Abstract
A study of the symbols employed by the Cuban underground hip-hop movement based on ethnographic data gathered in Havana from 1998 to 2006 situates the movement as one of a number of transnational Afro-diasporic cultural movements for social equality. Afro-Cuban young people’s commitment to socially conscious hip-hop links them to a larger history of African and Afro-diasporic activism in the arts.
Un estudio de los símbolos utilizados por el movimiento underground del hip-hop cubano, basado en datos recolectados en la Habana de 1998 a 2006, sitúa dicho movimiento dentro de una serie de corrientes culturales que, producidas por la diáspora africana transnacional, se desenvuelven a favor de la igualdad social. La entrega de la juventud afrocubana a la conciencia social del hip-hop se articula a una historia más amplia de activismo africano y la diaspora africana en las artes.
Over the past decade the Cuban underground hip-hop movement has attracted significant academic and media interest (Perry, 2004; West-Durán, 2004; Joffe, 2005; Baker, 2005; 2011; Fernandes, 2006) because of its public criticism of the social difficulties that many Cubans face. The public presence of critical artists contradicts the depiction of Cuba as a repressive state, and their invocation of transnational black solidarity defies the invisibility of Afro-Latinos throughout the region (Andrews, 2004). The movement’s racialized critique challenges the hegemonic ideology representing racism as an individual issue rather than a systemic, culturally and materially based one. It also challenges the notion that Cuban society has eliminated racism. Underground hip-hoppers link racialized oppression to the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and rampant global capitalism. Therefore they pursue a cultural intervention against oppression that they believe is rooted in ideology and is not easily resolved by redistributive policies.
While much of the published work on the movement has noted the racialized and economically turbulent context in which it emerged, very little research has linked it to transnational black cultural movements that challenge the failure of Western modernity to recognize the humanity of black people. The racial oppression blacks face is one indication that the equality, prosperity, and freedom promised by Western modernity and promoted by utopian capitalist, socialist, and democratic discourses are a myth (Jameson, 1991; Gilroy, 1993).
The underground hip-hop movement is a manifestation of what Paul Gilroy (1993) calls an Afro-descendent counterculture of modernity. A product of what Cedric Robinson (2000) has identified as the black radical tradition, this counterculture is a reaction to the profound ideological contradictions of Western modernity, in which egalitarian ideologies coexist with Western colonialism, slavery, material inequality, and racism (Ferguson, 2004; Robinson, 2000; Quijano, 2000; Gilroy, 1993). In the case of contemporary Cuba, the contradiction is the failure of Cuban socialism to protect the Afro-descendent population during the economic downturn of the 1990s. As Cuba was reintegrated into the world capitalist system through economic liberalization, there was a reemergence of racially based material inequality. The Afro-descendent challenge to modernity is a struggle over cultural hegemony that is designed to alter society (Hall, 2008: 287), and its vision of the new society draws upon African worldviews. This counterculture is a transnational conversation with African and Afro-descendent populations throughout the Americas and Africa that is based on recent and distant memories of Africa, slavery, racialized economic oppression, and material inequality (Gilroy, 1993; Robinson, 2000).
In this essay I focus on the way the symbols utilized by hip-hop movement artists have helped to educate “the masses” about their history and their current global and local situation. Their style of dress and the images they use on CD covers, in videos, and in graffiti offer an anticapitalist and anticolonial critique that centers on consciousness raising as a tool for understanding the present and envisioning liberation (Gilroy, 1993; Davis, 1998; Rose, 1994). They have also contributed to the reemergence of black identity politics in Cuba, helping Afro-Cubans to name the kinds of oppression that they face.
The existing literature on the underground movement has not analyzed its explicitly anticapitalist and anticolonial discourse (Perry, 2004; West-Durán, 2004; Joffe, 2005; Baker, 2005; Fernandes, 2006). I start from the observation that what is called music or visual or performance “art” in Western societies is a central method for community organizing and political and social critique in West African traditions (Rose, 1994; Davis, 1998; Miller and Bassey, 2009). I will show how underground hip-hoppers use symbols to convey political ideologies, including a multifaceted black identity, in continuous conversation with their African and Afro-descendent counterparts throughout the Americas and Africa about the path to black liberation. I draw from ethnographic data collected in Havana between 1998 and 2006 and, in particular, from interviews with 20 hip-hop artists and 10 state officials affiliated with the movement between 2004 and 2006.
Art, Aesthetics, and Transnational Countercultures of Modernity
Gilroy (1993) has explored black artists’ use of music corporations to disseminate their music and their political messages. He argues that the sleeves of 1960s and 1970s records convey blackness as an antiracist political identity by displaying African and other black images. He considers this an example of the way in which black music cultures reach beyond national boundaries to serve as an alternative, black public sphere. This sphere is a space in which people of African descent can organize to challenge social exclusion and racial violence (Black Public Sphere Collective, 1995). It is a space characterized by critical practice and visionary politics. In contrast to the academic journals, coffee shops, and other spaces typically dominated by the bourgeois elite, it is readily accessed by the otherwise excluded. Its music, radio shows, churches, and street corners create a “horizon of generosity” (Black Public Sphere Collective, 1995) that offers the excluded an opportunity to address their needs in a democratic space.
Black identities and liberation ideologies are transmitted through music and through the images that accompany recordings and appear on T-shirts and in graffiti. These images are tools for facilitating identity formation (Gilroy, 1993). Using the educational and affective codes of images, artists explicitly and implicitly target their art to members of the African diaspora. Gilroy argues that black music deals with horrific realities while envisioning the sublime. He shows that capitalism has created a situation in which Afro-descendent populations born into Western democracies are denied the benefits of Western citizenship by being defined as non-Western. Black music, he says, challenges this reality. Gilroy is silent about Afro-Latino history, but his argument applies to both the Americas.
The ideological currents of the African diaspora in the Americas were influenced by West African culture until the early 1900s (Scott, 2000), and voluntary immigration continues to this day. For example, well into the mid-1900s there were many Cubans and Brazilians who were African and who helped to maintain a direct cultural line to the continent for the descendents they encountered in the Americas and told their own stories of slavery well into the twentieth century (Barnet, 1968; Cabrera, 1995). Afro-Cubans and Afro-Brazilians practice West African religious traditions that have remained distinct from Catholicism and other Western religious traditions. It is in this way that participants in the African diaspora in the Americas still hold African worldviews that affect their cultural identities. An ideological feedback loop between the Americas and West Africa continues into the present, and most of this ideological exchange occurs in the arts (Robinson, 2000; Cabrera, 1995; Miller and Bassey, 2009).
Counterculture or Consumer Culture?
Sujatha Fernandes (2006) argues that the underground hip-hop movement is not really a movement but largely a product of the desire of Cuban youth to participate in and profit from a globalized U.S. consumer culture. In contrast, Alan West-Durán (2004: 16) argues that the movement is a form of protest in which hip-hop artists, marginal actors in Cuban society who “were themselves those demoralized, disorganized elements of society at one point, or still live among those marginalized sectors where this demoralization constantly surrounds them . . . are using rap as a form of social pleasure and action for the expansion of civil society.” Pacini-Hernandez and Garofalo (2004) consider the movement a continuation of Cuba’s post-1959 radical music cultures, specifically Nueva Trova. Along with Robin Moore (2006), they link the emergence of Nueva Trova to the institutionalization of the cultural sphere by Cuba’s new “protest state.” The Cuban state’s investment in the movement has been presented as an effort by the state to co-opt and appropriate hip-hop as a means of stifling the social critique that is part of it (Baker, 2005).
Geoff Baker (2005) challenges both the reduction of the movement to a commercialized form of black music and the characterization of hip-hoppers as demoralized and marginalized actors. Much of his assessment of the movement resonates with my own research. The underground hip-hop movement emerged from a conscious decision to use hip-hop as a medium for social critique. As Baker (2005: 399) puts it, “In Cuba, the nationalization of protest music has not entailed the purging of resistant elements, but instead the highlighting and exploiting of facets that correlate to the ideology of what may be considered a ‘protest state.’” He argues that the Cuban rappers and state representatives draw on a “shared rhetoric of revolution and resistance to U.S. hegemony.” Baker (2011) mentions the history of the intellectual exchange between Afro-Cubans and Black Americans and gives attention to some of the discourses circulating within the movement. However, his focus is primarily on U.S.-Cuban relations and does not situate Cuban hip-hop discourses in their regional context. The “protest state” has institutionalized a hybrid discourse combining a Eurocentric worldview drawn from socialism and elements of non-European countercultural discourses. This discourse also converges in the Americas with the black radical tradition, which draws primarily on African epistemologies and a collective memory of colonial exploitation. Given the fact that the Cuban Revolution is anticapitalist, anticolonialist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist, the discourse of the black counterculture is largely compatible with that of the state. It differs, however, in its African worldviews.
The process of socializing culture has involved political struggle among artists, intellectuals, the state, and politicians within it about the limits of freedom of speech (Moore, 2006; Camnitzer, 2003; Craven, 2002; Chanan, 1985). One point that has emerged from this struggle is that art should serve the interests and needs of the Cuban people. This perspective is also compatible with West African traditions, in which the arts are a key part of social and religious life. As a result, what its founders called “underground hip-hop” emerged, with state support, as a utopian social movement that challenged social and economic oppression through grassroots-level consciousness raising, community activism, and an anticapitalist critique. Because black Cubans live in a highly racialized society in which the majority of the population holds negative views about Afro-Cuban culture, Cuba’s black and mulatto youth identify with the socially conscious critiques of poor, urban black U.S. youth (de la Fuente, 2001: 322–323).
Transmitting Blackness
The underground hip-hop movement emerged in the 1990s with the legitimacy crisis of the Cuban state, as generational pressures for social change increased and the loss of Soviet-based economic stability resulted in the economic downturn called “the Special Period” (Perry, 2004; Fernandes, 2006; Baker, 2011). The downturn affected black Cubans the most (de la Fuente, 2001; Perry, 2004; Fernandes, 2006). They were the first cut from jobs and the least likely to be hired in the lucrative foreign-currency-driven tourist industry. For the first time in decades they could not depend on merit pay raises and experienced sharper declines in their standard of living than their white counterparts.
At the same time, as Cuba began receiving radio signals and TV images from Miami, Cuban youth of African descent were fascinated by hip-hop and requested recordings of hip-hop music videos and tapes from tourists. Through African-American intellectual and cultural exchanges in this period black Cuban youth became drawn to U.S. socially conscious hip-hop as a critical art form that they could cultivate in the Cuban context (Herrera, 1990). They rejected commercialized forms of hip-hop as an example of capitalism’s perversion of socially productive creative energies for the sake of profit.
The aesthetic form and content of socially conscious hip-hop were compatible with the traditions of Cuba’s radical art movements and the ideological interests of the state (Pacini-Hernandez and Garofalo, 2004; Baker, 2005). During the early years of the movement, people lumped it with Nueva Trova, a musical form that also had an antiracist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist bent. In 2005 hip-hoppers produced a “Cuban Underground Hip-Hop Declaration” at the First International Hip-Hop Symposium in Havana. Like their Nueva Trova counterparts of the 1960s, the artists argued that music and song should be located within community activism. They rejected art in its commercialized form, seeing music as a tool for community empowerment. For these critical artists, songs were means to challenge the problems that society faced. However, for many artists hip-hop, in contrast to Nueva Trova, had an “underground” feel to it. These artists refused incorporation if it would require changing the socially conscious message of their music. They used the term “underground” to distinguish their work from mainstream forms of hip-hop such as gangsta rap and reggaeton. The anticapitalist and socially critical orientation of the music does not lend itself to co-optation by profit-driven music corporations that market whatever sells, even if it is socially toxic, or to the ideological interests of a market dominated by the Cuban state. In this sense, most socially conscious or underground hip-hop exists outside of the hegemonic centers of media production and dissemination.
The U.S. underground hip-hop movement had its origins in New York City in the 1970s, in the midst of an economic collapse that demonstrated the inability of capitalism and the 1960s movements to provide the socioeconomic benefits associated with the American dream. Through hip-hop, new generations of critical youth have been able to address many of the social issues raised by the 1960s generation without suffering the institutional backlash that those movements experienced (Kitwana, 2003). Cuba’s 1990s hip-hop generation had much in common with its U.S. counterparts of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1990s many underground hip-hop artists shared concerns with their black American urban working-class counterparts: securing opportunities for themselves and their families and addressing the economic needs of their communities. Cuban artists were also concerned about the economic cycles of boom and bust that disproportionately affected people of African descent. They saw hip-hop as a way to challenge and change the ideologies that shaped their realities and to help others to feel where they were “coming from” in their lyrical analysis of their lived experiences. Pasita, of the underground hip-hop group Las Krudas, said, “We are not talking about something new, but it’s something that people have forgotten, or are kind of aware of but forget, or things that make people think ‘I have heard this somewhere before. But I don’t remember where I heard it.’” The engagement of memory and structures of feeling as a means to maintain a collective consciousness and to spur individual and collective change is a key aspect of the diaspora’s transnational circuit of knowledge and activism (Robinson, 2000).
When the first hip-hop videos and songs began arriving in Havana during the Special Period, most Cuban listeners did not know English. The artists I interviewed commented that they related to the music because there was something that resonated with them in the sound. Also, the urban and rural landscapes portrayed in the videos reminded them of their own environments in Cuba. Cuban young people felt that the artists looked like them, moved like them, and sounded like them. After a while, they wanted to make their own contribution to hip-hop culture and began to study hip-hop in a serious way. DJ D’Boys (interview, 2005) explained:
Afterwards, we were looking for more information, because we knew that there had to be more information. There was something bigger about this culture. And there we discovered it, you understand me, that there were four elements of the culture, and what their names were. We already knew how to break-dance, they are called B-Boy, the one who sings, they call MC, the one who scratches they call DJ, and we discovered the element of graffiti from a movie called Wildstyle.
During the 1980s Cuban youth were imitating hip-hop, but eventually they learned about the form and structure of socially conscious hip-hop and came to understand it as a culture. The first generation of Cuban underground hip-hop artists emerged in the mid-1990s, at the height of the Special Period, and had a huge impact locally and nationally.
The movement’s cofounder Rodolfo Rensoli (interview, 2005) reflected on his experience of organizing the first hip-hop festival as follows:
When I was doing the first rap festival, suddenly it dawned on me that most of us organizing it happened to be black, a friend and I, and I approached Miguel Matamoros, who is one of two brothers who had the idea of doing the festival, and he said to me: “Listen . . . they are yelling below ‘Long live the blackies!’” Here they call blacks “blackies” [burnt ones]. And I stayed right there and saw it as very dangerous, because I was accustomed to participating in mixed environments with blacks [and other races] and I had no awareness of how many of the large masses of blacks who felt very marginalized and had found a place of free expression. In addition, there were also whites there, because you know that here things have been mixed more than in other places. One doesn’t realize that with so much uprooting things were so socially divided. But suddenly I realized that, yes, I am giving opportunities to many black youth who had no other spaces where they could speak to their own interests, about their own perspectives, and with a high culture and high lyricism. And there I went because I was always aware of the problem from my father, my mother, and the experiences I had as a child.
For many black youth hip-hop offered a communicative structure for the public articulation of forgotten residual discourses—discourses that were invoked symbolically through hip-hop beats and images. Rensoli was surprised that almost all of the festival attendees were Afro-descendent. Because of the state’s imposition of a raceless discourse and forcible integration of all social spaces, many black Cubans had grown up without a racial identity. Public discussions of racism were discouraged, and those who talked about racism in public were seen as potentially counterrevolutionary (de la Fuente, 2001; Helg, 1995). That the state did not see race seems to have meant that the state did not see black people. Blacks were not included in history courses and in the national media. Many black Cubans who had received at least a partial secondary education after the revolution grew up without knowing about the social, political, and cultural contributions of Africans and black Cubans to the nation, and those who did not attend university remained largely ignorant of these contributions.
At the same time, many Cubans had developed a racialized consciousness at home, where parents passed on stories about blacks in Cuban history and reminded their children to watch out for racism and self-hatred. Racist discourses continued informally and subtly among Cubans and emerged in public during the economic downturn. Black parents taught their children that their dark skin and African hair were beautiful. They taught them to be wary of people who tried to tell them that they were uncivilized or backward because of their physical appearance. The new hip-hoppers incorporated this information into their music, and by doing so they spurred the (re)emergence of a public black consciousness and activism among black and mulatto youth.
Yompi, from the hip-hop group the Junior Clan, expressed the following thoughts about the movement in a 2005 interview:
OK, it’s said like this. There is a spoken-word [poem] that says it like this: “Hip-hop is who I am. The universal voice reclaiming a better world. It is the common feeling and a reflection of the youth from the ‘hood. The hope of the poor, the valiant, and the rebellious invoking their freedom. The black [person is] respected, the peace, the unity, the enemy of war. Hip-hop I am, a symbol of the resistance in order to maintain a clear consciousness. And asking words, what are you thinking about this? . . . Don’t you see that the world is boiling, from the bad and the worst? And the solution is in ourselves, changing this bad way of thinking, of acting.”
Yompi is dark-skinned (he describes his skin as “ebony”) and has shoulder-length dreadlocks. He said that he had experienced a lot of racism, but before hip-hop he could not understand what was happening to him; he had just felt a general malaise. With hip-hop he was able to gain a better sense of himself, to understand what was depressing him, and to develop a purpose in life—to be successful as a black man and to support Cuban youth by helping them to understand the racial prejudices that they face. Yompi’s invocation of universal blackness and a notion of a better world is a reflection of his participation in a black public sphere. For Yompi, hip-hop is the solution to the world’s social ills—a feeling of hope and of rebellion that results in liberty for all. Hip-hop is a symbol of resistance because it focuses on developing a clear consciousness and eliminating bad habits that lead to collective oppression.
The hip-hop movement is ideologically linked to transnational black countercultural movements through American black nationalist political exiles resident in Cuba. New Afrikan Revolutionaries such as Nehanda Abiodun held pan-African black-history classes in her apartment in 2004 until the state requested that they end. The exiled Black Panther leader Assata Shakur, who lives in Cuba, is an active supporter of the movement. In 1999 and 2002 Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover met with Fidel Castro to advocate for state support for the movement and with underground hip-hop artists to offer advice on how to develop the movement. Jafari S. Allen (2009) has engaged the question of the meaning of the 1959 Revolution for U.S. American blacks on the basis of fieldwork in Cuba from 1998 to 2003.
The Cuban state was very much aware of the black nationalist and black-power ideologies circulating in socially conscious American hip-hop. The Afro-Cuban, African themes and religious symbols that the underground hip-hoppers incorporated into their music were marginalized in Cuba’s larger public sphere, largely because of the Eurocentric elite’s collective memory of the historical links between African symbols and the possibility of an African insurrection on the island (Helg, 1995; Ferrer, 1999; Moore, 1997). For this elite, these symbols were a reminder of the potentially degenerative non-European elements of Cuban culture, reminding it that Cuba was as much an African society as it was a European one (Helg, 1995; Moore, 1997; Arroyo, 2003). Rensoli said that the state “assumed that we wanted to make a black-power [movement] against the official power [the state], and now they are starting to see that we are about something else. But how is it, if my people [fellow Cubans] are still part of the problem, that they won’t be the center of what I discuss?” (interview, 2005). Since racism was still a problem, as a critical artist Rensoli was going to focus on the people and issues that negatively affected his life. The concern about an impending black revolution on the island is linked to the reality that African worldviews and cultural practices are a competing cultural power on the island: the non-Western ideological orientation of Cuba’s population has not been colonized.
Cuban Youth and Black Radical Aesthetics
In the music video The Message (1983), by the New York City artists Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel (Figure 1), the hip-hoppers are out on the streets of their neighborhood talking about unemployment, crime, and limited opportunities. At the end of the video, while the artists are standing on the corner speaking to friends, a police car pulls up and they are forced into the car—seemingly for no other reason than their being black men standing in public. Randeée Akozta’s video Jodido Protagonista has similar images. In Figure 2 Randy is getting his hair braided. In Cuba black hair is seen as “bad hair,” undesirable and ugly, but in this clip his hair is long and kinky and he is having it styled. In Figure 3 he is standing in the street talking about harassment by police for being a young black man who does not overdress to make society comfortable with his presence. In Figure 4 a child is holding up a sign that says “Justice.” It is clear here that Randeée is talking not only to fellow Cubans but also to the larger, English-speaking hip-hop community.
Video clip of Grandmaster and Melle Mel’s The Message, music video ca. 1983.
Video clip of Randeée Acozta’s Flash Jodido Protagonista, music video ca. 2004.
Video clip of Jodido Protagonista.
Video clip of Jodido Protagonista.
The CD cover of Jodido Protagonista (Figure 5) is representative of the antiinstitutional character of underground hip-hop. Randeée is considered one of the most “underground” of hip-hoppers. He produces his music independently, relying heavily on his one-gigabyte secondhand laptop computer to mix his beats and make his videos. His CD cover is a photocopied photo, cut out and placed in an inexpensive plastic cover, of him rapping, though he looks as if he is actually lecturing. He is wearing urban street wear, indicating that his knowledge is from the streets. The CD inside, like those of most independent artists (e.g., Las Krudas, the Junior Clan, Los Paisanos, and Anónimo Consejo) is burned at home or by friends. Nothing about it indicates incorporation on any level. This CD cover represents a technical feat accomplished through a community of friends and with very limited resources. Many underground hip-hoppers claim a shared collective memory with the rest of the African diaspora: as a result of colonialism, they must make something that is aesthetically pleasing or useful when they are given nothing and have had much taken away. The “low-quality” aesthetic of the photocopy and the image of himself rapping delivers a very complicated message: “Randeée Akozta is a man of the streets. He delivers knowledge based on his own experiences, and since he is not incorporated in any way you are guaranteed to hear the truth.”
Album cover, Jodido Protagonista.
In Figure 6, the image is of a black youth dressed in the B-boy gear that was made fashionable in New York City. Behind him is a black fist representing the black nationalist movement and the “black struggle” in general. Also behind him are a turntable and a soundboard, and the needle of the tone arm is placed over his heart, which is in the shape of a record—illustrating the importance of hip-hop in expressing what is felt and lived. To reduce this image to a product of African-American culture disconnects African-Americans from the rest of the Americas and erases a long history of cultural and intellectual exchange. It also implies that Cubans lack agency—that they are not participating in cultural exchange but simply uncritically receiving culture. The B-boy fashion actually started in Jamaica and was made popular in New York City by Jamaican immigrants (Rose, 1994; Rivera, 2003; Neal, 1998), but on this CD there is Cuban flag on the B-boy’s shirt and hat and the flag is also incorporated into the background.
Album cover, Cuban Hip-Hop All-Stars, Vol. 1, 2002. © Steve Marcus/Papaya Records.
Figures 7 and 8 display the inserts from a CD called Cuban Hip-Hop All-Stars, which depict colonization. The first image shows Spaniards on a beach. One is wearing a cross, indicating the Catholic Church’s complicity in the colonizing process. They are standing over long-haired indigenous people on a beach. The souls leaving the people’s mouths represent the colonial genocide of indigenous populations. This image melts into the image of a slave ship. One of the slaves is leaning onto the beach and staring at the dying indigenous person. This illustrates the connection between the colonial indigenous genocide and the slave trade. The masses of people huddled together on the slave ship are thinking of Africa. In the next image, white and light-skinned wealthy people are drinking, smoking, and thinking about money. This alludes to the emergence of the neocolonial class in Cuba. While the elite are enjoying themselves, poor people scramble behind the table looking for crumbs. A cross and a church are in the background, symbolizing Catholicism’s support of neocolonialism.
First section of album insert, Cuban Hip-Hop All-Stars, Vol. 1. © Steve Marcus/Papaya Records.
Second section of album insert, Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars, Vol. 1. © Steve Marcus/Papaya Records.
In the next section (Figure 8) there is an image of Che Guevara, symbolizing the Cuban Revolution. Behind it are fire, weapons, pigs (standing for the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs), cars, and an American flag with dollar signs in the stars, symbolizing American greed, aggression, and imperialism. Below the chains at the base of the American flag is the word “Censored,” alluding to the censorship resulting from Cuba’s global isolation via the economic embargo and to the market censorship that underground artists face for their social critique. At the end of the narrative depicted in the insert, the United States represents the contemporary incarnation of the colonial agenda. However, blackness is also a relational identity; its emergence is linked to the genocide of indigenous populations that share the suffering originating in European-based capital.
Other CD covers address the relationship between modernity and blackness by using other symbols linked to contemporary exploitation. La fabriK (a play on the word fábrica [factory]) is a collaborative independent production of the underground hip-hop groups Obsesión and Doble Filo. The CD cover (Figure 9) represents rejection of industrialization. Behind the backdrop of a factory and a red, toxic-looking sky are a black fist (a reference to black nationalist rebellion), a peace sign, a raised middle finger (symbolizing “F— you!”), and an open-palmed hand (symbolizing “Stop!”). These represent messages about the destructive nature of modernity, a request for peace in the face of the environmental destruction caused by industrialization, and a rejection of the drive for profit that results in the destruction of all forms of life. The dedication side of the insert (Figure 10) reads: “To our parents, to the Cuban hip-hop movement, to the people who have been waiting for this, and to you.”
Album cover, La fabriK, 2003.
Album insert showing dedication, La fabriK.
The dedication is to die-hard hip-hop fans, who live for the next CD. In my interviews with younger hip-hoppers who had once been die-hard fans themselves, I frequently heard stories of their having been on a road to self-destruction. Some had tried to leave Cuba illegally on dangerous rafts. Others had been suicidal; before hip-hop they had not understood why they felt a general malaise, but receiving an education via underground hip-hop lyrics had helped them to understand their situation. They had begun to realize that they had internalized racism and that they felt disconnected from Cubansociety because it discouraged the embrace of African aesthetics and history. The movement had taught them about themselves, and it embraced African aesthetics and proudly displayed them in public space.
These CD covers are designed to deliver political messages that encourage independent grassroots work in the community. They help marginalized youth from economically depressed communities in an economically depressed and “defamed” nation to take pride in their black Cuban ancestors’ contribution to the nation and in their existence as black people. These messages are also conveyed by hip-hoppers’ style of dress. Underground hip-hop artists wear a lot of red, black, and/or green—colors associated with pan-Africanism and black nationalism—and T-shirts whose graphics reinforce self-education and black consciousness. In Figure 11 Michael Oremas is wearing a black T-shirt that says “Power to the People.” It shows the images and names of Black Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. In Figure 12 Yompi of the Junior Clan wears a T-shirt that says “The Black Revolution.” The hip-hoppers also wear army fatigues, emphasizing the theme of “a revolution within the revolution”—the “revolution within” being the challenge to the racist, sexist, and homophobic colonial legacies that persist in Cuban culture (Saunders, 2009). In Figures 13 and 14 Las Krudas is performing in dashikis and dreadlocks. This is a rejection of hegemonic Eurocentric standards of beauty whereby black women are encouraged to straighten their hair and wear tight, revealing clothing.
Michael Oremas of the Junior Clan, wearing a Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale “Power to the People” T-shirt, during a concert in El Cerro, Havana, 2006.
The Junior Clan in concert in La Madriguera, 2004.
Las Krudas. From left to right, Wanda, Pelusa, Pasita.
Video stills of Las Krudas performing (courtesy of Las Krudas).
Graffiti are another way in which underground hip-hoppers seek to educate the masses. Among the themes of the Havana-based graffiti artist NoNo are Cuban history and the history of transnational anticapitalist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist struggle. In Figure 15 NoNo stands in the archway of her apartment building. In the foreground, the word “Underground” is written on the left side of the arch. Behind the lettering of the word is a basketball. The word is a reference to the urban U.S. origins of the art form. To the right is the African blessing “Ache,” symbolic of the African influence in underground hip-hop. In the background is a silhouette of José Martí sitting on the word “Apostle,” a name sometimes given him for having predicted the development of U.S. imperial ambitions. In this piece NoNo combines the past and the present and draws on cultural elements that have been influential in the formation of Cuban underground hip-hop as a revolutionary and critical art form. Figures 16 and 17 are murals by NoNo focusing on respect for one’s African heritage (“Raices”) and on transnational activists struggling for equality.
NoNo in front of a mural in her apartment building in El Vedado, Havana, 2006.
Mural by NoNo in the apartment building where she lives, 2006.
Another mural by NoNo in the apartment building where she lives, 2006.
Discussion
Most underground hip-hop artists think that hip-hop is dead in the United States and see themselves as ready to take up the anticommercial, communitarian, and revolutionary aspect of hip-hop as a means of maintaining the revolutionary core of the art form. The global hip-hop community uses hip-hop to serve various political, cultural, and consumer interests. In the case of the underground hip-hop movement it is important not to confuse its political and cultural interests with the commercialized and profit-driven interests of other forms of hip-hop such as reggaeton, which would obscure their role in the transnational struggle against colonialism and its legacies.
Many of the first generation of underground hip-hop artists have left Cuba to live abroad, where they are continuing to produce independent, socially conscious art. They are working to help hip-hop to realize its socially transformative potential globally, and through strengthened international recognition and activist networks they seek to strengthen the movement at home.