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Paper short abstract:

This presentation of a playlist of Cuban rap songs analyses the relationship between recent urban music and socio-political protest in Havana.

Paper long abstract:

Havana rap artists are said to have ushered in the New Afro-Cuban Movement circa 1994. Soaked with street-level commentaries on race relations, their songs pushed open a new era for Cuba's public sphere. Louder than its predecessor, the Nueva Trova Movement of the 1960s through the early 1990s, local rap resonated with the city's tradition of music as social commentary and socio-political protest.

The rise of Havana rap duo Los Aldeanos around 2004 was pivotal in the transition from the aesthetically black and racially charged Vieja Escuela rap to the Rap Cubano Nueva Escuela era. The fall of the Cuban Underground Movement after the government's creation of the Cuban Rap Agency was also the fall of early Cuban rap's heavy discourse on race. Many of the newer songs protested the Cuban government in the manner 'the people' thought of the Cuban government. Rappers, poets and fine artists members of the San Isidro Movement, more recently, have trailed on the legacy of Hiphop concerts and sounded public interventions. How have racially and politically loaded rap songs transformed the tone through which the arts establish public platforms for citizens' exchanges with the Cuban state? Through an acoustemology of a selection of songs by Explosion Suprema, Papa Humbertico, Los Aldeanos, Omni Zona Franca and Maykel Osorbo, this presentation analyzes the relationship between local rap and the evolution of recent socio-political protest in Havana.