Close to the Edge (8 page)

In late June I decided to visit Alamar for a prefestival rap concert at the Alamar amphitheater. To get there I had to take a bus that left from the stop at 29 and the Avenida de los Presidentes, a few blocks from where I was staying in El Vedado. As I approached the bus stop, I saw long lines of people just waiting—a familiar enough sight in Cuba; they were spread out along the walls and clumped under the shade of citrus trees.

“¿El ultimo?” I called out as I walked to the end of the waiting masses, per the convention at all places where Cubans queued for services—train stations, fish shops,
panaderias
, government offices, and the famous state-run ice cream parlor, Coppelia. “Who is last?” A young woman in a green lycra tank top and striped leggings signaled me. “OK, I'm behind you,” I told her, and she nodded listlessly.

After about twenty minutes a
camello
bus wheezed its way to the stop, belching black smoke and diesel fumes.
Camellos
were bulky pink steel vehicles dubbed camels because of their humps in the back and front. They were constructed out of eighteen-wheeler semis and were yet another solution to the transportation crisis. Instead of all rushing for the bus, the waiting people recalled who they were behind and entered the bus in an orderly fashion. In this way another two buses filled up, and finally—about one hundred people and two hours later—I paid my twenty centavos and was on my way to Alamar.

At the concert in Alamar I met Julio Cardenas, aka El Hip-Hop Kid. He was a tall guy with a short afro and an earnest expression. Julio was raised by his mother in the neighboring sector of Guanabacoa. As a kid he would come rushing home from school to watch the b-boys
retandose
and
retarse—
battling—and
tirando cartones
, laying out the cardboard strip, on the back patio of his building. He and his friends watched
Beat Street, Fast Forward
, and
Breakin'
and copied the moves. Julio moved to Alamar when he was fifteen, and he became caught up in the hip hop movement that was taking Alamar by storm. He would go to the
moños
, or block parties, where people rapped and deejayed.

After Julio finished school, he went on to technical college to do a degree in civil construction. But he graduated at the height of the Special Period, when there were no jobs. So he went to work with his grandfather in a nearby fishery, for some cash to help out his mother and to get the local authorities off his back. Eventually, he found a job as a bridge operator, raising and lowering the bridge that connected Alamar and Cojimar, to allow the ships to pass through. The job was a no-brainer. At 7 a.m. Julio would raise the bridge. By early afternoon, when all the boats had gone through, he would sit back with his friends and exchange news about who had the latest rap magazine from the States, whether they'd heard this song from Pharcyde or EPMD.

In 1996 Julio formed the group Raperos Crazy de Alamar (RCA) with Carlito “Melito,” a carpenter, and Yoan. They started out just to amuse themselves, without ambitions of being serious artists. “That moment we were living was so critical, so boring,” related Julio. “Everything was closed off and censured. We, the youth, were doing hip hop just to do something, looking for a way of having fun.”

I was reminded of the young people I knew back in Sydney who had also looked to hip hop as a way out of the boredom. It wasn't the same boredom of kids in the suburbs who wanted reprieve from their sheltered existence. It was the boredom of low-paying menial jobs and truncated opportunities. The rap scholar Tricia Rose identified this need to break the cycle of boredom and alienation as one of the factors that underlay the rise of hip hop in its birthplace, the Bronx.
²
While Cuba presented quite specific conditions of economic crisis, combined with political restrictions, I realized that this void wasn't something peculiar to Cuba. And hip hop wasn't just a distraction from the void. It was a way of re-creating a sense of community and finding spaces of pleasure in the face of atomization, isolation, and the regimentation of life.

Julio and his friends listened to American rap, but they didn't understand the lyrics, and they had no clue how to write their own songs. One day Julio was at Pablo's house listening to his latest CDs. He heard the song “Boricuas on Da Set,” by Fat Joe, featured on a compilation album. Hearing the song was a turning point in his life. “'Coñyyyyoooo,'ta buena,' I said, when I heard it,” Julio related. “It was a moment that touched my heart and opened my mind. I was hearing a lot of music from Miami radio, LL Cool J, 2 Live Crew, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, but that song inspired me. I thought it could really be the Latino-American-Cuban connection.”

Pablo copied Fat Joe's song for Julio on a cassette. Julio would listen to the poor-quality recording on his old beat-up Walkman over and over, every day. “I liked the beat, but I didn't know what to do,” said Julio. “I didn't know anything about flow, cadence, rhythm. I'd never studied music. Wow! How am I gonna do it? At the start it was all a joke. But every day I began to think about a vision of how I wanted to do the song. What was guiding me was the sound of the voices, the mixture of each, and the cadences. I started to rap over the top of this song, write my first lyrics. So when Fat Joe said, ‘Oh Boricuas, clap your hands,' I started saying, ‘Todo el mundo con los manos arriba, negros, mulattos, blancos.' That was the basis of my first rap, ‘Hip Hop Es Mi Cultura.' It was an old-school rap, but it reached the people.”

RCA tried out at the hip hop festival auditions later that year. The musicians faced a panel of three judges—a professor of visual arts, a professor of drama, and a poet who said that their lyrics were undeveloped, lacking in content, and violent. Julio was incensed.
“Asere
, you don't know shit about rap,” he thought to himself. “You've never listened to rap in your life! How you gonna sit there and tell me what is rap?”

But by 1999 RCA had not only passed the auditions—they were the stars of a festival that had included the famous African American artists Mos Def, Talib Kweli, DJ Hi-Tek, dead prez, and Common. The encounter was anticipated with much emotion and excitement by the Cubans. When dead prez rapped, “I'm an African, I'm an African,” in front of a crowd of thousands at the festival, the amphitheater resounded with the thundering response of the Cuban audience chanting back the words. It was Pan-Africanism in motion. But the politics didn't always translate. Unaware of the implications of what he was about to do, the rapper M-1 pulled out a dollar bill on stage and began to burn it with a cigarette lighter, an act considered illegal and a defacement of property in the United States. “Because of this dollar, the children in my country are dying for crack or for drugs or for bling bling.” The audience went wild. How could he be burning a precious dollar bill? “Oye, no, gimme that dollar, I can buy some bread, or some french fries,” people in the audience cried out. Then he began to burn a ten-dollar bill. “Nooooo! Stop!” screamed the audience. “What is that crazy fucker doing? I could feed my whole family for a month with that.” One member of the American delegation, Raquel Rivera, was translating, explaining to the baffled audience that in America black people are dying because of the dollar bill. “But here in Cuba,” shouted one person, half-seriously, “people are dying of hunger.”

Then, inexplicably, during the performance of the pioneer American rapper Mos Def, people started leaving the stadium. “Reyes de la Calle are better than Mos Def,” said some kids on their way out. “We can't understand anything he says.”

The Latino-American-Cuban connection was somewhat tenuous when subjected to the very real differences of language, culture, and history. First, Alamar was not the South Bronx. Black Cuban youth did have access to higher education—Julio had finished his degree in civil construction—even if that education didn't necessarily lead to jobs. They did not live in communities ravaged by crack or other drugs, and bling bling was a remote concept, given Cuba's endemic scarcities.

Second, the black militancy of the American rappers was not comparable to the racial consciousness of Cuban rappers. Black Cuban identity—always expressed within the boundaries of an anticolonial nationalism—was not equivalent to American blackness, shaped through the fiery battles about slavery, desegregation, and civil rights. Cubans didn't have a civil rights movement that brought a discussion of race out into the open. The black-white dichotomy of American race relations did not exist in Cuba. While in much of America even “one drop” of black blood socially categorized a person as black, Cubans had a much broader spectrum of racial classifications—from the darker-skinned
prietos, morenos
, and
negros
to the mixed-race
pardos
and
mulatos.
The militant stance of American rappers, particularly their language of racial justice, appealed to the Cubans. But the categories of American racial politics established by Jim Crow laws in the early twentieth century could not be superimposed on a culture in which racial identity was not so clearly spelled out.

Like me, the Black August rappers had come seeking to make connections with Cuban rappers as part of the hip hop universe. But the possibility of marginalized people around the world uniting in a hip hop fellowship was starting to seem increasingly like fantasy; the black planet was more the wishful thinking of a handful of intellectuals and socially conscious rappers than a reality. Were we guilty of what the hip hop scholar Imani Perry has called a “romantic Afro-Atlanticism” that ignores the deeply conflicted interactions between people of African descent in the “New World”?
³
The idea of a shared aesthetic culture that travels between diasporic communities didn't take into account the deep residues that national belonging left behind.

As the century drew to a close, American rap was no longer the epicenter of hip hop for Cubans. Cuban rap was starting to take on its own voice, to develop its own stars and pioneers. RCA closed the 1999 festival, receiving as much applause, if not more, than the American artists. “This was a defining moment for us as a movement,” recalled Julio. “Despite the fact that they were rappers from the US, from the mecca of the world—New York— they weren't better than us. We were rapping and expressing our own realities to our own people.”

T
he annual hip hop festival in Alamar was started in June 1995 by an association of rappers known as Grupo Uno. The rappers worked on a shoestring budget to make the concerts happen, sometimes without electricity, dependent on an ailing sound system or resources donated by friends and neighbors. By the time of the 1999 festival, the Cuban state had become more involved. It provided a professional sound system, transportation to and from the events, and even food for rehearsals. And after the 2000 festival, the state disbanded Grupo Uno and entrusted the Youth League with the organization of the festivals. The absorption of hip hop into the state was underway.

At the same time the state itself was evolving in response to pressures from citizens. The appointment of the long-haired poet Abel Prieto as minister of culture was a reflection of the changes taking place in the cultural sphere. In July 2001 Prieto met with rappers to talk about forming a rap agency. After the meeting he pledged his support to Cuban rap as a movement that profoundly reflects “the theme of racial discrimination” and “highlights the dramas of marginalized barrios.” It was the first time an official had talked publicly about race and marginality. And with this newfound legitimacy, rappers began to play more of a role in organizing their festival. Rather than having music professors sitting as judges on the panels, by the 2001 festival it was the rappers themselves who were adjudicating.

“I represent my ancestors, my African roots,” rapped a white Cuban guy with light brown hair.
⁴
He formed the group Los Padrinos with a black Cuban guy. They were trying out at the hip hop festival auditions. I looked over at the panel of five judges: Magia, Alexey, Pablo, Ariel, and Yosmel, a rapper from the group Anonimo Consejo. But there was not even the shadow of a smirk on their faces. Either they were maintaining a professional demeanor in keeping with their task, or, more likely, they were unfazed by a white rapper's paying homage to his African ancestry. Cuban national identity was promoted by postindependence intellectuals as a composite of African and Spanish cultures. It was not seen as odd for a white rapper to claim his African roots because these were the shared roots of the nation and not only of black Cubans.

“Gracias.” Magia nodded at the duo when they finished their audition. Then each judge turned to jot down notes on a piece of paper with three categories: flow, lyrics, and projection. These were the criteria that were being used to judge the rappers. Magia had explained to me earlier that of the two hundred or so groups trying out in auditions across the country, seventeen would be selected from Havana and three from the provinces. Seven other groups, which were officially employed in state music agencies—these included Obsesión, Instinto, and Anónimo Consejo—were also in the festival lineup, along with five foreign groups.

I spotted my friend Lily. Lily had recently found a small one-room apartment in Cotorro, a distant suburb of Havana by the main highway. Randy still spent most of his time in the barrio of Almendares, where his grandparents lived. Lily was at every one of Randy's shows and had now come to support him at his audition. She was listening and learning about the rap that he was so passionate about.

Randy and El Huevo were up next. After being rejected during the 2000 festival auditions, Randy had gone away and worked hard at his craft, practicing every day. He sauntered onto the stage, winking at his mother. He was confident. He was lyrically in good shape. His friends were now on the panel of judges. They knew his skills. I crossed my fingers for him.