Close to the Edge (5 page)

Café Cantante was a small intimate venue facing the historic Plaza de la Revolución. We descended a series of marble stairs to the entrance, where we paid—yet again—five pesos each and then made our way into the club. Like most other venues struggling to survive the economic crisis, Café Cantante had to reorient itself toward a tourist market. Evening concerts that showcased top Cuban bands such as NG La Banda and Irakere cost upward of $25 per ticket, almost twice the monthly salary of a Cuban. The afternoons were when young Cubans had a chance to use the space, for rap or rock concerts.

“Respect! All crew, all massive, everywhere in the world / You practice the art of hip hop / This goes out to every boy and every girl.” Ariel Fernández, aka DJ Asho, was spinning, and the cramped space vibrated with the booming voice of KRS-One. At a table by the front of the crowded room sat a tall stick-thin guy and a reticent young black woman with springy brass-colored hair. Pablo introduced them as Alexey Rodríguez and Magia López, a husband-wife rap duo known as Obsesión.

“¿Voy a cantar?” I asked Magia in my beginner's Spanish, misconjugating my verbs so that I was requesting to sing rather than asking if they would be singing, as I'd intended. “Si, un momento.” She conferred with someone at the back and then came back to announce that I had been added to the afternoon's lineup. Oh, shit! I tried to explain the mix-up but to no avail.

On stage first was Instinto, the all-female trio extraordinaire. The women were dressed in low-cut and clingy outfits and high heels. As the salsa beat kicked in from the DJ booth, they gyrated their hips in a choreographed routine. The young men in the audience went wild. The divas onstage rapped in lyrical prose, spun on their heels, and sang in three-part harmony. This was the Cuban-streets-meet-high-brow-classical-training at Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte. There was no way I could match a performance like this. Was it too late to get out of it?

Then the next act was being introduced, a Portuguese rapper from India. Heads, including my own, turned in anticipation of this exotic wonder until I realized they were talking about me. Too late. I smoothed down my blue jeans and hesitantly edged onto the stage. I had no slinky dress. I had no background beat. And, worst of all, I was performing solo. If there was an unspoken rule among Cuban rappers, it was that you always perform with one or more others—you never brave the stage alone. I could feel the collective gasp of shock as I came onto the stage—by myself.

I decided to sing one of my new pieces, “Woman Find.” The fast and scatlike rhymes were inspired by the jazz-hip hop fusion style of the LA-based rap group Freestyle Fellowship. I realized I would be totally incomprehensible to a Cuban audience. The song was a militant tract about women breaking beyond stereo-types and finding a voice in society. As I sang the chorus, “We'll no more believe when they tell us we're free,” Alexey and some others added improvised timbals with a spoon on the side of a glass. There were a few cheers and some scattered clapping when I finished. I figured that somehow, despite the language barriers, maybe the song had resonated among some people. As I walked down off the stage and back to my seat, I felt hands on my arm. “Que linda.” “Que guapa.” I was being surrounded by young men who liked my pretty song.

I sighed, deflated, and took my seat. “That was alright,” said Pablo, leaning over from his seat. “Maybe I can produce some music for you.”

P
ablo lived in Santos Suárez, a formerly middle-class area in the southern part of the city now occupied by working-class blacks. It wasn't until my next trip to Cuba, after spending a year and a half at grad school in Chicago, that I finally made it to Pablo's place. I was curious about how rap music graduated from barrios like Almendares to the recording studios. If most of Cuba ran on old Soviet equipment, how did Cubans acquire the samplers and mixers and other expensive equipment required to make beats? A beat was the prerecorded background music that accompanied rappers as they performed. It had replaced the records played by DJs in early live rap performances.

I caught a cab to the modest two-story corner house that Pablo shared with his mother. There was a rich aroma of tomatoes. Pablo was cooking pasta. A sauce simmered on one burner, noodles on the other, and eggs boiled in another pan. After draining the noodles and dishing them into bowls with the sauce, he peeled the boiled eggs and crumbled them on top. Pablo saw the look on my face.

“I know, it's weird,” he admitted, in his disarmingly impeccable English. “It's just another habit from the Special Period. Cheese was so hard to come by, and we Cubans are always
inventando
, so we just substituted it with crumbled up eggs. Try it, it actually tastes pretty good!”

I sampled the local cuisine. The pasta sauce was tasty. I figured if I ever got caught in a special period, I'd just do without the cheese.

After we ate and cleaned up the dishes, we went into Pablo's studio. It was a tiny room next to the kitchen. There was a Roland keyboard sampler, a Behringer mixing board, a micro-phone shielded by a homemade pop screen made of panty hose, a set of turntables, and—he showed me proudly—an Akai MPC digital sampler that had been sent by a US label that August. Pablo read the manual in English. In only ten days of working with the equipment, he had produced the first-ever Cuban hip hop album. It was called
Cuban Hip Hop All-Stars, Vol. 1
.

“We're lucky to have equipment like this, because of our connections with record labels,” Pablo said, gesturing toward the sampler. “But we always have to make it clear that we reject the kind of consumerist ethic and materialism that drives hip hop as an industry. Like a few weeks ago, a photographer from
Vibe
magazine wanted to do a shoot of Cuban rappers wearing Tommy Hilfiger. We refused, because we knew that it was just an attempt by labels to get their products into Cuba.”

I nodded. Rappers were wary of being accused of “capitalist consumerism,” a desire for material goods that was at odds with being a revolutionary. Foreign labels—even underground ones—were capitalist corporations that tempted the rappers with record deals and expensive, hard-to-acquire equipment. Cuban rappers and foreign labels were engaged in a
rumba guaguancó.
They flirted with one another, each enticing the other while protecting themselves. The courtship worked only if both parties thought that they were using the other for their own ends.

The sampler was a godsend for Cuban hip hoppers. Until that moment they had just made do with whatever materials were available to them. For improvised backgrounds Cubans made “pause tapes.” They would record the break beat on a cassette and then manually loop it over and over until they had a complete song.

Cuba's first hip hop DJ, Ariel Fernández, improvised a set of turntables with Walkmans as the decks. His cassettes contained music recorded from CDs and FM stations. At
bonches
, the block parties, or local gatherings in the barrio, Ariel would set up two Walkmans. He would play a cassette in one Walkman while searching for the song he wanted on the other. Then he would flip to the other song. He didn't have a mixer that would allow a seamless transition from one song to the next, but he made do with volume controls. The important thing was, as he said, to preserve the principle of the turntables.
¹
It was yet another example of the creative spirit of
inventando.

The MPC in the hands of Pablo meant that rappers who worked with him could now actually have beats that used Cuban rhythms and samples. I pulled out the lyrics for my rap song “You're My Shadow,” and I sang a few lines for Pablo. It was a song about heartbreak and betrayal, and the comfort one could find in female friendships. Pablo pondered it for a minute. He extracted an old Cuban bolero record by Blanca Rosa Gil from his vinyl collection, put it on the decks, and sampled one line from the track “Acerca el oido” (Bring your ears closer). “Dejame contarte el olvido, Dejame decirte el olvido” (Let me tell you the forgotten, Let me say to you the forgotten). The sample added a plaintive suggestion of memory, perhaps an older voice imparting wisdom to a younger person. Pablo recorded this phrase on the MPC, along with a drum loop and a bass line. Turning to the keyboard, he began tapping out a few simple melodies. He finally settled on a quick ascending triplet that led into the melody and then a three-note riff that played off the bass line. He copied these to the sampler, too. Pleased with the beat so far, he sampled an alluring female voice saying, “Escuchala” (Hear it) from another album. He added the sample with a jarring syncopation slightly after the end of the phrase.

Afterward Pablo walked me out to the street to flag down a cab. He slipped on an Ecko t-shirt with the words “Ecko Unltd, NYC” printed on the front. He looked at me sheepishly. “An American producer was here last week, and he offered me all this clothing. I wouldn't have taken it, but I really needed some new clothes.”

M
aybe protesting capitalist consumerism was just a luxury for those of us in the West. Here in Cuba sometimes necessity had to come first. With clothing hard to find or priced in dollars at the fancy Carlos Tercera shopping mall, hip hoppers like Pablo couldn't always turn down the offerings of the foreign labels. And, no doubt, Pablo knew that turning up at the next block party in an Ecko t-shirt would turn some heads.

Cuba seemed not to be as isolated from global music trends as I had thought. Producers, tourists, and relatives brought hip hop gear from the United States. Many people had VCRs, so aspiring hip hoppers could see prerecorded video clips. And they could listen to Miami radio station 99 Jamz FM.

Soon after I returned to Cuba for the third time in May 2001, I sat out on the balcony of the
casa particular
in Vedado with Magia and Alexey. Alexey related that, when he was growing up in the eighties, he was attracted by the energy and soulfulness of the rap music that came along the airwaves of 99 Jamz FM. As a kid he would build antennas from wire coat hangers and dangle his radio out the window, “crazy to get the 99.” On episodes of
Soul Train
beamed in from Miami television, Alexey saw b-boying for the first time. He copied the steps and then showed them to the kids in the neighborhood. Alexey remembered the dance cyphers in the park El Quijote. Kids would form a circle. In the center the b-boys would polish the concrete with their back spins and windmills, while others broke into a beatbox or rhymed.

Alexey liked to work with his hands, whittling pieces of wood into elaborate statues and religious objects. He was working as a sculptor when he met Magia and they decided to get married. Magia shared a one-bedroom apartment on Calle Jovellar in Central Havana with her mother and sister. She moved in with Alexey's family, which had a small rooftop terrace apartment in the industrial suburb of Regla.

At this time Alexey was writing lyrics and rhyming in a rap group with two other guys. But the other two stopped coming to rehearsals, and Alexey was writing and rehearsing by himself. Eventually, he asked Magia if she would form a group with him. Magia initially joined the group as a way of supporting her husband and creating a space outside the daily routine of married life that wasn't just about cooking, cleaning, home, and work. “I began with the group just singing the chorus,” Magia said. “But later Alexey began to give me room so that I could rap about issues relating to women. Eventually, I earned my position within the group as a rapper. To be honest, I never thought I'd ever leave the bedroom and perform in front of an audience. I'm actually a very shy person, but I've overcome that bit by bit.”

Magia and Alexey, like other Cubans of the hip hop generation, had little or no memory of the early years of the revolution. They'd heard stories from their parents about the literacy campaign that mobilized 1.25 million Cubans or about the desegregation of whites-only spaces during the 1960s. As the younger generation, they had benefited from the extension of education, housing, and health care to black families. But they came of age during the Special Period, as the revolutionary years gave way to times of austerity, and racism was visible once again.

In a society where it was taboo to talk about race publicly, racism was the elephant in the room. Fidel had attempted to create a color-blind society, where equality between blacks and whites would make racial identifications obsolete. But in redrawing the geography of Cuba's racial landscape, the state simultaneously closed down Afro-Cuban clubs and the black press. As racism became public once again during the Special Period—it had never really gone away—blacks were left without the means to talk about it. When called on their racism, officials trotted out the same tired line—
en Cuba, no hay racismo
(in Cuba, there is no racism). My trusty manual,
The Cuban Revolution and Its Extension
, had referred to racial prejudice in Cuba as “no more than a disappearing legacy of the past.” But I saw how my black friends were harassed by police and asked for ID. I saw that they had a harder time getting jobs in tourism than their white peers.