• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 08 / 28 / 2010

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While it is true that the way to communicate through Rap does not belong to a Cuban style, the national public increasingly knows and enjoys this imported musical genre that is enriched by the attributes and reality of Cuba.

This movement takes profits from the roots and culture to reflect another vision of the Cuban way.

Cuban Hip-hop resorts to papers, workshops, video discussions and excursions to rethink the genre beyond concerts and festivals. The Cuban Rap Agency, the Cuban Institute of Music and the Hermanos Saiz Association support such activities on the island.

The music players this summer, with regard to the 6th Cuban Hip Hop Symposium, were Hermanos de Causa, Anónimo Consejo, Brebaje Man, the solo Danay and Mexican Moyenei, performers of urban musical style.

Hip hop lovers enjoyed some international exponents of the genre like Deheshi Empire and Lou Piensa from Canada, U.S. Poets for Peace, and colorful dancers and improvisers of break dance from the aforementioned nations, Mexico and Haiti.

One of the major concerns of researchers and players in the Cuban Hip Hop nowadays is the social integration of alternative music. On the other hand, they are also concerned about the gender focus of this musical discourse and the violence reflected in the lyrics of popular Cuban music.

This movement is still going through difficulties such as a concert space, little attention by the media and the empiricism of composers and musicians.

It is obvious the maturity in the discussion of subjects that concern the urban movement, showing an aesthetic resurgence, says the Director of the Cuban Agency of Rap, Magia Lopez, "it has been lost many important elements such as essence, history; the new generation has forgotten that first generation which had an initial trajectory. Today this is not inherited.

There is a gap between one generation and another. We are looking inside to see why thing are wrong."

Hip hop movement began in Cuba as a reflection of social protest, and blackness through culture. As in all latitudes, the development of this movement is supported in rap, break dancing, DJs and graffiti from the visual side.

Hip hop breaks into the island in the late 1970s. At first, it established itself as a rapper break dancing movement.

Meanwhile, the current Cuban rap represents, among other things, the Afro-Cuban heritage of the nation without resorting to stereotypes, mainly from the contents and the conception itself of this movement.

Gender becomes evolutionary space of cultural expression and identity of new generations of Cubans.

By Maité López Pino

Cubasi Translation Staff