Last August, hip-hop duo Los Aldeanos openly criticised the Cuban government from the stage of the Rotilla music festival, an independent electronic, dance and rap event that attracted around 20,000 young Cubans to a beach in Havana.
This summer the organisers, Matraka Productions, were informed that the government was taking over the festival, which had been running, with state support, since 1998. A statement issued by Matraka said categorically that their festival was not happening this year, denouncing the ‘theft, plagiarism, and kidnapping’ and ‘stubborn and excessive censorship’ of what they described as a ‘life project’. Their words, like Los Aldeanos’ incendiary lyrics, damn the state’s control over creativity: ‘What moves us is the hope that someone will discuss our problems / Necessities, violence and lies of the state / Its mechanism has become corrupt and manipulated / And police that instead of inspiring hate make me ashamed.’
Yet the government hasn’t always been this hostile towards Cuban rap. Founded in 1995, the Festival de Rap Cubano which took place annually in Alamar, a suburb in East Havana, had government backing for nearly a decade. The Cuban authorities even proclaimed their support for rap in 1999, calling it ‘an authentic expression of Cuban culture’. This was despite being initially wary of a musical movement that was so obviously influenced by the US.
Cubans began with hip-hop dancing, and at dance battles crowds would chant ‘Las cajas! Las cajas!’, a colloquial way of saying ‘You’ve been defeated!’ Initially, hip-hop culture was absorbed in ‘an innocent way’, according to Pablo Herrera, Cuba’s ‘premier’ rap producer from the scene’s beginning in the early 90s and during its boom years. Cubans were ‘very naively rapping, emulating the style of the US about living in the Bronx even though they didn’t live there.’
Early Cuban hip-hop, then, seemed to be just one in a long line of musical genres that had crossed the Florida Straits, following jazz, soul and big band, amongst many others. Fidel Castro was even reported to have rapped at a baseball game. What then soured the relationship between rappers and the state?
The decline in the establishment’s enthusiasm for rap can be traced back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which plunged the country into the crisis of what Castro delicately labelled the ‘Special Period’. With people reduced to eating tree bark and banana skins with sugarwater, by the mid 90s rap had become a way for Cubans to express their experiences of the hardships.
These rappers, rather than singing about guns, bitches and bling, wanted to feel, as their revolutionary parents and grandparents had been able to, like they could do something positive for their society. They used hip-hop to address issues like racism, religion and prostitution. The artists were more thoughtful than their American counterparts, and highly educated too, beneficiaries of the free universities in Cuba. We met rap duo Alianza in Cerro, a barrio of grim, Soviet era concrete apartment blocks in Havana. As Navy Prop, one half of the duo, explained, they are inspired by the stories on the streets of Cerro. What is typically ‘Cuban’ about their music, he told us, is the way their messages are transmitted.
It was this new-found willingness to examine the status quo, paired with a surge in the genre’s popularity around ten years ago (the scene’s zenith saw up to 500 groups across the island) that made the government nervous. As Herrera explained, ‘They didn’t want to rewrite their own history. They don’t want to say we messed up here.’ The Cuban state, with a gerontocracy still trapped in a paranoid ‘trench mentality’, wasn’t ready to let the musicians take on the social problems themselves.
The authorities, looking to clamp down on the growing hip-hop scene, found their opportunity when Hurricane Charley hit Havana in August 2004, just in time to cancel the rap festival in Alamar the following night. Herrera stressed that the relationship between rap artists and the Ministry of Culture had been ‘working well’ until that point in time. The festival’s cancellation however, ‘severed the progress and momentum’ of Cuba’s hip-hop scene, in what he describes as ‘the beginning of a treacherous agenda with respect to Cuban cultural politics.’
The second catalyst in the declining fortunes of hip-hop was pinpointed by musician and producer Ashlie, from rap duo Tradicion Yoruba, as the rise of the hugely popular Los Aldeanos; they were the first rappers to make entire albums that criticised the government. ‘Rap became known for speaking out and being anti-government,’ he explained. ‘This made it harder for the rest of the rappers to work.’ He compared the group’s refusal to censor what they said in state venues to ‘going to your parents’ house and saying disrespectful things.’
Michael Matos, director of Rotilla festival, said that Los Aldeanos were one reason for the event’s hijack. ‘Los Aldeanos had a crowd of more than 10,000 people who showed up just for them. The authorities are afraid that Rotilla might generate a revolution, a social explosion among the youth.’
However, while there has clearly been a crackdown on rappers’ freedom in recent years, the situation is not black and white, state versus artists. The reality is that artists like Los Aldeanos do not languish behind bars. Their music is freely available, and increasingly vocal. One half of Los Aldeanos, El B, won the Red Bull rap battle in Havana this year, and was allowed to travel to Mexico to compete. The group also travelled with other artists recently to perform in Miami, ‘the cradle of Cuban-American mafia’.
Rappers like Los Aldeanos do, however, have the presence and reach to speak out against the government, while less established groups still appear hemmed in by the institutions of the state. At this year’s 7e Simposio de Hip Hop Cubano, two DJs spun beats against a repetitive background projection that proclaimed the Simposio’s stance against ‘military intervention, environmental contamination, social injustice, violence and discrimination.’ The government-run event, which Herrera described as ‘co-opted’, had none of the heated atmosphere that one would usually expect from a genre that spawns such volatile creativity.
Rapper Soandres ‘Soandry’ del Río, of the group Hermanos de Causa warned me of ‘a spectrum of manipulation and politicisation from the institutional side’ of Cuban rap, and said that going to the Simposio wouldn’t take anyone to the ‘doors of underground Cuban hip-hop’, since more than half of the most talented and popular rappers were considered too politically incorrect to perform there.
When interviewing artists and producers in Havana, we continually came across self-censorship. Our descriptive questions about the Agencia Cubana de Rap, a government body that employs some rappers in return for a measure of creative control, and the limitations for emerging artists, would be answered frankly, but as soon as we asked for an opinion on the relationship between creativity and the state they would look away and avoid answering.
Within this complex blend of censorship and government co-option, it is unclear where Cuban hip-hop is headed. This is especially true given the general uncertainty about the direction of the Cuban state, now under the direction of the ageing Raul Castro, brother of the invalid Fidel. Herrera believes that ‘hip hop culture precludes a very important moment of maturity for Cuban culture’, and expressed his hope that the scene would ‘grow positively’. What is clear, however, is that groups like Los Aldeanos have thrown down a gauntlet to their government, in a challenge that has yet to be answered.
Additional translation: Lauri Saksa
