The Green Screen

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/0...index.html

By Morgan Neill
CNN
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HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) -- Working on an old computer with a burned-out monitor, Cuban rapper Aldo Rodriguez painstakingly lays the tracks for his next song.

Sitting shirtless on the edge of his bed, tattoos up and down both arms, the 23-year-old says he's not afraid to speak his mind in the communist country run by Fidel Castro for decades. His lyrics are punchy and edgy, tackling issues that the state would prefer not to be aired.

"I've pointed out the things that seem wrong to me, and the people like it," he says. "They like to hear it because they identify with what they hear in the songs.

"It's not anything bad. It's just the truth, and the people aren't used to hearing it." (Watch a Cuban rapper speak his mind Video)

His group -- Los Aldeanos, or "The Villagers" -- is one of Cuba's best-known underground hip-hop acts. It's earned credibility with lyrics that condemn racism, police harassment, prostitution and inequality -- criticisms often heard in Cuba's streets, but controlled by the state in the media.

For example, in their song "Ya Nos Cansamos," roughly translated "We're Fed Up," you'll hear these lines:

"They're always saying we're all equal
But you tell me if the doorways are crumbling in the generals' houses.
Of course all the hospitals in Cuba are free
But who do they treat better, the officers, or me?"

Rap has a small but devoted following in Cuba. But driving through Alamar, the neighborhood outside Havana thought of as the birthplace of Cuban rap, it's reggaeton, not rap, that's blaring from the dilapidated apartments these days.

Reggaeton is a danceable mix of rap and reggae. Its thumping, bass-heavy rhythms and often sexually explicit lyrics prove an irresistible combination in Cuba, where dancing sometimes seems the national pastime.

But among young men in particular, rap's aggressive stance has a unique appeal: No other form of music takes on the country's problems so directly. (Watch a Cuban rapper bust a funky beat at a concert Video)

In an effort to exert its influence over rap, the Cuban government created the Cuban Rap Agency in 2002. The agency promotes about a dozen rappers and produces their albums, but you won't find government critics like Rodriguez on their roster. These underground rappers say they won't be silenced or co-opted by the government.

So, they work out of their homes and distribute their music by hand on homemade CD's copied over and over again.
Rap organizer: State shouldn't meddle with rap

Last year, the nation's Rap Festival was canceled amid uncertainty surrounding Castro's health. The Cuban Rap Agency began co-sponsoring the event in 2002 to the angst of many.

Rodolfo Rensoli organized the rap festival before the state stepped in. He says government limitations have made groups and their fans more rebellious.

"Since the state took over managing the festival, brothers are coming out carrying signs calling for 'social justice' and other demands," he says.

He says it would be a major mistake to try to set limits on the rappers: "Censor them or cut them out, intimidate them or limit the expression of these kids -- that would be horrible."

CNN asked to speak with the director of the Cuban Rap Agency, but was told there is no director of the agency currently. (In fact, it's difficult to get anyone in the government to comment about rap.)

As for Rodriguez, he says he just wants to rap for himself. "I'm one of those who thinks that once you're part of a business -- not just in Cuba, but anywhere in the world -- they make you a slave."

Speaking from the house he shares with his mother and siblings, he assures us he's not opposed to the government, but he won't keep quiet about injustices he sees.

"I'm not against the commandant, or Raul [Castro, in charge since his brother's illness], or any of those people," he says, "I'm young and I've got a right to express myself. Like all the young people in the world, I see something wrong, and I point it out."

http://soc.qc.cuny.edu/Staff/fernandes_f...merism.pdf

Todos están perdidas, por eso están
a expensas a contraer el sida,
pero andar por la calle para ellas es lo primero.
Pero andan luchando brother,
andan con extranjeros, esa es la causa fundamental,
ofreciendo tu cuerpo para en la vida triunfar.
Por eso digo esto y de veras la sorprende
entregarse por dinero,
son cosas que no entiendo.

[They are all lost, this is why they are at
risk of contracting AIDS,
but walking the street is the most
important thing for them.
They go on hustling, brother,
going with foreigners, this is the fundamental cause,
offering up your body to triumph in life.
That is why I say this, and really it is
surprising to surrender for money,
these are things that I don’t understand.]

The Genesis of Cuban Rap
Cuban hip-hop is shaped by a highly specific set of social and economic
conditions, including the demographic restructuring of the urban metropolis
and increasing racial inequalities in the current period of crisis. For the first five
years of its evolution in Cuba up to 1992, hip-hop culture was produced and
consumed within the specific social context of the local community or neigh-
bourhood. At parties people would play music from compact discs that had
been brought from the US, or music recorded from Miami radio, and they would
pass on recorded cassettes from hand to hand. There would be breakdancing
competitions and people would rhyme in private houses, on the streets or in
parks. The period from 1995 to the present has involved the institutionalization
and commercialization of Cuban hip-hop culture in several different ways. As
the art form has developed its own Cuban style, as it has become distinctly more
complex, and as it has begun to garner large levels of support among Cuban

Consumerism and Socialism in Cuban Rap

youth, rap music has simultaneously, and on different levels, become inter-
twined with Cuban state institutions, transnational record companies, and
hip-hop movements in the US. This has produced various factions, or blocs,
within Cuban rap, which are identified with the broader national and transna-
tional forces. From certain social, historical and institutional locations emerge the
commitments and solidarities that are crucial to the articulation of political
demands, the reinvention of utopias and the framing of desire within Cuban rap.
Rap music and hip-hop culture grew rapidly in relocative housing projects
such as Alamar and other areas of high-density housing, occupied by mainly
black, working-class communities such as Old Havana, Central Havana, Sancto
Suárez and Playa. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, black and working-
class communities in Cuba were relatively protected from late capitalist pro-
cesses of economic restructuring. However, the crisis of the special period forced
the Cuban government to adopt policies of austerity in order to increase the
competitiveness of the Cuban economy in the global economy. Although policies
of austerity and restructuring have affected Cuban society as a whole, Alejandro
de la Fuente argues that there have also been various racially differentiated
effects.

The legalization of dollars has divided Cuban society according to those
who have access to dollars and those who do not. Family remittances are the
most important source of hard currency for most Cubans, and since the majority
of Cubans in the diaspora tend to be white, it is white Cuban families who
benefit most from remittances.

In the tourism sector, another area where
Cubans are able to earn in hard currency, blacks have tended to be excluded on
the grounds that they do not have the education or proper appearance and attire
to interact with tourists.

Other options of survival in the special period, such as
opening paladares, or family-run restaurants, are also less available to blacks who
tend to be based in more densely populated housing and do not have the space
to carry out entrepreneurial activities.

De la Fuente also argues that racial
prejudice has become increasingly visible and acceptable in the special period.

Cuban hip-hop emerged as a local response to experiences of displacement
and relocation, as well as impoverishment and discrimination. However, it has
grown and developed with the support of national and transnational institutions
with different, often contradictory agendas. The main form of institutional
support for Cuban rap comes from the Asociación Hermanos Saiz (Brothers Saiz
Organization, AHS), the youth cultural wing of the official mass organization of
Cuban youth, Unión de Jóvenes Cubano (Union of Cuban Youth, UJC). But North
American rap music is the original source of Cuban rap, and from the early days
underground Cuban rappers have maintained close ties with their ‘conscious’
and ‘underground’ counterparts in the United States. While the early waves of
hip-hop music to come to Cuba were more commercial, by the time of the first
rap festival in 1995 Cubans were hearing African-American ‘conscious’ rappers
such as Paris, then Common Sense, Mos Def and Talib Kweli. Like the Black
Power activists who visited Cuba throughout the 1960s and 1970s, from Stokely
Carmichael through to Angela Davis and Assata Shakur, who is currently in
exile in Cuba, Paris and Talib Kweli spoke a language of black militancy that
was appealing to Afro-Cuban youth.

Another avenue of transnational participation in Cuban hip-hop is the global
market, via transnational record companies. While hip-hop in the United States
started as an urban underground movement, it is now a major commercial

product, distributed by five of the largest multinational music labels including
Universal, Sony, BMG, EMI and WEA.

Records are judged by their Sound-Scan
numbers, or the number of records they sell in the first week.

In the Cuban
context the multinational labels, with their promises of videos, records and large
contracts, are tempting to Cuban rappers whose resources are scarce. In 1996,
Law 51, section 61 permitted foreign record companies to come to Cuba under
the representation of an empresa or state-owned enterprise, and sign deals with
Cuban artists. At times signing a deal may mean leaving the country, such as
happened with the Cuban rap group Orishas, who signed with the transnational
record company EMI and currently reside in France.
Cuban rap has been influenced by these diverse networks of African-Ameri-
can ‘conscious’ rap and transnational record companies. In some ways, the
intervention of various transnational networks into Cuban rap has polarized the
movement: Fernández argues that the movement of Cuban hip-hop is divided
by a major polemic between those who see themselves as ‘underground’ and
those who see themselves as ‘commercial’.

He describes ‘underground’ groups
as having two main qualities: first, ‘they maintain an orthodox and radical stance
along the lines of the origins of the genre and they distance themselves from
whatever possibility of fusion for its commercialization’; and second, ‘they focus
much more on an integration of politically committed lyrics with the social
context’.

Commercial groups are those who, ‘incorporate popular Cuban
rhythms in order to be more accepted, achieve authenticity, and become com-
mercially viable’.

In the context of Cuba, commercial rap groups are defined
somewhat by their ability to reach larger audiences. While most ‘underground’
rap music is limited to small pen˜as and shows, the biggest gathering being the
annual rap festival attended by up to 5000 youth in the large stadium at Alamar,
a commercial group such as Orishas have reached the broader Cuban public,
and the sounds of their latest record entitled A Lo Cubano can be heard in discos,
private homes and parties, as well as blaring from cars and on the street.
Categories of ‘underground’ and ‘commercial’ have some resonance in the
context of Cuba because they reflect real contests over access to resources and
diverging ideological positions. For some Cuban rap groups who self-identify as
‘underground’, there is hostility towards those groups who attract foreign
funding and attention because they are willing to dilute their political stance. In
their song El Barco (The Boat), Los Paisanos criticize the more commercial
rappers who are funded because they have compromised their politics and
dedication to the purity of rap: ‘those without shame who say they are rappers,
but who are patronized because of their mixture of rhythm’. The rapper vents
his anger against those who choose the commercial path: ‘I shoot words at them,
I don’t kill them, but I detest them and I don’t silence the truth, but I bring it
to the text.’ The group Los Paisanos, which started off with three members, lost
one member who left the group for a foreign deal to make more commercial-
sounding rap mixed with salsa, forsaking both the group and his participation
in the hip-hop movement.
But even though some Cuban rappers may self-identify as ‘underground’ or
‘commercial’, these labels cannot be applied unproblematically in the Cuban
context. While the distinction between ‘underground’ and ‘commercial’ in the
US derives from a perception of authenticity and commercial success as dia-
metric opposites, Cuban cultural producers are often attributed an automatic

Consumerism and Socialism in Cuban Rap

authenticity or ‘underground’ status by their American counterparts, due to
historic associations of socialist Cuba with a revolutionary nationalist politics. At
times, Cuban rappers themselves acknowledge that the distinction is somewhat
less relevant in Cuba than in the US. In a song called ‘I don’t criticize what is
commercial’, rapper Papo Record suggests that underground and commercial
are all the same in Cuba because there is no market. The label of ‘commercial’
is also somewhat of a misnomer because not all groups that mix salsa and other
instrumental forms with rap are funded by record companies; some just enjoy
those styles. Despite the problems associated with applying the labels of ‘under-
ground’ and ‘commercial’ in the context of Cuba, it remains that some rappers
do identify with these. In the following sections, I suggest that Cuban rap is
shaped by the struggle between these different tendencies within the movement,
although, as argued in the last section of the article, the boundaries between
them remain permeable.