Global Policy Forum

Eugene Robinson

FUBU-clad and Nike-shod, Isaac Torres and Reynor Hernandez sat at a table in the Las Vegas club, nervously sipping from a bottle of rum as they waited their turn to perform. This dark little nightspot on the fringe of Havana's entertainment district usually offers a chorus-girl floor show to an audience of foreign tourists. But not at the Friday matinee.

The crowd at Las Vegas this Friday was all Cuban, all black, and very youthful, twenties and younger -- except Reynor's mother, Leonor, a doctor, who sat primly in the front row. The men showed up in baggy cargo pants or droopy jeans, worn with NBA basketball jerseys, ribbed white tanks that showed off their muscles, polyester kung-fu shirts covered with tigers and dragons, unblemished sneakers. The women were outfitted in low-rise jeans and tight-fitting tops, with colorful head scarves, lots of bracelets and rings, multiple ear-piercings. Tattoos and dreadlocks were rampant, along with attitude.

Around 6, the lights dimmed and the music started -- not sly, syncopated Latin sounds but hard, pounding hip-hop beats -- and three young black men came forward, a group called 100 Percent Original. They had all the standard moves, the prowling, the scowling, the arm-crossing and the pushing-up, and within minutes of taking the stage the crowd was on its feet, moving to a bass line loud enough to rearrange internal organs. The rappers called out, and the crowd answered back:

"Pa' mis niches!"

"Pa' mis niches!"

"Pa' mis negros!"

"Pa' mis negros!"

"For my niggaz!" they were saying. "For my black people!"

An all-star lineup of rappers followed. Isaac's and Reynor's group, Explosion Suprema, performed its brief set midway through the show, after which Reynor's mother slipped quietly out the door. The finale was a freestyling contest, won by a short, slight teenager who calls himself El Menor ("The Kid"). The sound died and the lights came up promptly at 8.

A dark-skinned young man emerged from the deejay's booth and flashed a dazzling grin -- Pablo Herrera, Cuba's leading hip-hop impresario.

"Did you like the beats?" he asked, fretting that the sound levels might not have been just right. The beats were good, but it was hard to hear past the words:

"In the eyes of the police I'm nothing but a criminal."

"Stop me on the street for no reason. Just to screw me over."

"We're fighting for equality."

"Nigga, nigga, open your eyes!"

"Fight!"

"Criticize!"

"Make a stand!"

These words had been spoken in Cuba, still very much a one-party state, before a fist-pumping crowd of young people who cheered wildly. Even with no direct challenge to the state, no questioning of the fundamental tenets of socialism, the words spoken at Las Vegas that Friday evening sounded like rap music is supposed to sound: armed and dangerous.

Amid all the energy in the club, the electricity, the motion, the color and the noise, there was also the feeling that the matrix of what is possible in this country and what isn't somehow is shifting. "We like to talk about things people don't talk about," Reynor explained later. "Like how when the police see a black man on the street, and especially if he has dreadlocks or something like that, as far as they're concerned he's already a criminal. I write about my life. When I have a problem with my girlfriend, I write it. When I have a problem in the street, I write it. When I have a problem with the police, I write it."

Like this ode to the police: "Alert! Discrimination right here . . . I'm already a criminal to you, simply for being six feet tall or having dark skin . . . You stand there and follow my dark movements everywhere . . . Does the way that I dress bother you that much, [expletive]? . . . The failures of black people are due to the brutality of whites. . ."

He's not alone. All of Cuba's rap stars venture into the same Outer Limits, unexplored for decades: calls for racial solidarity, blasts against discrimination, bitter denunciations of the arbitrary and heavy-handed police, narrative tales of the bizarro-world travails of daily Cuban life. Cuban hip-hop sounds as if it's not really about the music at all, but about the future of the nation.

Pumped and exhausted from the show, Herrera glad-handed his way to the door and pulled up a chair at one of the club's sidewalk tables. He started to talk about his work and his vision, about the "revolution" that Cuban hip-hop is creating, but every few seconds he had to stop and bump fists with well-wishing fans as the crowd filtered out, heading en masse to another spot where the second hip-hop show of the night was about to start.

"You know, most people have in their head an idea of what Cuba should sound like," Herrera said between interruptions, flashing the million-dollar grin once more. "And Cuba right now is none of that."

High Fidelity

It all started, everyone agrees, in Alamar.

Hugging the coastline east of Havana proper, Alamar is a vast reservation of squat Soviet-era apartment blocs, the biggest housing project in Cuba and one of the biggest in the world. Within its dreary sprawl, some 100,000 souls hang laundry from their balconies, suffer with leaky roofs, cultivate warm friendships amid cold surroundings and watch their children play baseball, the national pastime, on piebald fields. Fidel Castro intended Alamar to be a monument to the Cuban revolution. He ended up building the South Bronx, minus the guns.

Alamar is where Isaac and Reynor live. The place is so bleak and isolated that people call it "Siberia," but it does have one amenity that most of metropolitan Havana doesn't: Away from the clutter and congestion of the city, there's decent radio and television reception from Miami. And that is how, in the early 1990s, Alamar's teenagers came to be seduced by messages from the imperialist enemy to the north.

They tuned to Miami radio, and through the static they heard music that took them to a different world -- hip-hop music by N.W.A., Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Eric B. and Rakim. The kids memorized the lyrics, at first with only a vague understanding of what they meant. They discovered "Soul Train" on a Miami television station and began to mimic the rappers' ghetto-fabulous wardrobe. They made cassette tapes of the music they liked and shared them with friends, who shared them with other friends, and soon the tapes spread across Havana and the rest of the country, like Russian samizdat.

Ariel Fernandez, Cuba's 25-year-old Minister of Hip-Hop (his real title is more prosaic, but that's his job), was just a kid then. "I always liked American music, because I could hear and feel the African roots, just like in Cuban music," he recalled, sitting in his boss's office above downtown Havana. "I was 17 or 18 years old, in high school, when I met some friends who liked hip-hop. We listened to the music in our homes. We started going to performances."

The government, though, didn't like what it was hearing one bit. For one thing, rap was an alien art form imported from the United States, laden with undesirable baggage like materialism, misogyny and gun-worshiping violence. For another, the young people of Alamar were walking a dangerous line, particularly in what they were saying. They talked about racism in Cuban society and the oppressiveness of the police, and the stories they told were often about the least attractive aspects of Cuban life. "You have to remember that rap came along at the same time as the Special Period," Fernandez said. "It was a very difficult time for the Cuban revolution. The rappers were expressing their support [for the nation], but they also had to be critical of what was going on."

"The Special Period in a Time of Peace" is the Cuban government's euphemism for the years of woe that have followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Suddenly Cuba's sugar daddy was gone and the U.S. trade embargo, previously a chokehold, became more like a noose. There were sudden and desperate shortages of everything -- food, fuel, electricity, soap, money.

Castro weathered the crisis by making it legal for Cubans to hold and spend U.S. dollars, sanctioning more private enterprise than ever before and building tourism into the nation's biggest earner of hard currency. Things got better. But with the improvement came great dislocation.

The most honored and accomplished pillars of society -- brain surgeons, electrical engineers, renowned scholars -- found themselves struggling to make ends meet on state salaries in Cuban pesos that amount to less than $20 a month. For young people contemplating an uncertain future, street hustling and prostitution began to look like viable career options.

Who rose to become the new elite? The maids, waitresses, doormen and parking lot attendants at the five-star tourist hotels, because foreign tourists tip in precious dollars. Many black Cubans came to feel they were being overlooked for these jobs in favor of whites, and began to say so out loud. This spurred new discussion of racism in Cuban society, which the revolution had greatly lessened but failed to eliminate.

So it turned out that the young rappers of Alamar had a lot to talk about.

"As Fidel tells us, culture is the soul of the people," said Fernandez. "This is a cultural movement that focuses its message on improving the nation's social health. The rappers are not trying to escape from society's problems, they're trying to solve them. Being revolutionary is to recognize things as they are and not be afraid to say it."

No one was more surprised than Fernandez when he got his job. In 1998 he was working at a Havana radio station, trying to persuade the managers to give him a little airtime to start a hip-hop show. They refused. "The management said it was just black music," he said, "and not popular with the listeners." Frustrated, Fernandez finally wrote a manifesto setting out his view that hip-hop was an important cultural phenomenon and that the Cuban state should pay attention. He started showing his essay around, figuring it would just be ignored. But an official of the Hermanos Saiz Association -- the youth-culture wing of the Cuban Communist Party -- offered to publish the piece in a prestigious state-run journal, El Caiman Barbudo.

That article led to more writing opportunities, more chances to preach the hip-hop gospel, and soon another radio station asked him to start a program called "The Rap Corner." He did the show for three years, at the same time organizing and deejaying live rap shows, and in December 2000 he was offered his job with Hermanos Saiz in charge of hip-hop.

Fernandez's rise was evidence of a dramatic shift in how the government chose to deal with the hip-hop movement. In the early days, unsanctioned shows were sometimes raided. In one celebrated incident in Alamar, police tried to shut down a concert and the crowd defiantly formed a shield in front of the rappers, protecting them until the cops retreated. The next day, one of the performers was whisked off the street and tossed in jail overnight. True to the spirit of hip-hop culture, this display of police power served only to give the rapper enhanced credibility on the street -- and a new story to put into rhyme.

The key moment came in the spring of 1999, and like many key moments in Castro's Cuba it involved a speech: Minister of Culture Abel Prieto declared that hip-hop would receive state support as "an authentic expression of Cuban culture." Prieto is considered one of the most forward-thinking officials in the Cuban hierarchy, but given Castro's reputation as a micromanager it is hard to imagine such a switch without his approval in advance. Most people believe he instigated it.

It was the classic calculation that Lyndon B. Johnson once made (in cruder terms) about J. Edgar Hoover and urination: Better inside the tent aiming out, than outside the tent aiming in.

Street Cred From America

One recent Friday night, as a crowd walked from Las Vegas to the rec center, where the second hip-hop show of the night was about to start, in the middle of the parade was a strikingly tall, chestnut-skinned, 51-year-old woman who spoke Spanish with an American accent: Nehanda Abiodun, political exile, fugitive from American justice and earth mother to the Havana hip-hop scene.

A black revolutionary who took up arms against the state, Abiodun fled here 13 years ago with the FBI in full pursuit. She is wanted on felony charges stemming from a series of armored car robberies in the New York area, in which a security guard and two police officers were killed.

"These are my children," Abiodun says of the young people around her, and indeed the hip-hoppers treat her like an unnaturally hip parent -- a mom who wears dreadlocks, helps you pick out a new African name, listens to your problems with actual interest and likes to dance all night. Oh, and is on the lam. She has mediated between the rappers and the cultural authorities, using her credibility as a dedicated revolutionary on their behalf. She argued that an authentic form of Cuban hip-hop, shorn of negative American influences, ultimately will serve the Cuban revolution by challenging it to address problems it has long ignored.

In an effort to guide the Cuban movement, Abiodun encouraged bringing only politically "conscious" rappers -- not the bling-bling, mo'-money crowd -- from the United States to what has become a yearly rap festival in Alamar. She encouraged the involvement of U.S. groups, like the Black August Collective and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, that advocate radical change and hold views that the Cuban state sees as supportive.

Recently she organized a pilgrimage to New York for nine Cuban rappers. The duo Anónimo Consejo ("Anonymous Advice") went on the trip and returned with respect bordering on reverence for the style, authenticity and power of American hip-hop, but not the content. Like many Cuban rappers, they began by imitating the guns-and-ho's lyrics of American rap, but moved to social themes -- with plenty of encouragement from authority figures like Abiodun, Ariel Fernandez and Pablo Herrera.

"We talk about racism and black pride, and we tell people not to use drugs, not to use crack cocaine," said Yosmel Sarrias, at 27 practically an elder statesman on the hip-hop scene. "We try to uphold the principle that man is more valuable than money."

Cuban hip-hop is more than music, "it is a movement," Abiodun said firmly. She wants her young rappers to continue to pose sharp and inconvenient questions, but she wants them to do so "within the context of the Cuban revolution."

After hip-hop's Cuban authenticity was declared by Prieto, things began to change. Officials purchased a sound system that rap groups could use at their concerts (no group has enough money yet to buy its own). The state began giving funds and other support to the Alamar festival. Clubs and other venues became available for regularly scheduled hip-hop performances.

At the same time, officials sought to establish a perimeter. Sanctioned performances only take place one or two days a week, and they start and finish very early in the evening. No one will say so, but it would seem that the government does not want large crowds of young black people whooping it up late at night.

Recent history would suggest this is like trying to hold back the sea. Hip-hop is a powerful thing, the most potent force in popular music worldwide over the past two decades. It spreads like fire and it's accessible to anyone, as observer or participant. To express oneself eloquently in the hip-hop idiom does require skills, but not years of practicing scales and finger exercises. You need only a microphone, something to say and somebody to listen.

The show at the rec center that night was scheduled to be hosted by a popular husband-wife duo called Obsesión, who had also gone on the trip to New York. "This is probably the first time you'll see a five-months-pregnant rapper," Abiodun said as we walked in.

Very sadly, the sight went unseen: Earlier that day, Magia Lopez had miscarried. Her husband Alexey Rodriguez bravely went on with the show, emceeing and even performing, his eyes glistening and his smile the saddest you'd ever seen.

At one point, Abiodun took the stage, announced what had happened and asked for a moment of silence. In a courtyard so jammed with party-hearty teenagers that you could barely move, not a sound was heard. All night long, Rodriguez couldn't turn around before someone -- a performer, a fan -- embraced him in a long, soulful hug.

You could almost convince yourself that Cuba had been successful in getting its hip-hop culture to reject the mindless materialism of American rap for something more communitarian, even spiritual. Yet there in the hallway stood one Papo Record, a popular rapper, dressed all in white, with a chunky gold cross on a thick chain around his neck, a big gold watch on his wrist and six rings on his ten fingers. He was wearing his visor both upside-down and backward, and he had his name tattooed in big Gothic-style letters down his arm. He talked excitedly about an upcoming concert, which he predicted would be huge, and about his goals, which are to become more famous and get a proper recording contract.

Fernandez was the evening's deejay. Almost all the rappers who performed declaimed long and loud against racism and privation and especially the police, the ever-present police. But they also rapped in support of jailed U.S. protest icon Mumia Abu Jamal and against the U.S. trade embargo of Cuba, and kept the criticism within the bounds set by the revolution. One performer even used Castro's own words -- from another context -- to slam his own police.

"Sometimes," said one rapper, "you have to say things in camouflage."

Like Cubans in general, the rappers know where the uncrossable lines are. Most of them probably don't want to say "Down with Fidel," but even if they did they surely wouldn't -- that would be way beyond the pale. Likewise, most rappers probably don't want to overthrow the whole socialist order, which is all they have known, but if they did they'd keep that sentiment to themselves.

But they do continue to make insistent and inconvenient demands for change. And that poses the question: If you let people make so many demands, at some point don't you have to show them some results?

The Impresario

So far, Cuban hip-hop has virtually no presence on the international music scene. The only group that has broken through is a quartet called Orishas, and it had to move to Paris to record its breakout album, "A Lo Cubano." Aside from that, the only product on the record-store shelves -- and it's very hard to find -- is a sampler album put together by Herrera and Fernandez called "Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars, Vol. 1." Herrera hopes to come out with Vol. 2 sometime this year.

Herrera is the Russell Simmons, P. Diddy and Timbaland of Cuban hip-hop rolled into one, a natural linguist with a golden ear for slang, rhymes and beats. He speaks perfect English and to meet him you'd swear he was from the States, but he lives simply in a house in the Santos Suarez district of Havana. He also works there, which means that the whole neighborhood gets to hear the progress of what he calls his "first symphony," a Fatboy Slim-like concoction brewed at his mixing board. It is one of a half-dozen current projects. He's determined to put Cuban hip-hop on the map.

Herrera said that since he grew up in socialism, he doesn't have, or want to have, "the mind-set that you need for marketing." But he does have a clear idea of where he wants to take the music. So much of Spanish-language rap, he notes, is lame. Even in its infancy, Cuban hip-hop is more musical, more literate, ultimately more powerful.

There are two potential barriers, though, aside from any business difficulties the U.S. embargo may cause. For one thing, the lyrics are so specific to their time and place, using arcane Havana slang, that many potential fans in the United States and elsewhere would be lost even if they were fluent in Spanish. For another, the evidence suggests that hip-hop fans like hearing tales about fast cars, faster women and $200-a-bottle champagne. Cuban rap offers none of that.

What it does offer is a challenge -- to its fans, and to Cuban officialdom.

"I see this as a revolution that comes from the bottom up," Herrera said. Not the kind where you "get yourself a gun and go up into the mountains." A revolution of sharp observation, and dark poetry, and tough questions that hang in the humid Havana air.

Answers are still pending. Meanwhile, how long will Cuban rappers be able to keep to this fine line they're walking? Constantly they are pulled in two directions, toward wholesale embrace of mindless Western materialism on the one hand and increasing stridency against state authority on the other. Either would be considered unacceptable, and neither is a conscious goal. Yet isn't it the nature of hip-hop to be rude and defiant, to shock with its candor, to say things that aren't supposed to be said? Isn't hip-hop supposed to spin out of control?

The godfather of Cuban hip-hop shrugs.

"Hey, the truth is that we're going to have casualties of war," he says. "Like always."

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.