Cuba - Lonely Planet [43]
Born in the ugly concrete housing projects of Alamar, Havana, Cuban hip-hop, rather like its US counterpart, has gritty and impoverished roots.
First beamed across the nation in the early 1980s when American rap was picked up on homemade rooftop antennae from Miami-based radio stations, the new music quickly gained ground among a population of young urban blacks culturally redefining themselves during the inquietude of the Special Period. By the ’90s groups such as Public Enemy and NWA were de rigueur on the streets of Alamar and by 1995 there was enough hip-hop to throw a festival.
* * *
In 2001 Welsh group the Manic Street Preachers became the first Western rock band to play live in Cuba. After the concert, which took place in Havana’s Karl Marx theater, Castro commented that their music was very loud, but ‘not as loud as war.’
* * *
Tempered by Latin influences and censored by the parameters of strict revolutionary thought, Cuban hip-hop – or reggaetón as locals prefer to call it – has shied away from US stereotypes taking on a progressive flavor all of its own. Instrumentally the music uses batá drums, congas and electric bass, while lyrically the songs tackle important national issues such as sex tourism and the difficulties of the stagnant Cuban economy.
Despite being viewed early on as subversive and antirevolutionary, Cuban hip-hop has gained unlikely support from inside the Cuban government, whose art-conscious legislators consider the music to have played a constructive social role in shaping the future of Cuban youth. Fidel Castro has gone one further, describing hip-hop as ‘the vanguard of the Revolution’ and – allegedly – once tried his hand at rapping at a Havana baseball game.
Today there are upwards of 800 hip-hop groups in Cuba and the Cuban Rap Festival is well into its second decade. The event even has a sponsor, the fledgling Cuban Rap Agency, a government body formed in 2002 to give official sanction to the country’s burgeoning alternative music scene. Groups to look out for include Obsession, 100% Original, Freehole Negro (cofronted by a woman) and Anónimo Consejo, while the best venues are usually the most spontaneous ones.
* * *
NUEVA TROVA – THE SOUNDTRACK OF A REVOLUTION
The 1960s were heady days for radical new forms of musical expression. In the US Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited, in Britain The Beatles concocted Sgt Pepper while, in the Spanish-speaking world, musical activists such as Chilean Víctor Jara and Catalan Joan Manuel Serrat were turning their politically charged poems into passionate protest songs.
Determined to develop their own revolutionary music apart from the capitalist West, the innovative Cubans under the stewardship of Haydee Santamaría, director at the influential Casa de las Américas, came up with nueva trova.
A caustic mix of probing philosophical lyrics and folksy melodic tunes, nueva trova was a direct descendent of pure trova, a bohemian form of guitar music that had originated in the Oriente in the late 19th century.
Post-1959 the genre became increasingly politicized and was taken up by more sophisticated artists such as Manzanillo-born Carlos Puebla, who provided an important bridge between old and new styles with his politically-tinged ode to Che Guevara ‘Hasta Siempre Comandante’ (1965).
Nueva trova came of age in February 1968 at the Primer Encuentro de la Canción Protesta, a concert organized at the Casa de las Américas in Havana and headlined by such rising stars as Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés. In cultural context, it was Cuba’s mini-Woodstock, an event that resounded forcefully among leftists worldwide as a revolutionary alternative to American rock ‘n’ roll.
In December 1972 the nascent nueva trova movement gained official sanction from the Cuban government during a music festival held in the city of Manzanillo to commemorate the 16th anniversary of the Granma landing.
Highly influential throughout the Spanish-speaking world during the ’60s and ’70s, nueva trova has often acted as an inspirational