Close to the Edge (6 page)

Alexey Rodríguez

It was at this juncture that hip hop culture appeared and took root. While the black nationalism espoused by an earlier generation of visiting black radicals like Marcus Garvey or Stokely Carmichael never had much appeal in Cuba, African American rappers spoke a language of black militancy that resonated with Cuban youth. It spoke to their experiences of racial discrimination in the Special Period. Young Cubans of African ancestry proudly referred to themselves as black.

“I am what my image shows, a black woman,” declared Magia, in her rap “Niche niche,” the Cuban slang for dark skinned. “Representing those women who dare to get out there / My skin is the color of night, it reveals secrets already known / To show that which is hidden is seen by all.”

Cuban rap was bold and rebellious. But, after all, isn't that what you would expect from a generation of young people raised under a revolutionary government? The daily youth periodical was called
Juventud Rebelde
(Rebellious Youth). In daycare centers and schools, children repeated the motto “We will be like Che.” We're talking about a place where the evening news called for resistance to US imperialism and global capitalism. But, with Cuban rap, it was different. It was different because the children of the revolution were turning the tables on the establishment revolutionaries. The younger people were taking the slogans and analysis they were taught and were using them to question the changes going on around them. If the birthright of the revolution was to make all Cubans equal, they asked, why were some more equal than others? Why were blacks not treated the same as whites?

Magia was part of a new breed of emcees, agnostic and irreverent, the voices of an urban culture that was—as the chorus to her song went—made in Havana City. But she didn't see herself as a dissident. Although she never was affiliated with the Communist Youth League, Magia had a strong sense of identification with the revolution. She often found herself defending the government in conversations with her more skeptical peers. I wondered how it was possible to be both a fierce critic of race relations and a defender of the revolution. Wouldn't there come a point where you would have to choose sides?

T
he question of being original is not
pretending
to be original. It's simply to
be original
.” Alexey's voice swooped climactically on the last two words in his usual theatrical style. Obsesion was performing on stage at Cubadisco, the annual music contest sponsored by the Cuban music industry and held in the beach-side district of Playa. Waves were crashing in the background on that late spring evening as floodlights lit the makeshift stage. Alexey wore his hair in short locks, a beaded black-and-yellow chain around his neck. On the front of his t-shirt was the image of the African American journalist and death-row prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal.

“Is it true or not?” Alexey, aka El Tipo Este, asked as he primed the audience of mostly young black Cubans in baseball caps, Fila sweatshirts, and basketball jerseys. The clothing styles, like the handshakes and the American slang that peppered their speech, highlighted their identity as young black Cubans. There was a sprinkling of
noviacitas
, young foreign women brought by their Cuban boyfriends. “This is the story that emcees have to take from the
loco, loco
, El Tipo Este, baptized today, the commentary begins.” The booming beat sounded four or five times in quick succession, and then the rhythm kicked in.

“Every person / In my barrio / Every person / In my barrio,” Magia repeated the refrain to the song, over and over. She was wearing a red-and-white paisley head wrap with an African gown, large hoop earrings, and a necklace made of small cowry shells. It brought to mind Afrocentric American rappers like Yo-Yo, Harmony, and Isis.

Magia began a rap-skit with El Tipo Este. “I was thinking of finding myself a foreigner / One that has a lot of money.”

“Of course,” El Tipo Este interjected.

“I don't care what he's like / I just want someone who'll resolve my problems. It's a sacrifice but you get results / Love in these times that we live is relative / I'm a young woman who has to secure her future, you get me? / I'm not the kind to look for work or nothin' / I want to travel, and help my family from abroad / My wedding has to be beautiful, like in the Hollywood movies.”

“Run for the city, a commentary,” they both chanted on the chorus. “Is it a
jinetera
, a bunch of crazies doing tourism, tell me where, chico?”

“I was thinking that an intellectual such as myself,” El Tipo Este rapped in a pompous tone.

“Like you?” asked Magia.

“Shouldn't be wasting time with these people / Who don't have a sufficient cultural level / To have a conversation that matches my social position / I don't support this language everyone is using /
‘Asere,'qué bolá?'
You find it all over the place / you know, with these people of the
solares”

“Yo, yo, yo, I was thinking,” she replied: “All the hours I've studied haven't served for nothin' / Whole mornings studying / I'm going to leave my career, papa / I'm very sorry, I won't be an engineer / My girl just called, there's a job in tourism / Tourism, papa / It's cleaning floors, but who cares? / It'll give me a few bucks and I can resolve some problems.”

“I was thinking, why don't I / Form a combo and start performing traditional music?” rapped El Tipo Este. “I'll be part of the
fardndula
[new elite] / I'll play Son de la Loma, and Chan Chan.”

“And Guantanamera,” added Magia.

The song alluded to the contradictions of Havana in the 1990s. Education was no longer a ticket to social mobility. Professional occupations were less remunerative than hustling or performing traditional Cuban songs for tourists. Obsesión was critical of this reality. As the audience laughed and clapped, I sized the people up. Some of the young Cuban men there with foreign girlfriends were
jineteros.
Wasn't that a contradiction, I wondered, being at an underground rap concert and at the same time wanting the nice things and trips around the city that came from befriending foreigners? Couldn't they see that the Obsesión song was actually a parody of the
jinetero
lifestyle, a criticism of the “easy fix” as a way to acquire material possessions and move up in the world?

The next group on stage, Explósion Suprema, had a noticeably different energy. Miki Flow wore a t-shirt that read “USA.” Brebaje Man was his co-rapper.

“Where are my people from Alamar?” Miki Flow called out. “We come from out in the sticks, man, from Alamar.” Alamar was a district on the periphery of Havana that contained a series of low-income housing projects. Miki Flow switched into hip hop Spanglish, a combo of American and Cuban slang. “¿Qué bolà, asere? Wasssssup? Aqui, en Cubadisco, manos pa' arriba, Explósion Suprema in da house.”

“Aiiiight. Represent the real hi ho,” added Brebaje Man, truncating his sentences Cuban style. “Manos pa' arriba. No doubt. Yo, check it out, check it out.”

Bouncing across the stage, Miki Flow began his song “Mi patria, caray!” (My country, damn!). As a rapper, he said, he represented the essence of Cubania: “Although my lyrics are not mixed with
son
/ Everything that I'm singing here is very Cuban.”

“Undergroun, almost without possibilities,” rapped Brebaje Man.

“But with the little that we have we ain't
gusanos
[maggots],” he continued, using the derogatory label often given to people who had renounced the revolutionary government.

“I'm like a magician on the stage,” Miki Flow went on. “Raising a dead public till they laugh with happiness / Making disappear their agony and their sadness.”

“Shuttup, shuttup New York / Shuttup, shuttup, mothafuka,” they rapped, concluding the song. Miki Flow and Brebaje Man gesticulated and grimaced as they threw in the English expletives “fuck you” and “mothafuka.” It struck me that this in-your-face pose was what resonated with local youth across language barriers. When Cubans heard American music, they didn't understand the lyrics for the most part. They didn't speak English. But there was something about the
attitude
of American rappers that spoke to them, that communicated all the frustration and pent-up anger of a life lived on the margins. I wondered what it was about Alamar that could produce such burning music.

Brebaje Man

Following Explosión Suprema, Randy came up onto the stage. Gone was the skinny adolescent who had rapped with his baby cousin about his bicycle. Randy was now a tall, broad-shouldered young man, his hair braided in cornrows. Randy had joined with Jesse Saldrigas, aka El Huevo, and with another rapper they formed the group Los Paisanos. The group had lost the other rapper, who had decided to switch to a commercial genre of salsa-rap fusion and signed a record deal with a foreign label. In a song called “El barco” (The boat), Randy rapped about the life of an underground rapper:

“We're a boat that's adrift, in the middle of a storm,” they rapped on the chorus. “We're a boat that's adrift, and the captain is called rap / We're a boat that's adrift, that navigates without direction / And with no money we've lost half the crew.” Cuban rap was penniless and adrift. And so was Randy, trying to navigate his way around sweet-talking label reps and defend himself against cops. He had outgrown his bicycle and was now forced to fend for himself in a boat that was lost at sea.

One of the last acts of the night, the group Hermanos de Causa, came onto the stage. “Buenas noches, Playa,” said Soandry, serious and without the hype of the previous performers. “We're Hermanos de Causa. We're from the barrio, from Alamar.” A synthesized beat, overlaid with conga, entered the background. After a four-bar interlude a drum sample brought the rhythm, and Soandry began to rap:

The tone was understated, quiet yet damning. It was this generation's answer to the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, who in his 1964 poem “Tengo” (I have) had praised the achievements of the revolution for Afro-Cubans: “I have, let's see, that I have learned to read, to count. I have that I have learned to write and to think.” There was a striking contrast between the imaginative ideal of the revolution—the one that I had also come to Cuba seeking—and the new realities of hardship and shortage. Young black Cubans were part of a generation who were promised a utopia, and reality fell far short.

F
rom problems of transportation to
jineterismo
, racial inequality, police harassment, and the lure of foreign labels, the global art form of rap was speaking directly to very local issues.

Hermanos de Causa

But could this localness and directness also make rappers too visible and vulnerable to censorship? After all, Cuban artists had perfected techniques of metaphor, allusion, and ambiguity. Film-makers like the legendary “Titon,” as the late Tomás Gutierréz Alea was known, or the black director Sergio Giral, had always chosen historical themes like slavery as a way to comment on race. Similarly, sometimes the trick for rappers was making a local theme seem not very local at all.

Magia had written a song, “La llaman puta” (They call her whore), and she asked me to do the vocals on it. Over several weeks in June we rehearsed the song for an upcoming concert featuring Obsesión at the Cine Riviera. The concert was to be a prelude to the annual rap festival held out at Alamar. A few days before the event, we did a final run-through of the show in the apartment that Magia and Alexey shared with his parents in the small peninsula town of Regla.