[NYTr] Hip Hop & the Cuban Revolution

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Workers World - Sep 27 and Oct 11, 2007
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/hip-hop-cuba-0927
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/hip-hop-1011


WW commentary

AN EVOLVING IMPACT

Hip Hop & the Cuban Revolution

By Larry Hales

Part 1

Hip Hop culture is again being attacked by the major news outlets,
which of late began with Don Imus, when his virulent racism was
spotlighted after his hateful remarks against a college basketball team
made up mostly of Black women. However, some capitalist news outlets
appear to have embraced Hip Hop in revolutionary Cuba.

It’s not that this should be a confusing turn, not for those who’ve
been in solidarity with the Cuban revolution. Nor should it be for
people struggling against racism and oppression in the U.S.

When FIST, a revolutionary youth group, visited Cuba this July, the
youth had an opportunity to meet with the head of the Cuban Rap Agency
and several Cuban rap artists. The artists explained what the music
means to them, how they first came in contact with Hip Hop culture, and
how it is viewed by the revolution.

A New York Times article written last December entitled, “Cuba’s Rap
Vanguard Reaches Beyond the Party Line,” attempts to assert that youth
in Cuba are at odds with the revolutionary leadership and that these
tensions are evident in the burgeoning Hip Hop culture there.

The writer claims that “many” of the five million people under the age
of 30 question the system. It is not to suggest that Cubans are not
critical. Perhaps the greatest criticism comes from Fidel, but
criticism itself is not a bad thing. In an ever changing world there
are always new questions and problems and healthy criticisms are part
of deepening socialism, especially with the contradictions of a global
capitalist market.

While many of the emerging leaders on the island were not alive during
the revolutionary armed struggle, they came of age during one of the
most difficult and challenging periods of the Cuban revolution. That
period is known on the island as the Special Period, and the Cuban
economy is just recovering from the effects.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its largest trading
partner. Eighty percent of Cuban trade was with the Soviet Union and
the socialist camp in Eastern Europe.

While perhaps some can look at the counterrevolutionary reforms of
Perestroika under Gorbachev as a warning sign, it was not expected that
trade would stop immediately, but it did.

The U.S. and many in the imperialist West expected that the Cuban
revolution would fail, but history and the resolve of the Cuban people
were the best weapons to ensure that this did not happen.

The Cuban people experienced a significant reduction in caloric intake.
Food had to be rationed. Temporary market reforms were put in place.
Cuba promoted tourism on the island as its primary way of securing hard
currency with which to trade on the international market.

Only a person who lived through it can truly attest to the
difficulties, but regardless of the hardship, not one hospital or
school closed. But neither did antagonism from the U.S. government
cease.

It was during this period that Cubans began to really get exposed to
Hip Hop culture. While rap music started being broadcast from Southern
Florida in the late 1980s, it was in the 1990s—during the Special
Period—when this culture and music began to take hold with youth on the
island.

If one were to listen to this music from the late 1980s and early
1990s, known as the “Golden Age of Hip Hop,” what is clear is that the
music was the pulse of oppressed Black and Latin@ youth, that the
rhythms and the lyrics expressed the frustration and anger of youth
living under the reactionary Reagan regime.

If the musical explosion that emanated from the South Bronx in the late
1970s was a manifestation of “a dream deferred,” then the evolution of
the music to what it became in the late 1980s and early 1990s can best
be described as the chain reaction in urban centers across the U.S.

Though Cuban youth may not have fully understood each and every word,
the angry sentiment towards oppression is easily translated.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was felt hardest by underdeveloped
nations. The Soviet Union, even with its many internal contradictions,
was the buffer that held U.S. imperialism at bay and was supportive of
liberation movements around the world.

The fact that Cuba was undergoing such a crisis as the Special Period,
and that Hip Hop culture, rap music and its energy and break dancing,
caught on during this time symbolizes the difficulty of the times and
the draw of the culture.

Part 2

During the Golden Age of Hip Hop in the United States, from the 1980s
to the early 1990s, the music was stealth. It is not that it flew under
the radar. How could it, when it resonated around the country in
oppressed communities? However, because of pure racism it was not seen
as an art form but as a fleeting expression of the righteous anger of
the oppressed.

It was a logical evolution in a time of the decline of the great social
movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also the beginning of
deindustrialization, the reintroduction of the death penalty, the
booming growth of the prison-industrial complex and Reaganomics.

Hip Hop was at its most creative, its most enlightening, its most
explosive and to the U.S. ruling class, its most dangerous point.

In Cuba, that period was one of great anxiety, but the revolution
triumphed in spite of the hardships and Hip Hop has since helped
reinvigorate youth on the island.

It was Harry Belafonte who first had a conversation with Fidel Castro
and Minister of Culture Abel Prieto about the many Hip Hop artists in
which he explained the culture to Commander Fidel.

Belafonte said of the meeting, “I wasn’t surprised that there were
Cuban rappers, because I don’t care where you go in the world ...
rappers seem to be everywhere. But I was surprised at how many there
were and how uninformed the hierarchy in Cuban cultural circles was of
the whole culture of hip-hop music.

“After meeting with the hip-hop artists in Havana about seven or eight
years ago, I met with Abel Prieto at a luncheon that Fidel Castro had,
and we got to talking about hip-hop culture. When I went back to Havana
a couple of years later, the people in the hip-hop community came to
see me and we hung out for a bit. They thanked me profusely and I said,
‘Why?’ and they said, ‘Because, your little conversation with Fidel and
the Minister of Culture on hip-hop led to there being a special
division within the ministry and we’ve got our own studio.’”

Since then, Fidel has called rap the “vanguard of the revolution.”

Culture is protected in Cuba. In the U.S., Hip Hop, like all things
under capitalism, has become a commodity. However, more than just that,
both the attacks on Hip Hop and the co-optation of the culture are part
of the racism endemic to the system.

Hip Hop is seen as a threat to the U.S. ruling elite and as a threat to
white supremacy. The Hip Hop generation of today is a multi-national
generation of youth who have seen through the lies of the system and
understand much more deeply than their forebears the attempts to divide
the multi-national working class, though not in those words.

Hip Hop is like the coded language of the slave in the fields; the
blues of an era where the objective reality of U.S. capital is one of
crisis and more wars. It is the “CNN of the Ghetto,” as Chuck D says.
It also is the barometer of the people’s willingness to openly
struggle, as was evident in the music before the great Los Angeles
rebellion, when the Black masses in South Central L.A., tired of the
repressive conditions, rose up.

Cuba, however, sees the now global phenomenon and the power it holds.
Like with the early Hip Hop musicians in the U.S., the culture arrived
at a time when artists had to improvise. In the U.S. turntables became
instruments; beat boxing, making music with one’s mouth, drove
impromptu ciphers—freestyle circles. In Cuba, early artists used
typewriters to bang out beats.

The difference, though, is how this culture flourished in two
diametrically opposed social systems, one run by a small exploitative
class, the other by a workers’ government with the task to provide for
all of society and solve the problems of an ever-changing world.

One is an anarchic system, the other is a planned economy.

The approach to culture is rooted in each system’s approach to
humanity. The capitalist system has out-used its usefulness. It came
into the world dripping in blood from head to toe, and as is evident in
the rise of the U.S. military juggernaut, will go out of this world
covered in blood.

While Fidel says, “Within the revolution, everything,” the U.S. rulers
see little value in a thing that does not produce profit or cannot be
used for subterfuge.

In 2002, Cuba opened the Cuban Rap Agency and from the agency came the
magazine La Fabri-K and a record label.

Capitalist media outlets such as the New York Times, CNN and a few
artists in the U.S.—like Pitbull of the song “Culo” and “independent”
film producers—try to use the culture against the Cuban revolution.

One need only look at the source of the criticism. Pitbull also wrote a
song called, “Ya Se Acabó,” joining in the clamor with other right-wing
Miami Cubans and U.S. politicians when Castro had to undergo surgery
and then stepped down because of his illness.

Pitbull is part of the ignominiously named “Guerilla Radio: The Hip Hop
Struggle Under Castro,” a documentary made by filmmakers associated
with CNN and Mountain View Group Ltd. According to its web site,
Mountain View has “created award-winning corporate communications
campaigns, educational programs, TV commercials and sales tools for
over 200 clients, including Fortune 500 companies.”

One of the filmmakers who worked for CNN, Tom Nybo, was “embedded” with
the occupation forces in Iraq. A report from the School of Journalism
at the University of Montana said that before Nybo went to Iraq in
2003, “he received two weeks of military training–one organized by CNN
and the other by the Pentagon.”

In Cuba, culture flourishes and the Cuban Rap Agency will see that it
is not used by outside forces to try to destabilize the revolution, but
rather is used to deepen the consciousness of youth on the island in
the service of deepening the revolution.

As Belafonte said, “What I think was important is how open the
leadership was to this thing called hip-hop, whereas in the United
States we do so much to demonize the culture, and we don’t even have a
Ministry of Culture in this country. But here we have Cuba, with a new
form of music that came from another place, from the United States of
America, and they were open to giving it assistance, to help develop
hip-hop music in Cuba.”

[The writer is a leader of FIST—Fight Imperialism, Stand Together—youth
group and was a member of its delegation that traveled to Cuba in July.]

Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and
distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without
royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww at workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe at workersworld.net