalla de los Gallos
competition. Aldeanos' renegade status was in turn enhanced by reports
that El B's travel permission to attend the international finals of the Batalla
was twice denied by the Cuban state. These events were captured in the
widely circulated 2009 biographical documentary Revolution by the Havana-

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 223


based filmmaker Mayckell Pedrero. A subsequent documentary, Viva Cuba
Libre: Rap Is War (2013), by the Los Angeles-based Jesse Acevedo, also pro-
files Los Aldeanos with a notably more sensationalist and unabashedly anti-
Castro flair. A third documentary, by the Havana-based filmmaker Alejan-
dro "Iskander" Moya, who similarly characterizes the duo as "virulently
antigovernment and explicitly anti-Fidel" (Katel 2010), is reportedly in pro-
duction as well. Such efforts have undoubtedly helped amplify Aldeanos'
international stature and popular draw as flamboyant young voices of Cuban
discord. A prominent figure in Aldeanos' mix of global promotion has been
Melissa Riviere of Emetrece Productions, an audiovisual production and en-
tertainment company run between Minneapolis and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
A PhD graduate in anthropology from the University of Minnesota whose
dissertation research dealt comparatively with Cuban and Puerto Rican hip
hop, Riviere had been until fairly recently an early and key advocate in cham-
pioning the duo internationally through a range of media projects.
In conversation, Magia Lopez questioned the level of international at-
tention bestowed on Los Aldeanos, citing Riviere's involvement in partic-
ular as an example of the duo's external networks of patronage. Her query
seemed twofold. The degree of foreign support for the artists on both
political and material levels raised questions for Magia as to the extent of
Aldeanos' claimed marginality within Cuban society as the grounding for
their critical posture. At another level, she wondered about the extent to
which their foreign support might itself be feeding-in provocative if not
potentially manipulative ways-the duo's adversarial stance toward the Cu-
ban state. This second concern no doubt carried its own implicative chal-
lenge for Magia, given her recently assumed role as director of the state-run
ACR. For Magia, Los Aldeanos' claim to the critical underground stood in
tension with their artistic practice, one she ultimately positioned as "buen
comercial" (solidly commercial). Yet at the same time Magia's own position
as a rapera-cum-head of a state institution charged with the commercial
promotion of island hip hop was clearly fraught with its own loaded set of
complications.
In hindsight, however, these conversations may have had unexpected
foresight. Recent revelations reported by the Associated Press suggest that
the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) during
this period engaged in covert provocateur efforts within Havana's hip hop

224 CHAPTER SIX


movement as part of a broader program to actively support and implic-
itly encourage dissonant elements within Cuban society (D. Butler et al.
2014b).29 In addition to a Serbian contractor working through a Panamanian
front company,30 those implicated in the scheme were in fact Los Aldeanos,
who reportedly received resources and forms of support. Regardless of the
details of the circumstances, the duo were eventually pressured to leave
Cuba and now reside in South Florida.
Whither Race?
The mercurial rise (and subsequent fall) of Los Aldeanos is reflective of
another more recent shift within Cuba's broader hip hop movement, one
characterized by a marked decentering of race and black racial subjectivity
once pivotal to the work and lives of many pioneering raperos. To recall,
the British ethnomusicologist Geoffrey Baker has suggested that black
racial currents within Cuban hip hop were chiefly expressions of foreign,
particularly U.S., cultural influences and political interventions by U.S. hip-
hop-affiliated individuals, academics, and resident African American exiles
(Baker 2011). Key here is Baker's contention that with the 2003 close of the
U.S.-based Black August collective's annual participation in Havana's hip
hop festival, an implicitly inorganic grounding of black identity and dis-
course among Havana-area raperos waned as well.
While I have addressed the role of Black August as well as the salience of
racial orientation in hip hop prior to the collective's Cuban involvement (see
chapter 3), it is largely true that black identity expression and accompanying
antiracist challenges long integral to hip hop's rise in Cuba have receded
since the mid-2000s. As the most visible of today's new face of Cuban MCs,
El B and El Aldeano of Los Aldeanos-who would phenotypically speaking
fall respectively between mestizo and white racial categories in Cuba-do
not in fact foreground racial identity, analyses, or themes in their music.
The same can be said of MC Silvito Rodriguez, son of composer Silvio Rod-
riguez and another leading figure within Havana's new generation of hip
hop artists.
An undeniable factor informing this shift has been the mentioned out-
flow of so many pioneering figures of Havana's hip hop community abroad,
many if not most of whom centered black subjectivity and antiracist inter-

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 225


vention in their music and artistic lives. Regarding his experience working
with Los Aldeanos during his Almendares Vivo project and production of
the related 2004 L3Y8 compilation disc," DJ Alexis D'Boys recalls:
Los Aldeanos were part of a project of mine because they had tremen-
dous talent, and I had invited them to hold a concert in Almendares. I
had a lot of interest in them, I gave them a lot of attention, and we did a
lot of business together. And they understood a lot about black culture
and its presence here in Havana. But after I left Cuba, everything fell
apart. They started to do their thing apart from that movement-they
believed more in themselves and less in the hip hop movement. In the
end it became a movement of raperos blacquitos [little white rappers], and
this affected the rest of the hip hop movement.... After I left Cuba ev-
erything changed; today the movement is completely white. After 2006
all the black artists left Cuba, and now all the raperos are white. These
people are not aware of the roots of this culture in Cuba.32
In a conversation with Obsesion's Magia Lopez and Alexey Rodriguez,
they echoed a similar theme regarding what they view as an ideological dis-
juncture that emerged between a now largely 6migr6 cohort of pioneering
MCs and a new generation of artists who arose in the vacuum. With this
break in discursive continuity, they argued, the torch failed to be passed.
Speaking to what he described as "this generation's disconnect with Cu-
ba's history, including Angola," the producer Pablo Herrera characterized
the shift as one akin to a de-racializing slide from "Afro-Cuban hip hop to
Cuban hip hop.""
Some have suggested that there may have been additional factors in the
mix informing hip hop's waning black origination, in particular those in-
volving state interests. Recalling the moment from his then home in New-
ark, New Jersey, Ariel Fernandez Diaz implied that there was a deliberate
effort on the part of the Cuban state to undermine the movement's black
leadership, claiming that some were in fact pushed out of positions, if not
ultimately out of Cuba itself:
The truth behind why black identity discourse has slowed down and been
stifled within hip hop is that it was a designed attack on the black leader-
ship within the movement to cut off this thing that was going on-it was
the attack on Rensoli,34 the attack on me, the attack on Pablo. So there's

226 CHAPTER SIX


a certain way the leadership of the movement or the intellectual leader-
ship of the movement-Rensoli, Pablo, me-were completely cut out of
the equation, you're not going to have the presence of those individuals
pushing for discussion and debate within the movement.... So the truth
is that it was an institutional plan and an organized attack precisely to
cut out this element within hip hop. I also think the coordination of the
Cuban Rap Agency (ACR) helped with that; I mean, you're trying to make
the leadership look to the commercial aspect of the music and not the
social-political aspect of the music, you know what I mean?"
Here again Ariel alludes to the promotion of reggaeton through the ACR
as an illustration of the linkages between commercial expediency and the
Cuban state's interest in defusing the political salience of race within hip
hop. Commenting on his and others' departures from Cuba, Ariel added:
"We were pushed to leave the island. I never wanted to leave Cuba. I wanted
to live in Cuba but I could not live without support. And the basic insti-
tutional strategy was to shoot me down and destroy the moral space, and
whatever respect I earned through the years of my work here was really put
in danger with different political and institutional tactics used to try to set
the movement against me, you know what I mean?"
Reflecting on the period in conversation from his home in Edinburgh,
Pablo Herrera ultimately questioned the strategic wisdom of those in the
hip hop community claiming status as a movimiento. As artists, Pablo ar-
gued, raperos never had a clear or unified project or strategy when dealing
with the Cuban state, and as such pitted themselves against an institutional
apparatus with whom they were woefully unprepared and outmatched.
Using the metaphor of a ball game, Pablo mused, "I think a lot of people
who wanted to make hip hop into a movement have basically committed
suicide, have basically thrown [hip hip] against the wall and basically killed
it," adding:
The minute we said that we're a movement-I take responsibility for
that as well-the minute people said that we're a movement then they
said, "We have to get you guys out, ok, you guys are out," and that was it,
you know what I mean? The minute we asked for that much power, we
were speaking the language of the government, the language of cultural
policy, of cultural politics. And as soon as we started speaking to that we
were completely out of bounds with being able to know what we were

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 227


doing. Because we were playing with tools that are not natural to us as
artists. Now we are in their court, they have the ball, you know what I
mean? They have the rap of exactly how to play us. From being players we
became a ball. And they knew exactly how to play it, so they could shut
down what we were doing."
During the exchange Pablo repeatedly professed in a reflective tone of certi-
tude, "I'm a person that's about cultural longevity, not political martyrdom."
Among those cited by Ariel and Pablo as being forced out of leadership
was Magia Lopez, who left her post as ACR's director amid controversy in
2012. As a result of mounting tensions between her and an assortment of old
and new Havana raperos, including Los Aldeanos, a letter was submitted to
Cuba's Minister of Culture Abel Prieto in late 2011 while Magia and Alexey
were abroad touring Canada and the United States. The letter listed griev-
ances about Magia's directorship including allegations of self-promotion
and reported financial mismanagement, ultimately requesting that she be
removed from her position. A version of the letter, signed by a prominent
(all-male) collection of older-school MCs, found its way to the blog Pennltimo
dias run by the Barcelona-based dissident writer Ernesto Hernandez Busto,
who, among other accolades, has been celebrated by the George W. Bush In-
stitute's "Freedom Collection" as a "recognized authority on technology and
democracy."37 Under duress, Magia was forced to vacate her directorship
and was replaced by her longtime artistic colleague Roberto Rosell Justiz of
the hip hop duo Hermanazos. Obsesion subsequently departed from ACR's
artistic portfolio.
While the incident brings to focus a complicated set of converging fac-
tors, a central and persistent element in the mix relates to long-standing
internal tensions and fragmentation within Havana's hip hop community.
It had certainly been my experience over the years that, despite the artistic
depth and politically charged focus of much of the music, the rapero com-
munity often seemed beleaguered by internal antagonisms and competi-
tive, at times ego-centered politics that hindered possibilities for more uni-
fied organizational efforts. All said, citing concerns beginning with Rodolfo
Rensoli's 1999 removal as lead organizer of the annual hip hop festival and
running through Magia's 2012 forced exit from ACR, both Ariel and Pablo
suggested the hand of a divide-and-rule strategy by the Cuban state. In Pab-
lo's words, folks had their "tops blown off as a result of people not knowing

228 CHAPTER SIX


how to play the system, or play within that system. This is what I meant by
being a ball rather than a player. Someone else is holding the racket. You're
not in your court."
Although the extent to which Cuban institutions may have fanned or
possibly exploited fractional dynamics is difficult to ascertain, Pablo's cri-
tique of the community's strategic shortcomings (or naivete?) in dealings
with state apparatuses may hold some validity. On his role during the pe-
riod, Ariel confessed in hindsight:
I definitely feel that I didn't succeed at what I wanted to, we didn't suc-
ceed. I mean my idea of the hip hop movement was to create a type of
coalition. My idea was to create a type of Abakui society, a really tight
brotherhood-sisterhood. That didn't happen because of us [leaders], it
happened because people within the movement didn't want to come into
this view, or the egos didn't allow them to do so. I might have made
mistakes in the process, definitely. But I think I can prove that I took
different actions and steps to try to bring everybody to the table, and
tried to really put everybody on the same page. . . . Through the work
that I did with the movement, through writing articles, creating Caf6
Cantante, creating the [Movimiento] magazine, I really wanted to create
a sociocultural coalition because I thought that was what the movement
was calling for. It didn't make sense to me to talk for ten years about how
police treat you without coming to the point when it's time to take action
that goes beyond the stage.38
Recognizing such limitations does not, however, deny the significance
of hip hop's rise as a critical lens into, and an active player within, Cuba's
evolving fields of racial articulation and life during a period of historic flux.
While hip hop's racial orientation and politically directed focus may have
undergone change, the terms, struggles, and potential consequences of
black antiracist expression and activism in Cuba clearly continue.
One need only consider the recent controversy surrounding Roberto
Zurbano, the Afro-Cuban intellectual and long-standing interlocutor with
Havana-area raperos who assumed directorship of the state-financed Mov-
imiento magazine following Ariel Fernandez Diaz's 2005 departure from
Cuba. In the wake of a 2013 New York Times op-ed piece published in English
translation that addressed the persistent and evolving nature of racial in-
equality in Cuba (Zurbano 2013a), Zurbano found himself demoted from his

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 229


position as director of Casa de las Am6ricas' literary press. For Zurbano, a
key issue in the mix was his charge that the New York Times had manipulated
the tone of his essay through a (deliberate) mistranslation of his original
title, "El pals que viene: ZY mi Cuba negra?" (The country to come: And
my black Cuba?), to "For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn't Begun." A
broader concern for Zurbano, however, was his subsequent state censor-
ship for broaching Cuba's current dilemmas of race within a highly visible
international (and in particular a U.S.-based) forum. In his defense, Zur-
bano penned an open online response titled "Maiana seri tarde: Escucho,
aprendo y sigo en la pelea" (Tomorrow is too late: I listen, I learn, and I'm
still in the fight), which opened:
If a conservative left in and outside of Cuba thinks that a black Cuban
revolutionary shouldn't make critiques of the Revolution, they do not un-
derstand the role blacks have played in this [Revolution], nor what a truly
revolutionary process is. At the core, at the heart, in the base and on the
shores of this process has been black support. We claim the moral right
to criticize it as a duty to defend it, because what we have achieved is still
insufficient in terms ofwhatwe have done and deserve. To renounce this
critique is to renounce bettering the Revolution and embodying it more
as our own.
Combating racism is one of the major tasks of the century. This
scourge did not arise in a particular country, but in a global context in-
volving various nations and cultures marked by the colonial desire to
divide the world and establish economic and political hierarchies that
survive today. Contemporary racism is also a global phenomenon and
the struggle against this goes beyond all boundaries. Renouncing the
international debate is to reduce its impact to old nationalist concepts
and disregard the process of unequal exchange generated by tourism,
new information technologies, migration, and transnational culture. It
is a debate about the persistence of racism in Cuba [and] on the paternal-
istic and sophisticated ways this degradation is reproduced or renewed
and, especially, regarding how to recognize and address them in a new
context. (Zurbano 2013b)
Zurbano's charge brings into pithy focus a similar range of Cuban ten-
sions that many raperos have long confronted in their music. From validat-
ing a critical black subject of national and revolutionary history, to chal-

230 CHAPTER SIX


lenging the limitations of nonracial national formulations that deny such
historicity, to the global fold of racialized power via the current market di-
mensions of racial inequality, struggles over Cuban complexities of race and
national citizenship remain at urgent center. As discussed, the analytical
lines of such appraisal arose in dialogue with raperos and can be seen as
part of an emergent black counterpublic seeking to challenge a silencing
of black antiracist struggle and attending forms of political subjectivity. To
evoke Pablo Herrera's language, might Zurbano's dismissal from the direc-
torship of Casa de las Americas' press be yet another instance of a promi-
nent "top being blown off" by the state?
Amid such developments, Obsesion's Magia Lopez and Alexey Rodri-
guez were among those who continued to pursue hip-hop-related projects,
international travel, and local engagements organized around antiracist
themes. Key among these has been their participation in the founding of a
local Cuban chapter of the regional antiracist alliance Articulacion Regional
de Afrodescendientes de Latinoamerica y el Caribe (ARAC, or Regional Co-
ordination of African Descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean).
It was through correspondence with Magia in late 2012 that I first became
aware of ARAC's evolving development in Havana.
Building on a decade of global antiracist forums, a group of activists
from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Ecua-
dor, and Venezuela along with an assemblage of Afro-Cuban intellectuals
and others convened in Havana under the auspices of ARAC in September
2012. The gathering was organized to discuss collaborative efforts to ad-
dress racism and racial discrimination against Afro-descendant communi-
ties in the region. As an outgrowth of the meeting, a Cuban chapter was
launched in 2013. Claiming institutional autonomy as an organ of a nascent
Cuban civil society while distancing itself from being viewed as a dissident
organization,39 ARAC's stated objectives sought to combat racism and ra-
cial inequality through dialogue with Cuban institutions and the national
media (Companioni 2013). Among those Afro-Cuban intellectuals taking
lead roles in ARAC's organizational impetus were Gisela Arandia, Tomas
Fernandez Robaina, and Roberto Zurbano-all of whom shared active his-
tories of support and engagement with Havana-area raperos.
Quite timely, one of the early challenges faced by the newly formed col-
laborative was Roberto Zurbano's dismissal as head of Casa de las Ameri-

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 231


cas's press. In response, ARAC issued a statement with a series of points,
opening excerpts of which read, in English translation:
Regarding the recent controversy in the national and international media
concerning the problem of race in Cuba today, we wish to express the
following:
- The project of our civil society is still under construction and [we]
recognize that radical antiracism is part of the very essence and the
most genuine popular element of the Cuban revolutionary process.
- [We] urge Cuba to eradicate all vestiges of racism, racial discrimina-
tion, colonialism, exclusion, social inequality and lack of respect for
differences.
" ARAC strongly supports and will continue to support the free expres-
sion of ideas for all of its activists, as part of the fundamental freedom
of expression in our society as a whole.
" ARAC thus opposes any institutional or individual process or method
of an obstructive or repressive nature against any participant involved
in such controversies who has elected to express his or her opinion
or views.
- We believe the deepening of controversy around issues that concern us
is a good sign of our society's ability to solve challenges independently
as actors in solidarity and with respect for diversity without interfer-
ence from external powers. (ARAC 2013)
Adding a personal voice to the debate, ARAC member Gisela Arandia
wrote an online response to the Zurbano affair, arguing that it exposed
the "virulence" of Cuban racism to the world. She then went on to iden-
tify three obstacles to resolving racial inequality in Cuba-an absence of
political will on the part of the state, enduring ideological claims that the
revolution had resolved the "racial problem," and a lack of strategic unity
among black Cubans themselves (Arandia 2013). A key concern voiced by
Gisela was her contention that antiracist critique is often delegitimized in
Cuba by bounded nationalist discourses that claim such orientations are in-
organically influenced by the United States, in particular African American
approaches to antiracism. Indeed, similar accusations as discussed under-
gird dismissals of racial critique and related subjectivity among Cuban rap-
eros in light of transnational histories of engagement with North American

232 CHAPTER SIX


interlocutors (cf. Baker 2011). ARAC's Cuban formation, Gisela counters,
"is trying to challenge the myth of racism in a new political and economic
reality by exposing the historical polarization of racism-poverty. In recent
years this reality has unfortunately increased the gaps of access to better
living conditions for large parts of the black Cuban population who remain
in positions of great poverty and limited upward mobility.... By weakening
the myth of silence there may creatively arise multiple collective proposals
that carry the legitimacy that the matter requires" (Arandia 2013).
While the broader resonance and organizational longevity of ARAC and
its interventions may be difficult to gauge at this point, the impetus for
its formation are the same historical urgencies and tensions that helped
shape the rise and critical voicings of Cuban hip hop. At the center of both
are efforts to readdress Cuba's historically fought, and indeed complexly
lived, ambiguities of race, national citizenship, and legacies of revolution
amid unfolding uncertainties of the neoliberal present. The challenge thus
raised concerns how to effectively both mediate and ground a sense of black
revolutionary Cubanness in non-self-negating and meaningfully active ways
through such flux. In what ways might struggles to expand the future Cuban
terms of a nascent civil society via emergent claims to a black counterpub-
lic in this sense occur in dialogue with broader global conversations and
attending political affinities? While the arc of such inquiry may be in fluid
play, it is clear that Cuban raperos have occupied a particularly animated
role within this evolving moment, lending both artistic expression and pop-
ularly embodied voices to the charge.
For Havana's now-expansive 6migr6 community of raperos and their
affiliates in the diaspora, one might consider the life and work of the late,
great Celia Cruz for generational comparison. A native of Pablo Herrera's
barrio of Santos Suarez, during an international tour in 1960 Cruz refused to
return to Cuba in defiance of the revolution's recent triunfo, settling in New
Jersey and ultimately assuming U.S. citizenship. An enduring vocal critic
of Fidel Castro and the socialist project, Cruz has long been considered
a persona non grata by the revolutionary state. While her life's music and
mention were effectively banned from official Cuban media, her voice
remains ever resonant at the popular level of la calle through songs like the
rather apropos "La vida es un carnaval." Yet during the span of her artistic
career Cruz continued to celebrate her fidelity to Cuba by drawing heavily-as

Whither Hip Hop Cubano? 233


did Chano Pozo, Arsenio Rodriguez, and others-on Afro-Cuban secular
and sacred currents of musical practice. Capturing the nostalgic complexity
of her ambivalence, Cruz's "Por si acaso no regreso" (In case I don't return)
laments: "Although time has passed with pride and dignity, I have taken your
name; to the whole world over, I have told your truth" (Aunque el tiempo
haya pasado, con orgullo y dignidad, tu nombre lo he llevado; a todo mundo
entero, le he contado tu verdad). Indeed, many a rapero afuera could testify
similarly.

234 CHAPTER SIX


Postscript
On a warm October afternoon I set out with Obsesion's Magia Lopez and
Alexey Rodriguez to attend a local Sunday second-line parade in a black
working-class section of New Orleans. The two had arrived the night before
for a weeklong program of performance and forums as part of a 2011 North
American tour. This being their first visit to New Orleans, I could think of
no more fitting introduction to the city's cultural cartography than a Sunday
second-line parade. With the recent lifting of Bush-era travel restrictions
on Cuban artists and intellectuals, Havana raperos were now again free to
tour the United States after a long hiatus. Building on stints of international
travel melding music and social activism-including participation in the
2006 World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, and repeated invitations to
Vancouver's Hip Hop for Peace Festival organized around antiwar and anti-
imperialist concerns-Magia and Alexey were quite resourceful in exploit-
ing the renewed opening. This would in fact be the first of two subsequent
U.S. tours, the second unfolding in 2013 and involving artistic collabora-
tions with 6migr6 and local MCs alongside outreach in black and Latino
communities regarding antiracist and antisexist themes.1
This Sunday's second-line was organized by Women of Class Social Aid
and Pleasure Club, one of a handful of such female-centered clubs in New
Orleans and seemingly all the more apropos given Magia's pioneering work
as a rapera. Following the club members' flamboyant entrance from a local


bar to the calls of an awaiting brass band, the second-line started at a slow
gait. As the energy grew, however, Magia and Alexey found themselves en-
veloped in the moving mass of bodies and music as they danced their way
along the second-line's three-plus-hour route of street parading. A certain
afrocaribe5o intimacy appeared in play as the two spoke of an affinity and
embodied comfort with the second-line, drawing on their experiences of la
Conga, Santiago de Cuba's massive carnival street parades that, akin to New
Orleans' circum- Caribbean variation, weave through black working-class
barrios of Santiago as community members follow in step with percussive
conga bands. I too was reminded of the congas' shuffle-step procession,
often of thousands marching in moving time with the bands' dave (key
rhythm), as I worked to keep step with the second-line's rolling mass lest I
trip and take down others, given the intimacy of the shared movement. The
second-line's music and pace calls all into rhythmic communion as a mobile
community, one in which Magia and Alexey seemed to find fellowship that
New Orleans day.2
During our parading we noticed a sharply dressed, young Asian man
dancing up front. In classic hip hop flair of baseball cap, warm-up jacket,
baggy pants, and athletic shoes, the dancer exhibited a wonderfully play-
ful sense of the second-line "footwork" as he improvised his way down the
route with attendant focus on the other dancing parishioners. As Alexey and
I admired his moves, I queried a woman photographing him. She informed
me that his name was Ivan Stepanov, aka B-boy Forwin-a breakdancer
from Siberia who had just arrived in New Orleans at the invitation of a local
arts nonprofit. Like Magia and Alexey, it was his first second-line, and on
the spot the two invited him to perform with them in one of their upcoming
shows. The following Friday evening B-boy Forwin joined the duo along-
side an assemblage of local artists including an Afro-Cuban percussionist,
a Japanese bassist, a saxophonist, a DJ, and a Trinidadian-born MC-all in
creative sync via converging currents of diaspora and hip hop that found
innovative form that week.
As explored, transnational routes of musical communion have been sim-
ilarly alive in the creative making and moving of Cuba's hip hop community.
Amid legacies of racial disenfranchisement forged at the confluence of ex-
clusionary national histories and ongoing market elaborations that have
denied equities of presence and participation, Afro-Cuban raperos have
sought a multivocality of black citizenship and antiracist critique through

236  POSTSCRIPT


spheres of musical life. Here the now-global cultural terrain of hip hop of-
fered both imaginative resource and creative recourse in crafting political
claims and cosmopolitan belonging at simultaneous levels of the nationally
and transnationally diasporic. Within this mix, raperos have had to navi-
gate varying state strategies to manage their art and message in addition
to the enduring constraints of a regulatory nonracialism, while contending
with Cuba's unfolding complexities of neoliberal marketization alongside
the competing rise of reggaeton. Rather than moving as isolated outliers,
these efforts arose in dialogue with a range of social actors seeking anti-
racist redress to the ideological silencing and structural marginalization of
Afro-Cubans from full livelihood within the Cuban nation. While this mo-
ment may indeed be one in ongoing flux, as is all in a rapidly transforming
Cuba, it appears evident that the political urgency of such calls continue to
resonate critically forward.
Coda: In November 2013, Alexey Rodriguez and his partner gave birth to
their daughter, Nehanda Imani-her name a celebratory ode to their friend,
African American political exile, and rapero mentor Nehanda Abiodun, cou-
pled with Imani, Swahili for faith.

POSTSCRIPT   237



Notes
Introduction
1. La escalera (the ladder) refers to the practice of binding suspects to ladders for brutal
interrogations that often involved severe whipping. This was a central method used
against those allegedly involved in the 1812 conspiracy.
2. To this day this legacy privileges the white Dominican-born General Miximo G6-
mez of the independence forces as the supreme military hero of a liberated Cuban
nation.
3. In this light, recently liberated blacks were figured in paternalistic terms as in-
debted wards of the independence movement, loyally indebted for their bestowed
freedom.
4. Early Cuba's nonracial promise was complicated by U.S. interventionism follow-
ing the Spanish-American War. Subsequent military occupations of1898-1902 and
1906-9 secured U.S. capital expansion within the island's sugar economy, enabling
U.S. firms to control upward of 75 percent of the island's sugarcane production
by the mid-1930s (Jatar-Hausmann 1999: 11). Successive military administrations
entrenched discriminatory hiring practices in Cuban state institutions (Helg 1995)
while introducing ideologies of racial inferiority by way of Jim Crow-like segrega-
tion in U.S.-owned sugar facilities (de la Fuente 2001).
5. Here racialized terror, to borrow from Achille Mbembe, provided a way "of marking
[black] aberration in the body politic [where] politics is read both as the mobile
force of reason and as the errant attempt at creating a space where 'error' would be
reduced, truth enhanced, and the enemy disposed of" (Mbembe 2003: 19).
6. Fidel Castro, "Revoluci6n," March 26, 1959, cited in Fernindez Robaina 1993: 103.


7. Calls for national unity assumed added urgency given escalating U.S. hostilities
following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), the Russian missile crisis (1962),
and imposition of the U.S. trade embargo (1963).
8. As David Theo Goldberg notes of analogous postracial projects, discourses of anti-
racism are often appropriated and collapsed into national "color-blind" discourses
of official nonracialism, rendering antiracist avenues of contest debilitated (Gold-
berg 2009).
9. As will be elaborated upon in chapter 1, an important caveat to such racial erasure
occurs in official realms of Cuban folklore, which tends to render blackness ahis-
toricized and incorporatively bound within the limits of nationhood.
io. Consider here Lisa Duggan's (2004) critique of the tendency in neo-Marxist/left cir-
cles of positing a valuative-and ultimately artificial-dichotomy between "class"
and "identity" politics regarding their presumed efficacy as competing forms of
social organizing.
11. Along these lines Baker also cites Fernandes 2006, though similar critiques are
extended to de la Fuente 2008; Saunders 2008; and West-Duran 2004.
12. Between enduring poles ofnegro (black) and blanco (white) comprising Cuba's infor-
mal racial classification system, there is an expansive range of vernacular terms of
graduated nonwhiteness given histories of racial mixing and attendant ideologies
of mestizaje. Contingent on racial markers like skin pigmentation and hair texture,
some of the more common terms include jabao, trigueno, mestizo, mulato, indio, and
moreno.
Chapter 1. Raced Neoliberalism
1. The term Regla de Ocha or simply Ocha (a Spanish contraction of orisha) is commonly
used by practitioners and aligned scholars for the syncretic Yoruba-derived belief
system popularly known as Santeria. The ethnically tied African cognate Lucumi
is alternatively used in particular circles to privilege the religion's African cultural
lines. While many simply refer to their religious community as la religi6n, I will
generally use the term Ocha-Lucumi when referring to the religious tradition.
2. Following independence from Portugal in the wake of its War of Independence
(1961-74), Angola's subsequent civil war unfolded from 1975 to 1991.
3. Established in 1997, this monthly per-rental-room tax was collected regardless of
whether rooms were occupied.
4. Between 1990 and 1993 family food consumption fell 33 percent, accompanied
by the rise of some neurological diseases tied to poor nutrition (Leogrande and
Thomas 2002: 343; Hidalgo and Martinez 2000: 107).
5. The 1992 Torricelli Act designed to restrict third-country commerce with the island
halted an estimated $768 million in annual trade, 90 percent of which involved
imports of food and medicine (Leogrande and Thomas 2002: 355). For an extended

240 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION


discussion of the U.S. trade embargo's impact on Cuba's public health system, see
Hidalgo and Martinez 2000.
6. Escalating efforts to attract global capital included a 1992 constitutional amend-
ment allowing up to 49 percent foreign control of joint ventures, a 1995 law guar-
anteeing foreign firms protection against expropriation and up to Ioo percent
ownership in certain sectors, and the establishment of free trade zones in 1996
(Leogrande and Thomas 2002: 343-44). Some early joint venture agreements, how-
ever, were reportedly later rescinded in favor of subsequent contracts with Venezu-
ela, China, and Brazil (The Economist, March 24, 2012: 6).
7. In contrast with standing policy limiting foreign investment to joint-Cuban-owned
ventures, Mariel's "Special Development Zone"-upgraded with financing from
Brazil and operated by Singapore-based PSA International-allows Ioo percent
foreign ownership of ventures.
8. A proposal by Raul Castro to phase out the libreta was met with resistance given
that large numbers of poor Cubans remain dependent on its subsidized staples, as
limited as they may be.
9. The largest medical personnel swap has been with Venezuela, recipient by 2005
of some fourteen thousand doctors (roughly equivalent to 20 percent of Cuba's
physician force) in exchange for oil imports accounting for upward of two-thirds
of Cuba's daily consumption (NewsMax.com 2005).
10. Rather, an autonomous mode of unregulated capital, neoliberalism, as Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest, operates more akin to "a form of state regulation
that best facilitates the global movement and profit of capital" (2004: 280).
11. Surveying the largest Cuban 6migr6 population, the 2000 U.S. Census recorded 90
percent of naturalized Cubans and 84 percent of Cuban noncitizens self-identified
as white (Tafoya 2004: 7). Black Cubans living in the United States, moreover, tend
to be poorer, more recent immigrants in comparison to established networks of
white Cubans concentrated primarily in the Miami area. Although some black Cu-
bans may have closer immediate links to family on the island, their more limited
levels of surplus income translate to fewer financial resources for remittances. For
further discussion of racial disparities in remittances, see Blue 2004; de la Fuente
2008; Eckstein 2010; Espina and Rodriguez 2006; Sawyer 2005.
12. Tourism remained Cuba's principal source of foreign exchange through 2005 when
it was surpassed by payments from international contracting of Cuban profession-
als abroad.
13. In ways reminiscent of similar practices in Brazil (de Santana Pinho 2010; Gold-
stein 2003), it has been suggested that darker-skinned Cubans are often excluded
from tourism-related employment on the racialized grounds that they lack buena
presencia, or "good presence" (de la Fuente and Glasco 1997: 65; see also Cabezas
2009).
14. The time allotted Cubans abroad prior to forfeiture of citizenship was recently ex-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 241


tended to two years, while additional extensions can be applied for on an individ-
ual basis.
15. Examples of revolutionary state institutions dedicated to the study of Afro-Cuban
cultural forms include the Instituto Nacional de Etnologia y Folklore (est. 1961) and
the Departamento de Folklore del Teatro Nacional de Cuba (est. 1962).
i6. A key architect of Cuba's post-1959 cultural policy, Armando Hart Divalos served
as the revolution's first minister of education (1959-65) and influential minister
of culture (1976-97), and wrote prolifically on the role of cultural production as
revolutionary instrument.
17. See also the Conjunto's former artistic director Rogelio Martinez Fur6's oft-cited
distinction between "positive" and "negative" (i.e., primitive, irrational) aspects
of Afro-Cuban folklore in his celebrated work Didlogos imaginarios (Martinez Fur6
1979).
18. Like many Afro-hemispheric music traditions, rumbas are customarily held on
Sundays, historically the day of rest and leisure for working-class Afro-Cubans
dating back to enslavement.
19. Similar strategies among young black men have been observed by Katrin Hans-
ing in the context of Cuba's Rastafarian community (Hansing 2001) and compara-
tively documented by Steven Gregory in tourism zones of the Dominican Republic
(Gregory 2006).
20. Some of the state-related costs associated with Cuban travel, such as the infamous
"carta blaca" (white card), have been recently curtailed under Radl Castro.
21. For further discussions of the raced character of Cuba's sex-trade, see Cabezas
2009; N. Fernandez 1999; Fusco 1998; O'Connell Davidson 1996.
22. Denise Brennan (2004) and Steven Gregory (2006) have noted similar dynamics
between white male tourists from the United States and female sex workers in the
Dominican Republic.
23. Quoted from http://cuba-sex.com/cuba-prostitutes.htm, accessed May 4, 2004.
24. See, for instance, "US Stands by Cuban Sex Tourism Allegations after Castro De-
nials," CubaNet, July 28, 2004, accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.cubanet.org
/htdocs/CNews/yo4/juIO4/28e7.htm.
25. Jesus Maria, for instance, is host to one of Havana's largest communities of Aba-
kui, the secretive all-male Afro-Cuban fraternity that has been historically associ-
ated with a (black) criminality and related Afro-cultural archaisms (Miller 2000).
References to the Abakui are in fact ambivalently drawn in the subsequently men-
tioned film De cierta manera.
26. Following G6mez's untimely death in 1974, De cierta manera's final cut was finished
with the help of the fellow auteur Tomis Guti6rrez Alea and others.
27. All Spanish-to-English translations of song lyrics, interviews, and Spanish text are
done by the author unless otherwise noted.

242 NOTES TO CHAPTER 1


Chapter 2. Hip Hop Cubano
z. Antonio Eligio Fernindez, aka Tonel, is an accomplished artist and art commenta-
tor from Havana now residing in Vancouver, British Columbia.
2. Fernindez Diaz's 2000 article in the state-run, youth-targeted periodical El Cai-
man Barbudo touches upon many of the historical elements mentioned in our
conversations.
3. Personal interview in English, January 10, 2002. All quotations of Ariel Fernindez
Diaz in this chapter are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
4. Personal interview in Spanish, August 2, 2002.
5. The song "Lo Negro" was eventually released on their 2003 self-issued album,
Paisanologia.
6. Initiates of Ocha-Lucumi are usually governed by one leading orisha, commonly
referred to as their personal santo (saint).
7. Ifi deviation is traditionally mediated through babaldwos, or male "priests" of Ocha-
Lucumi.
8. Personal interview in Spanish, July 31, 2006. All quotations of Alexis "D'Boys" Rod-
riguez in this chapter are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
9. Personal interview in English, July 20, 2012. All quotations of Pablo Herrera in this
chapter are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
io. Personal interview in Spanish, September 29, 2012.
11. Personal interview in English, July 26, 2012.
12. Personal interview in English, July 26, 2012.
13. B-boy is a U.S.-derived hip hop term coined to refer to male breakdancers.
14. See introduction.
15. "We both speak African" is a simplified rendering of Gillespie's original phrasing,
"bo peek African," which he used as an approximation of Chano's Cuban-inflected
English.
6. Regarding the racial contours of Mario Bauzi's life and work, see J. Moreno 2004,
and for Arsenio Rodriguez, see R. Fernandez 2006 and Garcia 2006.
17. Personal interview in Spanish, July 31, 2006.
18. Capoeira is a Central-African-derived, Afro-Brazilian dance/martial art form with
some striking stylistic similarities to breakdancing.
19. Regarding state circulations of U.S.-produced media more broadly, North Amer-
ican film has long been a popular staple in revolutionary Cuba in theaters and on
state-run television. Television broadcasts of The Sopranos and Grey's Anatomy are
some of the more recent expressions of such diffusion.
20. La Piragua continues today to be an important official locale for music perfor-
mances.
21. The hijacking of a Havana-Regla ferry on August 4, 1994, was in fact the third of a
series of similar ferry hijackings within just over a week.
22. This frenetic moment is captured in Charles Bosch and Joseph Maria Dom6nech's

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 243


Oscar-nominated 2003 documentary Balseros, produced for Spanish television
channel TV3. New York-based photographer Janis Lewin has also documented
the moment through her exhibited collection of photographs of the episode.
23. Other early Cuban la mona DJs included two associates of Adalberto's, Randell
Villalonga Davalos and Miguel Caballero.
24. Personal interview in Spanish, July 4, 2002.
25. Freestyle refers to the practice of improvised rapping, often occurring in a group
setting or cypher.
26. The Asociacion Hermanos Saiz is named after the brothers Luis and Sergio Saiz,
celebrated urban youth activists of the Movimiento 26 de Julio (the revolutionary
guerrilla force led by Fidel Castro). The brothers were killed by Batista's police in
1957 outside a movie theater in western Pinar del Rio.
27. Personal correspondence, August 9, 2009.
28. Primera Base's Igual Que Tn album was released in 1997 on the Panama-based label
Caribe Productions.
29. Personal interview in English, August 5, 2003.
30. Personal interview in Spanish, August 1, 1999.
31. Cruzao is a Cuban term most often used in religious contexts to refer to the syncre-
tistic fusion of African-derived religious forms in everyday religious practice.
32. The competition component of the festival was phased out in succeeding years.
33. Original Spanish text by Joel "Pando" Heredia, as cited in Pacini Hernindez and
Garofalo 2000. English translation by the author.
34. The former Black Panther and journalist-activist Mumia Abu-Jamal is serving life
imprisonment for the alleged murder of a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. Sup-
porters and various human rights organizations maintain that he is a political pris-
oner and have coordinated a long-running international campaign for his release.
35. References to Mumia Abu-Jamal can be found in the lyrics of foundational groups
such as Obsesi6n, Los Paisanos, An6nimo Consejo, EPG&B, and Junior Clan, to
name a few.
36. The dance workshop was organized by Yvonne Daniel, the U.S. academic and au-
thor of Rumba (1995)
37. Hoch's solo performance piece Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop was first published in text
in 1998 and later translated into the 2000 film of the same title. The work's Cuban
section involving Pablo grew out of Hoch's involvements with Havana's hip hop
community, to which I will return, dating back to the mid-199os.
38. Distributed by New York City-based Papaya Records, the disc featured An6nimo
Consejo, Explosion Suprema, 100% Original, Instinto, Hermanos de Causa, Ob-
sesi6n, Justicia, Junior Clan, Grandes Ligas, Reyes de las Calles, Bajo Mundo, Alto
Y Bajo, and Cuarta Imagen.
39. Personal interview in English, September 24, 2012.
40. See chapter1.
41. Pablo was initiated into Ifi around 2012 while living abroad in Edinburgh, Scot-

244 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2


land, bestowing upon him religious status as a babaliwo, or religious leader/priest
in Ocha-Lucumi.
42. The World Festival of Youth and Students, held periodically since 1947, was tradi-
tionally hosted in Soviet-aligned countries. The 1997 event, with the slogan "For
Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship," was hosted in Villa Panameri-
cana (Pan-American Village) in the municipality of Cojimar in Habana del Este.
The facility and adjoining apartment complex was initially constructed to host the
1991 Pan-American Games.
Chapter 3. New Revolutionary Horizons
1. Although Magia and Alexey separated as a married couple in 2010, they continue
to maintain an active partnership through their artistic work as Obsesi6n.
2. A Regla ferry, or lanchita, was hijacked in the summer of 1994, setting off the crisis
of the huelgas discussed in chapter 2. A Regla ferry was again commandeered in
2003 by an armed group of Cubans attempting to flee to the United States. Follow-
ing their apprehension by Cuban commandos, three hijackers were executed after
a brisk tribunal hearing, triggering considerable international condemnation. The
incident was the first of a series of hijackings in 2003-two involving domestic
airplanes-that signaled an elevated point of social crisis amid Cuba's post-1989
hardships.
3. A 1974 Spanish-language translation of The Autobiographtj of Malcolm X published in
Cuba has assumed collectible status within Afro-Cuban circles.
4. Personal interview in Spanish, August 1, 1999.
5. In ways reminiscent of other Caribbean settings (de Albuquerque 2000; Phillips
1999; Pruitt and Lafont 1995), Katrin Hansing (2001) suggests dreadlocks have also
been taken up by some young black men involved in the informal tourist trade in-
cluding forms of sex work. Within such economies of exchange, dreadlocks serve
as an authenticating marker of black Caribbean masculinity, one often associated
with a raced virility.
6. A recorded version of "Los Pelos" set to a funky bass line was released on Obse-
si6n's 2007 album, Supercr6nica.
7. Personal correspondence in Spanish, November 15, 2012.
8. DJ Roger Martinez left Obsesion and immigrated to the Los Angeles area in 2002.
The duo of Obsesi6n was later joined by producer Yelandy Blaya roughly between
2003 and 2005, and DJ Isnay "El Jigue" Rodriguez between 2007 and 2012.
9. Though mensaje literally means "massage," Alexey explained that within this ver-
nacular context it refers to Bandera's refusal to bow in the face of danger.
io. The line "no metan forros" translates literally as "don't mess with the cover/or
lining," but in Cuban vernacular the expression is used to imply "do not tell
lies or cheat." The expression thus doubles as a pun-i.e., "no metiforas" (no
metaphors).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 245


11. In Cuban vernacular, rebambarambara refers to a tremendous problem/fiasco/mess.
In this context "iRebambarambara!" can thus be translated as "making hell!"
12. Following independence the former combatant leader Quintin Bandera was re-
portedly unable to find employment beyond that of a janitor. In 1906 he was assas-
sinated by government troops after becoming involved in organizing resistance to
the U.S.-aligned administration of Tomis Estrada Palma (Ferrer 1998b).
13. Personal interview in Spanish, August 11, 1999.
14. For a YouTube video of Alexey's "Esta es mi mama," see http://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=Chd8THiZX1s, accessed February 13, 2014.
15. A hip hop/reggaet6n CD compilation titled Havana-Cultura was later released under
EGREM in 2009. Obsesi6n also represented the first hip hop album produced in Cuba.
The album's producer, Afro-Cuban jazz pianist Roberto Fonseca, helped facilitate ac-
cess to state recording facilities, and the album was distributed through state-run mu-
sic stores for Cuban pesos rather than U.S. dollars, making it accessible to many young
Cubans. Two earlier-recorded hip hop ventures by Primera Base and SBS (Sensational
Boys of the Street) were produced overseas in Panama and Spain, respectively.
i6. Barbito was a fellow member of the Diez y Diecinueve posse and director of then
EPG who died of asthma complications around 1999. Barbito was known for his
graffiti work, some of which adorns the patio adjoining Deno's home. The "B" in
EPG&B was added after his death.
17. By late 2003, EPG&B began to unravel due to a series of precipitating events. One
member of Grandes Ligas, Yaimir "Pitit" Jim6nez, left Cuba for Switzerland on
a fianc6 visa earlier that year, while the remaining member, Yordis Villalon, was
arrested for marijuana possession-an offense under Cuba's harsh drug laws that
carries a minimum one-year prison sentence for even nominal traces.
18. Personal interview in Spanish, July 31, 2006.
19. Personal correspondence, November 11, 2009.
20. Parque Quinta de los Molinos was a former botanical garden and one-time resi-
dence of the Cuban independence leader General Miximo G6mez.
21. I will return to a more detailed discussion of Ariel Fernindez Diaz's evolving posi-
tion within AHS in chapter 5.
22. Ariel's high-tech DJ equipment was acquired through contacts in New York City.
23. A self-educated radical, prison organizer, and author of Soledad Brother ([1970] 1994)
and Blood in My Ee ([1970] 1990), Jackson was gunned down by San Quentin prison
guards for allegedly harboring a smuggled pistol, though many on the left suggest
it was a staged political assassination.
24. Reyes de las Calles's "El mundo va a acabarse" is featured on the 2001 CD compi-
lation Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars, Vol. 1, produced jointly by Pablo Herrera and Ariel
Fernindez Diaz.
25. U.S. artists involved in Black August's South African tour included Dead Prez, Talib
Kweli, and Black Thought of the Roots-all of whom had previously performed or
would soon perform in Cuba.

246 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3


26. These same nationalist traditions drew upon their own concurrent streams of
Third World internationalism from Frantz Fanon to Maoism (Bush 2009; Kelley
2003).
27. Pablo Milan6s later composed "Cancion para Angela Davis," a celebrated version
of which he recorded with Silvio Rodriguez in 1975-
28. In 2013 Shakur's U.S. bounty was doubled to $2 million in addition to her rather
dubious placement on the FBI'S list of most wanted terrorists.
29. Personal interview, August 5, 2003.
30. Common's lyrics appear to draw broadly from narrative lines of Shakur's autobiog-
raphy.
31. Personal interview in English, August 5, 2003.
32. Personal interview in Spanish, August 1, 1999.
33. See chapter 2.
34. Personal interview in English, July 26, 2012.
35. Personal interview in English, July 20, 2012.
36. The hotel-lined peninsula of Varadero is Cuba's preeminent beach location for
foreign tourists, which has grown into something of a Cuban Cancun. For years it
was designated as a dollar-only zone of commerce, and access to its white-powder,
palm-treed beaches has long been restricted for most working-class Cubans.
37. Personal interview in Spanish, September 22, 2000.
38. Personal interview in English, January 10, 2002.
Chapter 4. Critical Self-Fashionings and Their Gendering
Epigraph: Jos6 Marti, La cuestion racial (Havana 1959), cited in P6rez (1999: 91).
1. Personal interview in English, August 5, 2003. All subsequent quotations of Ne-
handa Abiodun in this chapter are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
2. Personal interview in English, July 26, 2006. All subsequent quotations of Tomis
Fernindez Robaina in this chapter are from this interview.
3. This time frame reflected strategic considerations given the sensitivity of post-1959
Cuban scholarship on race.
4. G6mez was a white, Dominican-born general of the Cuban independence forces
long celebrated as its supreme military leader, and hence a key hero of the Cuban
republic.
5. Personal interview in Spanish, August 2, 2002.
6. Nicolas "Miko" Nocchi was the commercial force behind Orishas, a French-
produced rap group of Havana expatriates who became an international sensation
with the release of their premier album, A lo Cubano, in 1999.
7. Ire refers to a self-consciously "natural" vegetarian-centered lifestyle adopted by
many Rasta practitioners.
8. Recorded versions of Hermanos de Causa's "Tengo" appear on Cuban Hip-Hop All

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 247


Stars, Vol. 1 (2001), and La Causa Nostra (Our cause), Hermanos de Causa's first self-
released solo album (2003).
9. Original Spanish text, respectively: "Negro delincuente, concepto legendario /
Visto como el adversario en cualquier horario" and "el armamento pesado calibre
grueso, alta precisi6n / Impactando duro al blanco con mi vocaci6n."
10. It is worth noting that this artist in question is one of the most highly visible and
accomplished "white" members of Havana's rapero community.
11. Abakui members have in recent years participated in a number of exchanges with
Nigerian counterparts that, according to Kenneth Routon, have been used to lay
claims to an African historical identity (and thus political legitimacy) autonomous
of revolutionary jurisdiction and realms of state sovereignty (Routon 2005). The
U.S.-based cultural historian Ivor Miller has been instrumental in helping facilitate
a number of these encounters. As I have argued, similar appeals to Afro-alterity be-
yond the revolutionary national have comparable currents within Cuban hip hop.
12. Sanctions notwithstanding, gender and sexual fluidities do manifest to some de-
gree within broader spheres of Afro-Cuban religiosity. While J. Lorand Matory's
work on Brazilian Candombl6 speaks eloquently per example to currents of female
religious leadership within the broader circum-Yoruba Atlantic (Matory 2005), this
has been less historically so in Cuba. Yet long-standing prohibitions on women's
practice of Ifi divination in the Ocha-Lucumi tradition have for instance come
under challenge by a rather controversial movement of ianifd-female initiates
to the sacred practice of Ifi divination historically the sole Cuban domain of male
babaliwos.
13. The expression asere shares a broader Cuban history of urban address among black
working-class men.
14. In addition to levels of cultural and liturgical opaqueness, histories of state harass-
ment and efforts to regulate (if not eradicate) the Abakui during revolutionary and
prerevolutionary periods further discouraged initiates from public disclosure for
risk of harassment (see Routon 2005).
15. Personal interview in Spanish, September 29, 2012.
6. An Afro-Cuban composer influential in the popular rise of Cuban rumba and son
in the early to mid-twentieth century, Ignacio Pineiro and his Septeto Nacional
toured extensively in Europe and the United States and were featured in the influ-
ential "G.V. Series" (1933-58) of classic Cuban music impactive of many West and
Central African popular music forms into the postcolonial period.
17. Another pioneering female artist was Mc Monica, who performed alongside old-
school Mc Irak Saenz of the later duo Doble Filo.
18. For an innovative treatment of Las Krudas, see Celiany Rivera Valhzquez's docu-
mentaries T Con T: Lesbian Lives in Contemporary Cuba (2008) and Reina de mi Misma,
Queen of Myself: Las Krudas d' Cuba (2010).
19. Personal interview in Spanish, December 18, 2001. All subsequent quotations of
Las Krudas in this chapter are from this interview.

248 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4


20. While Pasa's and her sister Wanga's identification as black women might appear
self-evident, Pelusa's very light-brown skin and reddish-tinged hair mark her
nearer jabd or trigefa within Cuba's graduated racial classification system. Yet ar-
ticulate with forms of black self-affirmation shared by other lighter-skinned Mcs
discussed earlier, Pelusa in my experience self-identifies politically as negra.
21. Kilay is an acronym of participating members' individual names.
22. Omega Kilay interview in Spanish, conducted with the assistance of Sue Harrod,
September 9, 2006. All subsequent quotations of Omega Kilay members in this
chapter are from this interview.
23. See the original Spanish text at http://www.hipzoma.com/proyectos/proyecto23
/dossier-grupo.pdf, accessed September 12, 2011.
Chapter 5. Racial Challenges and the State
1. Personal interview in Spanish, December 22, 2001.
2. Roberto Zurbano assumed directorship of Movimiento following the 2005 departure
to the United States of Ariel Fernindez Diaz, who served as the magazine's first
editorial director.
3. Personal interview in English, July 20, 2012.
4. See for instance Belafonte's rather intimate exploration of Afro-Cuban music tra-
ditions in his three-part hosted PBS series, "Roots of Rhythm" (1997).
5. Personal interview in English, August 5, 2003.
6. Personal correspondence in Spanish, November 15, 2012.
7. Personal interview in English, September 29, 2012.
8. Orishas' A lo cubano album was first released in Spain in 1999 under the Orishas
moniker. The group has subsequently released an additional four alums.
9. Personal interview in Spanish, July 24, 2002.
10. The key organizers of the tour were the Miami Light Project under the directorship
of Beth Boone, and the New York City-based International Hip Hop Exchange
headed by Marinieves Alba.
11. U.S. journalist Eugene Robinson likened Ariel in this capacity to a Cuban "Minister
of Hip Hop" (Robinson 2002).
12. Editorial consultants included Rub6n Marin, Magia L6pez and Alexey Rodri-
guez, Sekou Umoja, Yrak Saenz, Joaquin Borges-Triana, Roberto Zurbano, Tomis
Fernindez Robaina, Pablo Herrera, Victor Fowler, Ismael Gonzilez Castafer, Tania
Canet, Yesenia S6lier, Tatiana Cordero, Gloria Rolando, Maikel Garcia, and Grisell
Hernandez-virtually all of whom were Afro-Cuban.
13. Personal interview in English, January10, 2002. All subsequent quotations of Ariel
Fernindez Diaz are from this interview.
14. There were in fact long tensions between Ariel and Pablo stemming in part from a
mutual competiveness as two among the most resourceful, if not personally ambi-
tious, members of Havana's hip hop community.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 249


15. Such was also conferred to me in private conversations by Roberto Zurbano and
Tomis Fernindez Robaina.
i6. See chapter1.
17. Carlos Moore (1989) asserts significant numbers of those purged from the Partido
Comunista de Cuba (PCC) were an older generation of black committee members,
suggesting the move served in part to eliminate an established guard of influential
black politicos.
18. The state-led effort was called "la campana de rectificaci6n."
19. Per diasporic comparison, consider Michael Hanchard's discussion of Brazil's
movimiento negro in its efforts to forge an alternative "black" public sphere via
Afro-Brazilian cultural strategies (Hanchard 1994).
20. Personal interview in Spanish, July 15, 2006.
21. Another noted expression of early state openings to racial discussion was a
1993-initiated study of Cuban racial attitudes by the Centro de Antropologia de
Cuba. The journal Temas also broke significant ground with a 1996 issue dedicated
to scholarly debates on race and racial discrimination (cf. N. Fernandez 2001).
22. Personal interview in Spanish, August 16, 2002.
23. See the 1997 Decreto 217 Regulaciones Migratorias Internas para la Ciudad de La Ha-
bana y sus contravenciones (Decree 217 internal migration regulations for the City
of Havana and its violations). See http://www.cuba-I.com/decreto-217-regulaciones
-migratorias-internas-para-la-ciudad-de-la-habana-y-sus-contravenciones/, accessed
May 2, 2015.
24. Yesenia S6lier, an accomplished dance performer, is currently working on a PhD in
communications studies at New York University.
25. Diago is the grandson of the pioneering Afro-Cuban artist Roberto Diago (1920-57),
from whom he takes his name. The elder Diago also widely exhibited work in Cuba
and abroad.
26. Alejandro de la Fuente later helped curate an exhibition on the Santiago-based
Grupo Antillano movement, whose artistic work spanning the late 1970s and early
1980s underscored the instrumentality of Africa and the Afro-Caribbean in the mak-
ing of Cuban nationhood. See http://www.queloides-exhibit.com/Grupo-Antillano
/tablet/index.html, accessed April 3, 2015.
27. A published novelist, Prieto was president of UNEAC from 1991 to 1997.
Chapter 6. Whither Hip Hop Cubano?
1. Personal interview in Spanish, July 31, 2006.
2. Original Spanish text: "Hacen revolucion con sus textos, educan con su poesia" .. .
"incomprendidos, censurados a pesar de portar la verdad en sus manos."
3. Among those participating in El Cartel were Explosion Suprema, Los Paisanos, and
Hermanos de Causa. The Cuban hip hop documentary East of Havana (2006) gives
center stage to a number of El Cartel members.

250 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5


4. The documentary La Fabrik: The Cuban Hip-Hop Factorn (2005) by the Cuban Amer-
ican filmmaker Lisandro Per6z-Rey narrates the experience of Obsesi6n and one
member of Doble Filo on their 2003 performance tour to New York City.
5. Those profiled centrally in the film were Michel Hermida Martinez, aka Miki Flow,
of Explosion Suprema; Magyori "La Llave" Martinez of EPG&B and Omega Kilay;
and Soandres del Rio of Hermanos de Causa.
6. Participating artists in the annual hip hop festival were customarily chosen by way
of auditions before a panel assembled by AHS.
7. Personal interview in Spanish, July 31, 2006.
8. Although relatively scarce in comparison to other Caribbean settings, marijuana
has long been available on the island in relatively small quantities. In conjunc-
tion with harsh mandatory penalties for possession (e.g., one-year minimum for
possession of any recognizable trace of marijuana), the crackdown significantly
impacted the availability and circulation of marijuana. While cocaine was said to
have been available during my period of research in a significantly more limited
degree, those who partook were significantly fewer in number and likely included
foreign tourists given its prohibitive cost and scarcity.
9. Alternative Cuban brandings of reggaet6n are reguet6n or cubat6n.
io. The now prolific genre, which fuses dancehall reggae rhythms with Spanish Carib-
bean hip-hop-inflected vocals, grew out of Afro-Panamanian pioneerings of reggae
en espafiol, coalescing among Puerto Rican artists and producers in the commercial
formation and global popularization of today's reggaet6n.
11. "Raggamuffin" or "ragga" is a style of Jamaican dancehall (reggae) music originat-
ing in the 1980s.
12. Personal interview in Spanish, July10, 2001. All subsequent quotations from mem-
bers of Crazy Man are from this interview.
13. For example, the former hip hop crew Gente de Zona shifted toward reggaet6n
early in their career, eventually garnering a spot as one of Cuba's premiere reggae-
t6n groups.
14. Personal interview in Spanish, July 31, 2006.
15. Personal interview in English, July 26, 2012.
i6. See the discussion of commodified blackness in chapter 1.
17. In addition to previously mentioned works, other foreign-produced documenta-
ries on Cuban hip hop include Young Rebels (2005), directors Anna Boden and Ryan
Fleck; La Fabrik: The Cuban Hip-Hop Factorn (2005), director Lisandro Per6z-Rey; and
Cuban Hip Hop: Desde el Principio (2006), directors Vanessa J. Diaz and Larissa Diaz.
18. See http://rootsofsalsa.com/details.php, accessed August 12, 2015.
19. With members from Haiti, Algeria, France, Argentina, Chile, Barbados, St. Vin-
cent, and Grenada, the collective performs in French, English, Spanish, Haitian
Creole, and Arabic.
20. As the nationalized, former family-run Bacardi rum company, the now-branded
Havana Club International has operated since 1994 as a 50-50 joint venture with

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 251


the French distillery conglomerate Pernod Ricard, which has reportedly netted
almost US$3 billion in international sales in the first quarter of 2012/13 (Pernod
Ricard 2013).
21. See http://www.havana-cultura.com/en/int/now-showing-havana-cultura, accessed
March 14, 2013.
22. For a comparative note, "Red Bull Street Kings" brass band competitions were
hosted in 2010 and 2013 in New Orleans, awash with Red Bull logos, free cans of
the drink, and an elaborately choreographed video production whose material is
now part of a Red Bull promotional website.
23. In recent years Soandres has become active as a spoken-word poet.
24. Featuring invited MCs Papi Humbertico and El Discipulo, the original Spanish
lyrics read: "Siempre a la ofensiva / En defensa de las vidas que anidan heridas / El
rap es guerra / La lucha no esti perdida / Liberen la verdad cautiva / No se deten-
gan sigan / El rap es guerra / Quieren que llenemos nuestros demos de canciones
movidas / Pero se olvidan que el rap es guerra."
25. Orginal Spanish lyrics read: "esclavo de tu nacionalidad, identidad y asuntos ...
esclavo de jodida y pausada agonia ... esclavo de tus deberes, esclavo de tus dere-
chos ... esclavo de luchar sin cesar y no hallar felicidad."
26. Magia remains an active member of Obsesi6n with her artistic partner Alexey
Rodriguez.
27. Personal interview in Spanish, October 5, 2009.
28. Personal interview in Spanish, October 30, 2011.
29. The example of Alan Gross, a recently freed USAID subcontractor jailed in Havana
after being accused in 2009 of clandestinely distributing satellite phones and com-
puter equipment to members of Cuba's Jewish community, stands as a high-profile
illustration of this broader U.S. undertaking.
30. For additional conspiratorial details of USAID's Cuban hip hop scheme, see D.
Butler et al. 2014a.
31. The title L3Y8 serves as a numerological reference to "Letras, Cultura y Hip Hop."
32. Personal interview in Spanish, September 29, 2012.
33. Personal interview in English, September 24, 2012.
34. See chapters 3 and 5.
35. Personal interview in English, July 26, 2012.
36. Personal interview in English, July 20, 2012. All subsequent quotations of Pablo
Herrera in this chapter are from this interview.
37. See http://www.freedomcollection.org/regions/theamericas/cuba/emestohernandez
_busto/, accessed April 6, 2013.
38. Personal interview in English, July 26, 2012.
39. For related elaborations, see Morales 2013.

252 NOTES TO CHAPTER 6


Postscript
z. During two New Orleans visits in which I was involved, Magia and Alexey combined
visits to public schools and local cultural organizations, academic talks, and col-
laborative shows with local Mcs and musicians. Institutional sponsorship of these
tours was organized through the University of Michigan and the Washington-
based lobby the Center for Democracy in the Americas.
2. Circum-Caribbean currents of cultural exchange have long tied New Orleans,
Cuba, and Haiti, as have histories of political affinity as exemplified in General
Antonio Maceo's 1884-85 exile in New Orleans while mobilizing Cuba's indepen-
dence struggle with Spain.

NOTES TO POSTSCRIPT 253



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272 REFERENCES


Index

Page numbers followed byf indicate
illustrations.
Abakua, 32, 92, 152-56, 229, 242n25,
248n11, 248n14
"Abakua" (Obsesion), 154-55
Abdala Studios, 201
Abiodun, Nehanda, 80, 89-90, 117, 118,
120,133, 137-39, 157,178,237
Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 82, 83, 84, 89, 100,
133, 244nn34-35
Acosta, Randy, 60-61, 142-43, 216, 217f
ACR. See Agencia Cubana de Rap
Afrocubanidad, 41, 69, 88, 149, 151
"Afrocubano" (An6nimo Consejo),
144-45, 147
Afro-Cubans: African American articu-
lations with, 18, 21, 26, 63-65, 69, 72,
77, 8o-8i, 83, 89-90, 100, 115, 118,
123-24, 113, 137-39, 157; citizenship,
4-5, 8-10, 13-14, 16, 27, 35, 39-40,
50, 53, 55, 100, 130, 135-36, 139-41,
143, 144, 147, 149, 169, 170, 173, 233,
236-37; disenfranchisement of, 4,

7-14, 74-75, 144, 147, 194, 236; emi-
gration by, 40; folklore trope, 40-44,
76, 141, 173, 194, 207, 210-11, 24on9,
242n15, 242n17; national legitimacy
of, 6-7, 17-18, 50-51, 100; police
treatment of, 12, 20-21, 48-51, 53-54,
96, 107, 120, 124-25, 126-30, 190, 193,
205, 229; sexuality, raced notions,
43-44, 46-47, 50, 95-96,150-51,
158-59; tourism commerce and, 13,
21, 38-39, 97-98, 182, 241n13, 242n19.
See also blackness; Cubanness/cubani-
dad; sex tourism/work
Afro hairstyles, 2, 93, 205
Agencia Cubana de Rap (ACR), 27, 105,
178, 180-85, 210, 211, 212, 222, 228
AHS. See Asociacion Hermanos Saiz
Alamar (barrio), 35, 53, 57-58, 76, 78, 79,
8o, 109, 111-15, 124, 147, 174, 184, 217
Alba, Marinieves, 119
Aldeano, El. See Rodriguez Baquero,
Aldo "El Aldeano" Roberto
Aldeanos, Los, 220-25, 226, 228
Alfonso, Gerardo, 203


Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de
Nuestra Am6rica (ALBA), 36
Almendars Vivo, 202-3
A lo cubano (Amenaza), 182, 247n6,
249n8
Alonso, Alpidio, 179-80, 184, 194
Alto Voltaje, 181, 210
Amenaza, 76, 81-84, 88-89, 110, 182,
214
Angola, 32-33, 87-88, 226, 24on2
annual hip hop festivals, 18, 110-12, 133,
218, 225; alternative, 202-6; banned,
89; colloquiums, 193-94; develop-
ment of, 75-79, 173-75; performing
blackness, 53-54, 78-81, 111-25; state
engagement, 173-75, 178-80, 184-85,
193, 201-4, 228
An6nimo Consejo, 53, 87, 110, 125-31,
126f, 132, 135, 144-46, 181, 191, 194,
211, 219
Anson, Sidney, 171, 172f
antiracism, 18, 116, 232, 24on8. See also
nonracialism
"Apariencias engafan, Las" (An6nimo
Consejo), 53, 125-30
Aponte, Jos6 Antonio, 145
Aponte Rebellion (1812), 8, 18
ARAC. See Articulacion Regional de
Afrodescendientes de Latinoam6rica
y el Caribe
Arandia, Gisela, 192-93, 232-33
Arias Jim6nez, Ariel, 195
Articulacion Regional de Afrodescen-
dientes de Latinoam6rica y el Caribe
(ARAC), 231-33
Asho. See Fernindez Diaz, Ariel
asho, use of term, 61
Asociaci6n Cultural Yoruba de Cuba, 43
Asociacion Hermanos Saiz (AHs), 76,
107, 110, 173-79, 184-85, 187-88,
193-94, 201, 215, 244n26
Assata (Shakur), 118

Ateneo Cultural Antonio Bravo Cor-
reoso, 206
audiocassettes, impact of, 62, io8, mZZ
Augusto Negro. See Black August
Autobiographyj of Malcolm X, The, 93, 245n3
B, El. See Rodriguez Gala, Bian "El B"
babalawos, 92, 153, 243n7, 245n41,
248n12
balseros crisis, 73, 113, 130
Bandera, Quintin, 100
barrios marginales, 51. See also specific
barrios
Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 195-96
batd drums, 158
Batalla de los Gallos, 219, 223
Bauzi, Mario, 69, 243n16
b-boying, 69-70, 243n13. See also
breakdance
Beat Street (film), 70
Belafonte, Harry, 176-78
Betancourt, Juan Ren6, 141-42
Bey, Yasiin. See Mos Def
BLA. See Black Liberation Army
Black August, 18-19, 61, 89-90, m1,
115-24, 133, 225, 246n25
black feminism and hip hop, 150-51,
156-70, 217
Black Liberation Army (BLA), 116-17
blackness: "blacknuss," use of term, 65;
Cubanness and, 41, 136, 143, 172-73,
182, 192, 194, 233; emergent, 59-71;
fear of, 8-9; folklore trope, 40-44,
76, 141, 173, 194, 207, 210-11, 24on9,
242n15, 242n17; hip hop festival and,
111-25; hip hop identity, 6, 14-19,
24-25, 52, 6o-65, 77-90, 93-96, 98,
103-4, 115-17, 119, 122-23, 124, 136,
139-40, 142-49, 172-73, 205, 213,
225-27, 236-37; mobilizing, 14-16;
nationalism and, 9, 147; performing,
78-85; politics of hair, 96-97, io6,

274 INDEX


120, 163, 146, 205, 245n5. See also
Afro-Cubans
Black/New Afrikan liberation move-
ment, 115, 116, 138
Black Panthers, 111, 115, 117, 118, 171,
244n34
Black Power Movement, 137
Black Soul movement (Brazil), 65
Black Star (hip hop duo), 118
Black Thought, 246n25
Blaya, Yelandy, 201
bolero-son music, 1, 148
Bolles, Lynn, 21-22
bonches, los, 65-66, 71
Borges-Triana, Joaquin, 191
Braithwaite, Fred. See Fab 5 Freddy
breakdance: competitions (los retos),
66-68, 70; Nuyoricans role in, 62, 70;
Puerto Ricans and, 70-71; in video,
69-70. See also b-boying
Brown, James, 62
Bruja, La. See De La Luz, Caridad "La
Bruja"
Buena Vista Social Club, The (album/
documentary), 42, 182
cabildos de naci6n, 10, 68-69
Cabral, Amilcar, 32
Cabral, Manuel de, 32
Caf6 Cantante, 110, 184-85, 229
Caf6 Mezclado, 207
Caiman Barbudo, El (periodical), 200,
243n2
Candyman. See Cuesta Palomo, Rub6n
Cantero, Alexis "el Pel6n," 1, 4, 71f, 147
capoeira, 70-71
Carbonell, Walterio, 141-42
Cardenas, Julio, 139, 214, 216
Carmichael, Stokely, 117
carnets de identidad, 20, 49, ,50 53
Cartel, El, 201
Casa de Las Am6ricas, 175, 195, 229-32

cassette tapes. See audiocassettes, im-
pact of
Castro, Fidel, 2-3, 10, 30-32, 35, 48, 73,
110, 117, 132, 149-50, 175-78, 189, 233,
244n26
Castro, Radl, 2, 3, 36, 241n8, 242n20
Cayo Hueso (barrio), 42, 91, 1o8, 109
CCP. See Cuban Communist Party
Cerro (barrio), 1o6, 110
Chang6 (orisha), 88
Chucho SH S, 207
CIDMUC. See Cuban Center for Investi-
gation and Development of Music
"Cimarr6n" (An6nimo Consejo), 135
citizenship: of Cubans abroad, 40,
241-42n14; enslavement and, 220-21;
entrepreneurialism and, 37-39, 130;
inclusive, 140-41, 143, 144, 170, 173,
236-37; male-centric, 149-50; mul-
tiple notions of, 16, 52-53, 139, 143;
neoliberalism and, 13-14, 192, 233;
oppression and, 165; Partido Indepen-
diente de Color on, 135; racial, 4-5, 9,
50-51, 135-36, 147, 149, 231, 236-37;
reggaet6n on, 208; transnational, 169;
wars of independence and, 8-9, 100
Civil Rights Movement, U.S., 19-20,
29, 137
Cleaver, Eldridge, 117
Club Las Vegas, 109-10
Cojimar (barrio), 76, 125, 147, 245n42
Collia, Yaribey "Yary," 79f, 168-69
Color Cubano project, 141, 192
Common, 113, 118
Conjunto Folklorico Nacional, 41, 48,
86, 242n17
Conjunto Rumbavana, 148
consumerism, 33, 44, 77, 1o8, 161
Cooder, Ry, 42
cosmopolitanism, black, 5, 6, 10, 63-65,
69, 77, 123, 146, 171, 172, 207
counternationalism, 9, 11

INDEX    275


counterpublic, black, 189-90, 231, 233
Crazy Man, 207
Cruz, Celia, 233-34
cruzao, use of term, 244n31
Cuban Center for Investigation and De-
velopment of Music (CIDMUC), 191
Cuban Communist Party (PCC), 72, 73,
181, 189, 250n17
Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars (CD), 85f, 87,
246n24
cubanidad. See Cubanness/cubanidad
Cubanitos, 181
Cubanitos 20.12, 210
Cubanness/cubanidad, 41, 74, 130, 136,
143,150,172-73, 182, 192, 194,233
Cubanos en la Red, 181, 209, 210
Cuban raperos. See raperos
Cuban Revolution (1953-59), 3, 74, 95,
106; egalitarian ideals, 7, 10, 23, 30-31;
rapero relationship to, 3-4, 10, 12, 101,
104, 105, 131-33, 140, 142-43
Cubensi (Las Krudas), 163, 167
CUCs. See pesos convertibles
cuentapropismo, 37-38, 48, 213
Cuesta, Odalys "Wanda," 160. See also
Krudas, Las
Cuesta, Odaymara "Pasa," 160-62, 161f,
167-68. See also Krudas, Las
Cuesta Palomo, Rub6n "Candyman,"
207-9
Davis, Angela, 117, 205, 247n27
D'Boys. See Rodriguez, Alexis "D'Boys"
Dead Prez, 115, 116, 118, 120-22, 124,
125, 246n25
De cierta manera (Gom6z film), 51
De La Luz, Caridad "La Bruja," 119
del Rio, Soandres, 1, 4, 147, 148f, 184,
196
Diago Durruthy, Roberto, 195-97
Diaz, Telmary, 157, 218-19
Diaz, Yanet, 156

Diez y Diecinueve crew, 1o6-8, 124, 157,
185, 246n16
difference: black political, 16, 18,
189-90; class, 7, 212; politics of, 162;
racial, 7, 9, 11, 12, 22, 39, 46, 51, 59,
77-78, 173, 208, 232; social, 15, 52,
124, 173, 188, 212. See also blackness
Disco Negro, El (Obsession), 92-93, 154
diversionismo ideol6gico, 74
DJ Alexis D'Boys. See Rodriguez, Alexis
"D'Boys"
DJ Asho. See Fernindez Diaz, Ariel
DJ-ing, 23, 40, 66, 70, 73-74, 1o8,
111, 157, 185, 204, 217, 218, 244n23,
246n22
DJ Kool Herc. See Kool Herc
DJ Leidis. See Freire, Leidis
DJ Yary. See Collia, Yaribey "Yary"
Doble Filo, 124, 181, 184, 201, 219, 221
dollar (U.S.): economy, 29, 46, 48, 73,
98, 121-22, 126-30, 247n36; foreign
remittances, 33-34, 36, 38, 1o6, 124,
241n11, 247n36
Dominican Republic, 44, 47, 69, 77, 231,
242n19
dreadlocks, 96-97, 1o6, 120, 146, 163,
205, 245n5
Du Bois, W. E. B., 7, 29, 136
Dufleaux, Lou "Piensa," 54, 218
Dunham, Katherine, 21
Eastern bloc, 30, 35. See also Soviet
Union
East of Havana (Saizarbitoria/Menocal
documentary), 201-2
economies: capitalist, 30-31; raced,
38-44, 46-48, 166, 241n1, 242n21;
under state socialism, 4-5, 36-37,
72-73, 213; transitions, 35-38
Eddy-K, 181, 210, 218
EGREM studios, 105, 219, 246n15
Eleggui (orisha), 92

276  INDEX


Emetrece Productions, 224
6migr6s, Cuban, 215-18, 226, 233, 235,
241n111
ENA. See Escuela Nacional de Arte
Entenza, Maigel "Kokino," 125-26, 126f,
131, 132-33, 138-39. See also An6nimo
Consejo
entrepreneurism. See racial entrepre-
neurism
EPG&B, 106-7, 168-69, 185, 214,
244n34, 246n15, 251n5
"Eres bella" (Las Krudas), 163-66
Escalera massacre, La (1844), 8, 239n1
Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA), 204
Esquina de Rap, La (radio program), 61
"Esta es mi mama" (Obsesi6n), 102
Estenoz, Evaristo, 142, 145
Estivis, Los, 62
Executive Plan Ghetto and Barbito.
See EPG&B
Explosion Feminina, 156-57
Explosion Suprema, 87
Eyjes of the Rainbow (Rolando documen-
tary), 86
Fab 5 Freddy, 120
Fabri-K, La, 201, 222-23
Family Code (1975), 150
Federaci6n de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC),
35, 150
feminism. See black feminism
Fernindez, Diamela "Ifa," 195
Fernindez Diaz, Ariel, 30, 59-63, 64,
66, 67, 69, 72, 87, 110-11, 112, 124, 133,
139, 140, 141, 178, 179-80, 181, 185-88,
286, 193-94, 200, 212, 214, 216, 222,
226-27, 228, 229, 246n22 246n24,
249n2, 249n11
Fernandez Robaina, Tomis, 139-44,
145-47, 151-52, 170, 191, 195, 196, 231,
249n12, 25onI5
Festival del Caribe/Fuego, 207

festivals, hip hop. See annual hip hop
festivals
Fifth Congress of Cuban Communist
Party, 189
FMC. See Federaci6n de Mujeres
Cubanas
folklore, trope of, 25, 40-44, 76, 78, 141,
173, 194, 207, 210-11, 24on9, 242n15,
242n17
foreign remittances, 33-34, 36, 38, io6,
124, 241n11, 247n36
Francis, Osmel, 209
Free Hole Negro, 157, 181, 218-19
free-trade agreements/zone, 12, 36
Freire, Leidis, 157, 168-69, 217
funk music, 63
Gilvez, Zoila, 145
Garcia Amor6s, Susana, 181, 182-83,
184,222
Garvey, Marcus, 171
"Generacion Y" (Sinchez blog), 221
Gomez, Marga, 165-66
Gom6z, Sara, 51, 242n26
Gonzales, Luis, 206
Gonzilez, Edgaro, 219
Gonzilez Escalona, Salvador, 42-43
"Gorda, La" (Las Krudas), 165
graffiti art, 23, 70, 107, 168, 203-4,
246n16
Graham, Gary. See Sankofa, Shaka
Grandes Ligas, 87, io6-8, 110
Granma (newspaper), 76
Grillo, Frank "Machito," 69
Grupo Uno, 75, 76, m11, 112, 173-75, 178
Guanabacoa (barrio), 53, 76, 92
Guevara, Ernesto "Che," 51, 110, 125,
139,150
Guibert, Aristey, 207
Guillard Limonta, Norma, 191
Guill6n, Nicolas, 18, 69, 141, 147, i8o, 192
Guinea-Bissau, 32

INDEX     277


Habana Aberita, 216
"Habana Joven, La" (Los Van Van), 113
Habana Vieja, 2, 16, 49, 51, 92, 160
Hall, Stuart, 10, 14-15, 78
Hanchard, Michael, 19-20, 65
Hancock, Herbie, 72
"Hands Off Assata" campaign, 118
Hart Divalos, Armando, 242n16
Havana Cultura Tour, 219, 222
health care. See medicine, socialized
Heredia, Joel "Pando," 89, 244n33
Hermanazos, 228
Hermanos de Causa, 1, 3, 4, 53, 147-49,
180, 184, 196, 220, 244n38, 247n8,
250n3, 251n5
Hermanos Saiz. See Asociacion Her-
manos Saiz
Hermida Martinez, Michel "Miki Flow,"
217
Hernindez Baguer, Grizel, 191
Herrera, H6ctor, 121-22
Herrera, Pablo, 64-65, 67, 76-77, 85,
86-90, 106, 107f, 110, 113, 123, 125,
139, 167, 176, 178, 179, 180, 182, 185,
188, 195, 201, 215, 216, 226, 227-29,
231, 244n37, 244n41, 246n24, 249n12,
249n14
hip hop, Cuban: Africa as reference
point, 34, 70-71, 76, 83-85, 138, 143,
146, 163, 171, 226, 231; African dias-
pora, 6, 65, 71, 84, 87-90, 120-22, 139,
143, 236; birth of, 57-59; black assem-
blages, 86-90; black feminist queer-
ings, 156-70; black identity, 14-19,
24-25, 52, 60-62, 78-85, 122, 136, 139,
146, 172-73, 225-27, 236-37; black
public sphere and, 188-97; commu-
nity, 66-67, 75-78; diaspora, 214-19;
entrepreneurialism of, 200-201; as
gendered, 68, 93, 94-97, 103-4, 139,
149-70; as internal revolution, 131-33;
as movimiento, 3, 6, 15, 57, 213, 227;

nueva trova and, 199-200; performance
spaces, 75-78, 106-11, 200-201; rise
of, 52-55, 77-78; self-censorship
in, 105; state on, 5-6, 16, 72-75, 76,
104-5, 173-88, 200-205, 227-28;
textuality in, 83-84; vs. U.S., 121-22;
USAID and, 24, 224-25. See also annual
hip hop festivals; raperos
"Hip Hop Revolution" (An6nimo Con-
sejo mantra), 131
Hoch, Danny, 86, 120
homosexuality. See queerness
huelgas (1994 riots), 73, 245n2
Hughes, Langston, 18, 32
Humbertico, Papi, 53-55, 220
Hurricane Charley, 201
Hurston, Zora Neale, 21
Ifi divination, 62, 88, 216, 243n7,
244n41, 248n12
Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de Regla, La,
92, 93
"Igual que td" (Primera Base), 79-80
indio, 24on12
Instinto, 114, 156
Instituto Cubano de la Mdsica, 110, 184,
185
Interactivo collective, 157, 218-19
Internet restrictions, 31
Inventos (E. Jacobs-Fantauzzi documen-
tary), 119
Ivonnet, Pedro, 145-46
iyas de ocha, 92
iyawo, 61
jabao, 6o-61, 24on12
Jackson, George, 111, 115, 246n23
Jacobs-Fantauzzi, Eli, 119
Jacobs-Fantauzzi, Kahlil, 119
Jacomino, Fernando Le6n, 179
Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop (Hoch film), 86,
120, 244n37

278   INDEX


Jamaica, 22, 70, 77, 161, 206, 207, 218,
251n111
jazz, 65, 69
Jesds Maria (barrio), 39, 51, 242n25
Jim6nez, Adalberto, 73-74, io8
Jim6nez, Yaimir "Pitit," 214
jineterismo practices, 46-48, 50, 86, 130,
158-60
J6venes Rebeldes, 106-7
Junior Clan, io6-8, 110, 122, 167, 171,
244n35, 244n38
Keloids. See Quiloides/Keloids (art show)
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 194
Kool Herc, 62, 70
Krudas, Las, 87, 160-67, 16if, 169-70,
216-17
Kweli, Talib, 118, 246n25
"Ligrimas negras" (Hermanos de
Causa), 1, 3, 53, 147-49
Lay Apesteguia, Rafael, 204
Lee, Spike, 80
lesbianism. See queerness
Let's Get Free (Dead Prez), 120
Like Water for Chocolate (Common), 118
"Llaman puta, La" (Obsesi6n), 158-59,
166
"Lo Negro" (Acosta/Saladriga), 61,
142-43
L6pez, Magia, 2, 91-105, 95f, 113, 139,
141, 142, 158-60, 167-68, 181, 183,
201, 218, 222-24, 226, 228. See also
Obsesion
lucha, la, 7, 104, 146, 164, 218, 223,
252nn24-25
Lucumi. See Ocha-Lucumi
M1, 118, 120. See also Dead Prez
Maceo, Antonio, 8-9, 98, 100, io8,
141-42, 143, 145-46, 194-95, 253n2
Machado Leyva, Javier, 195

Madriguera, La, iio-11, 184
Maestra (Murphy film), 87
Malcolm X, 2, 30, 79-80, 93, 117, 133, 137,
194, 245n3. See also Malcolm X Grass-
roots Movement
Malcolm X (Lee film), 80
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
(MXGM), 89, ii6
"Mambi" (Obsesi6n), 98-100, 103-4
Mandela, Nelson, 133
Manigua Brigade, ioo
marginalization: gendered, 167; in of-
ficial public spheres, 190, 193; racial,
1-2, 12, 17, 59, 68, 119-20, 149, 167, 237;
socioeconomic, 13, 68; of youth, 23
marginalidad, 48, 152, 204
Mariel port, 36, 241n7; boatlift (1980), 73
Marin, Rub6n, 80, 93
market capitalism. See under economies
maroon communities, 68-69, 135, 146
Marti, Jos6, 9, 10, 110, 130, 135, 141,
149-50, 172, 194-95
Martiinez, Magyori "La Llave," 79f,
168-69, 217
Martinez, Roger, 98, 216, 245n8
Martinez Fur6, Rogelio, 43, 146, 196,
242n17
masculinity: black, 27, 52, 68, 80, 93, 96,
104, 121, 139, 151-56, 167, 245n5, citi-
zenship and, 94, 109, 139, 149-50, 162;
Cuban heteromasculinity, 150-52,
162-63, 208; gendered hip hop,
149-56; machismo, 150-51, 162, 168
Matamoros, Miguel, 1, 148
medicine, socialized, 11-12, 30; marketi-
zation of, 37, 241n9
mestizaje, 17, 18, 81, 24on12
mestizo, 60, 67, 82-84, 143-44, 225,
24on12
Miki Flow. See Hermida Martinez, Michel
Milan6s, Pablo, 119, 199, 2471127
"Mi naci6n" (Los Paisanos), 29, 53

INDEX     279


Miramar (barrio), 33, 202
mona, lalmoneros, 65-67, 71, 73-75
Montreal, 54, 218
Mora, Eduardo, 210
Mor6, Benny, 105, 145, 18o-81
Morej6n, Nancy, 94-95, 196
moreno, 6o, 24on12
Morton, Jelly Roll, 69
Mos Def (Yasiin Bey), 118
movimento negro (Brazil), 19, 25on19
Movimiento (magazine), 61, 174-75, 178,
185-87, 191, 195, 229, 249n2
movimiento del soul (Havana), 19
Movimiento 26 de Julio, 209, 244n26
MPLA, 33
"Mujer negra" (Morej6n), 94-95
mulata/o, 8, 20, 44, 6o, 69, 94, 98, 109,
158, 24on12
Munoz, Jos6 Esteban, 165-66
Murphy, Catherine, 87
Museo Bellas Artes, 196
Museo de la Mdsica, El, 193
Museo de los Orishas, 43
MXGM. See Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement
NAPO. See New African People's
Organization
national identity cards. See carnets de
identidad
nationalism: Afro-Cuban claims to,
36-37, 50-51, 63-64, 84, 135-36,
141-44, 147, 194-95; Cuban-U.S. no-
tions, 59, 116-17; entrepreneurialism
and, 37-38, 45, 51, 213, 222; folkloric
representations, 40-43, 78, 173, 194,
210; liberation and, 8, 99-100; male-
centric, 149-50; multicultural, 18;
narratives of, 3, 8-9, 173; neoliberal-
ism and, 37, 189; nonracial, 4, 9, 12,
15-16, 130-31, 143, 146, 18-g
national literacy campaigns, 12, 87

neoliberalism: ambivalent Cuban con-
dition, 12-13, 36-38; citizenship
and, 4, 12-14, 37-40, 50-53, 147, 192,
208, 233; nationalism and, 3, 37, 189;
race and, 13, 18, 38-44, 144, 189, 192;
regulatory effects of, 6, 36, 213; turn
toward, 12, 36-38, 189, 241n7; uncer-
tainties under, 35, 73, 233
New African People's Organization
(NAPO), 116-17
Newton, Huey, 117
Nocchi, Nicolas "Miko Niko," 144-45,
182
Nomadic Massive, 218
nonracialism, 4-5, 7, 9-12, 16, 17, 27, 41,
51, 83, 84, 135-36, 141, 143, 144, 146,
149, 172-73, 175, 197, 231, 237, 239n4,
24on8. See also antiracism
nueva trova movement, 199-200
Nunez, Flaco Pro, 182
Nuyorican cultural activism, 18, 119-20
Obatali (orisha), 61
Obsesi6n (album), 105, 246n15
Obsesion (group), 2, 87, 91-105, 95f, 110,
113, 121, 131, 139, 141, 142, 143, 147,
154, 158, 167, 181, 183-84, 201, 211,
216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226,
228, 231, 235, 244n35, 244n38, 245n1,
245n6, 245n8, 251n4, 252n26
Ocha-Lucumi, 32, 43, 61-62, 88, 92,
145-46, 158, 159, 182, 24on1, 243nn6,
7, 244-45n41, 248n12
"Ochavon cruzao" (Amenaza), 81-83,
89, 123
Ochin (orisha), 158
Ogaden War (1977-78), 102
Omega Kilay, 168-69, 217
One Dollar (Herrera film), 121-22
100% Original, 87, 110
Oramas, Michael, 121, 167, 171, 172f. See
also Junior Clan

280  INDEX


orishas, 43, 61, 146, 158, 24on1
Orishas (French-Cuban rap group), 182,
214, 217-18, 247n6, 249n8
Orquesta Arag6n, 204
Ortiz, Fernando, 41, 49
Our Rightful Share (Helg), 140
Pacini Hernandez, Deborah, 65-66, 74
Paisanos, Los, 29, 35, 53, 60-61, 87, 142,
215, 216, 217f, 244n35, 25on3
palenques, 68-69. See also maroon com-
munities
Pal6s Matos, Luis, 69
Palo Monte, 32, 92
"Pa' mis niches" (100% Original), 104
Pampa, La, 108-9
Papo Record, 53, 181, 210
Parque de los Policias, 66-67
Partido Communista de Cuba. See Cuban
Communist Party
Partido Independiente de Color, 9-10,
135, 140-42, 144-45, 172-73, 191
Pasi6n Oscura, 114
PCC. See Cuban Communist Party
Pel6n. See Cantero, Alexis "el Pel6n"
Pennltimo dias (Hernindez Busto blog), 228
performance spaces, hip hip, 75-78,
106-11, 200-201
pesos convertibles (cucs), 36, 38, 39
Pinero, Ignacio, 156
Piragua, La, 72
Planos Cordovi, Omar, 207
police practices, 12, 20-21, 48-51,
53-54, 96, 107, 120, 124-25, 126-30,
190, 193, 205, 229
popular music, Cuban, 69
";Por Angela!" (Castellanos), 117
"Por si acaso no regreso" (Cruz), 233-34
Porto, Yudith, 156
Positiva, La, 156-57
Pozo, Luciano "Chano," 69, 154, 156,
234, 243n15

Prendes, Olivia "Pelusa," 16o, 163. See
also Krudas, Las
Prieto, Abel, 176-77, 187, 196, 228, 25on27
Primera Base, 79-80, 93, 181, 210, 244n28
Puerto Rico: commercialization of
reggaet6n, 208, 251nio; historical
affinities with Cuba, 69, 115, 118-20;
involvement in hip hop, 23, 68, 70,
119-20; radicalism, 118-19
queerness, 143-44, 151-52, 156-70, 189,
217, 248n18
Quiloides/Keloids (art show), 195-96
Quilombo dos Palmares, 146
race: class and, 14-15, 31, 34, 190; classi-
fication system, 24on12; decentering
of, 225-34; economies and, 38-44;
egalitarianism under state socialism,
4, 7, 10-12, 31, 74-75, 130-32, 189;
ethnography and, 16-25; national
constructions, 17-18; tourism and, 13,
21, 34, 38-40, 43-48, 98, 230, 241n13,
242n19. See also blackness
Race War (1912), 10, 135, 142
racial difference. See under difference
racial entrepreneurialism, 37-39, 45-52,
55, 78, 130, 200-201
racial marginalization. See under
marginalization
racism, generally: ban on discrimina-
tion, 10; machismo and, 162; per-
sistence of, 4, 83, 113, 148-49, 230;
repression and, 177-78; revolutionary
approach to, 10-12, 51, 197; structural,
11, 121, 193; as theme, 195-96. See also
antiracism; nonracialism
radio broadcasts, U.S., 58, 62, 64
Radio Free Dixie (radio program), 117
Radio Marti, 64
Raices de mi corazon (Rolando documen-
tary), 140, 191

INDEX     281


raperos, 52f; black assemblages, 86-90;
black counterpublic and, 189-90;
black feminist queerings, 156-70,
217; black identity of, 14-19, 24-25,
52, 6o, 78-85, 136, 139, 146, 172-73,
236-37; black radicality and, 136-49;
as "la calle," 204; community of, 5,
93, 228; Cuban heteromasculinity of,
150-53; Cuban revolutionary history,
relationship to, 3-4, 10, 12, 101, 104,
I-5, 131-33, 140, 142-43; decentering
of race, 225-34; defection episode,
51-83; diaspora of, 214-19, 233; gay,
151-52; income, 103; national be-
longing and, 13; performance spaces
for, 75-78, io6-11, 200-201; on raced
policing, 53; role of, 100-101; social
critique by, 53-54, 79, 129-30, 132,
140-41, 189-97; state and, 5-6, 16,
72-75, 76, 100-102, 104-5, 173-88,
200, 227; styles of, 77-79; vs. U.S. hip
hop, 121-22. See also hip hop, Cuban;
specific individuals and groups
Raperos Crazy de Alamar (RCA), 111,
114, 214
"Rap es guerra, El" (Los Aldeanos), 220
Rastafarianism, 96, 140, 144, 146, 161,
242n19
RCA. See Raperos Crazy de Alamar
reggae music, 75, 205, 207-8, 251n111
reggaet6n music, 151, 161, 190, 206-14,
218, 219, 221-22, 227, 237, 246n14,
251nn9,I0, 251n13
Regimiento, 207
Regla (barrio), 2, 76, 92-94, 98, 102,
153-55, 243n21, 245n2
Regla de Ocha. See Ocha-Lucumi
Rensoli, Rodolfo, 75-77, 8o-82, io6, m1,
112, 122, 173-74, 178, 226-27, 228
"Revoluci6n" (Papo Record), 53
Reyes de las Calles, 113
Rivero, Balesy, 75

Riviere, Melissa, 224
Roca Calderio, Blas, 73
"Rockit" (Hancock video), 72
Rock Steady Crew, 62
Rodriguez, Alexey, 2, 54, 91-105, 95f, 113,
121, 131, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 154,
158, 167, 168, 183, 184, 201, 218, 222-23,
226, 228, 235-37. See also Obsesion
Rodriguez, Alexis "D'Boys," 63, 64, 66,
68-71, 72, 74, io6, 107f, 109, 153-54,
171, 172f, 199, 202f, 203-6, 210-12,
213, 215, 218-19, 226
Rodriguez, Arsenio, 2, 69, 156, 234
Rodriguez, Silvio, 199, 201, 225, 247n27
Rodriguez, Silvito, 221, 225
Rodriguez Baquero, Aldo "El Aldeano"
Roberto, 220-21, 225. See also
Aldeanos, Los
Rodriguez de Tio, Lola, 119
Rodriguez Gala, Bian "El B," 220, 223,
225. See also Aldeanos, Los
Rolando, Gloria, 86, 140, 146, 191, 249n12
romances, transnational, 40, 45-46, 214,
246n17
Roots, The, 113, 119, 246n25
Rossell Justiz, Roberto, 228
rumba music, 42-43, 45, 68, 82-83,
155-56,182, 242n18, 248n16
Saenz, Yrak, 124, 183, 248n17, 249n12
Saizarbitoria, Jauretsi, 201-2
Saladriga, Jessel "El Huevo," 61, 142, 217f
Sinchez, Yoani, 221
Sankofa, Shaka (Gary Lee Graham), 133
Santamaria, Mongo, 2
Santeria, 32, 43, 24on1. See also
Ocha-Lucumi
Santiago de Cuba, 28, 206-9, 236
Sarrias, Sekou Messiah Umoja (Yos-
mel Sarrias) , 125-26, 126f, 131, 133,
136-39, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 194-95,
249n12. See also An6nimo Consejo

282   INDEX


S.B.S. (Sensational Boys of the Street),
209-10
self-censorship (autocensura), 105
S6lier, Yesenia, 195, 196, 249n12, 25on24
Sexto Sentido, 156-57
sex tourism/work, 46-48, 50, 130,
158-6o, 166, 242n22, 242n24, 245n5
sexuality: heteronormativity, 151, 166;
queerness, 143-44, 151-52, 156-70,
189, 217, 248n18; raced notions of,
95-96, 151; in reggaet6n, 208
Shakur, Assata, 86, 89, 115, 116-17, 157
Shakur, Mutulu, 118
Shakur, Tupac, 118
slavery: Cuban history of, 7-8, 10; ma-
chismo and, 162; memory of, 83, 94,
104, 162; revolts, 8, 145. See also ma-
roon communities
Soandres. See del Rio, Soandres
social mobility, black, 14, 23, 34, 40, 102
sociedades de color, 10, 11
"Son de Cuba a Puerto Rico" (Milan6s),
119
"Song for Assata, A" (Common), 118
son music, 42, 82, 182, 248n16. See also
bolero-son music
Soul Train (television program), 63, 69
Soviet Union, trade with, 2, 7, 12, 30, 35,
58, 102. See also Eastern bloc
Soyj Cubanito (Cubanitos 20.02), 210
Special Period (Periodo especial), 35, 48,
72-73, 97, 102
state socialism: anxieties, 74; consum-
erism under, 33; economy under,
4-5, 36-37, 72-73, 213; egalitarianism
under, 4, 7, 10-12, 32, 74-75, 130-32;
eroding ideals of, 208, 213, 221-22;
on free-trade agreements, 12, 36,
241n6; health care under, 11-12, 37;
on hip hop, 5-6, 16, 72-75, 76, 104-5,
173-88, 200-204, 227-28; intolerance
for dissent, 131-32; libreta, 37, 128,

241n8; public sector employment,
97-98; rapero support for, 100-102,
132, 133; salary regulation by, 33; trova-
dor support for, 199; for youth, 72
Sticman, 118, 120. See also Dead Prez
Suarez, Jos6 Antonio, 210
sugar production, 7, 103-4, 239n4
teatro bufo, 109
Temas (journal), 25on21
"Tengo" (Hermanos de Causa), 147, 18o,
247n8
"They Schools" (Dead Prez), 121
Third Congress of Cuban Communist
Party, 189
Till the Break of Dawn (Hoch performance
piece), 120
timba music, 150, 151, 190, 208
Toronto, 218, 219
Touch, Tony, 115, 116, 120-21
tourism: dollar-based, 33-34, 73, 124,
128, 130, 212, 241n12, 247n36; exclu-
sion in, 21, 34, 38-40, 98, 124, 241n13,
247n36; folklore trope and, 40-44,
210-11; medical, 37; neoliberalism
and, 13-14; sex trade, 46-48, 50
transnationalism, 6, 13, 15, 19, 21-22,
24-25, 68-71, 89-90, 1o8, 169, 171
triguefo, 6o, 24on12
Trio Matamoros, 148
Trotter, Tariq Luqmann. See Black
Thought
tumbafrancesca, 68-69
Turner, Nat, 111
UJc. See Uni6n de J6venes Comunistas
Umoja, Sekou Messiah. See Sarrias,
Yosmel
UNEAC. See Union Nacional de Escrito-
ries y Artistas de Cuba
Uni6n de J6venes Comunistas (UJc),
72, 76

INDEX     283


Union Nacional de Escritories y Artistas
de Cuba (UNEAC), 140-41, 175, 192,
193, 25on27
UNITA, 33
United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), 24, 224-25
Urrutia, Gustavo, 18, 141-42
USAID. See United States Agency for
International Development
Vald6s, Chucho, 2
Valdez, Yanelis "Nono," 168
Valentine, Clyde, 119
Van Van, Los, 113
Varadero (tourist resort zone), 130
Vedado (barrio), 76, 106-7, 109, 110, 202,
219
Veitia, Daysi, 87, 88
Vieques, Puerto Rico, 118-19
Virgen de Regla, La, 92, 93
Vox Sambu, 218

wars of independence, Cuban, 8-9,
98-99, 100, 123, 150, 209, 239nn2,3,
246n12, 246n20, 247n4, 253n2
Washington, Booker T., 18
WBAI-Pacifica radio, 30
Wenders, Wim, 42
Williams, Robert, 117
Wonder, Stevie, 62
Yemanyi (orisha), 88, 92
Yensy Oruna, Andy, 167
Yoruba Andavo, 81-82
Yoruba belief system, 145-46, 158,
159, 182, 24on1, 248n12. See also
Ocha-Lucumi
Young, Debbie, 218
Zumba, Ganga, 146
Zumbi, 146
Zurbano, Roberto, 151, 174-75, 191-92,
229-32, 249n2, 249n12, 25on15

284 INDEX