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Reflections of

Cuban Rap and Hip Hop
Shawn Alfonso Wells
Professor,
Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

W

hen I was in Havana in the late 1990s,
I was interested in soaking up Cuban
culture, and especially, in learning
how to dance salsa the Cuban way. Despite my
intense interest in everything Cuban, I was intrigued by the American rap and hip hop music I
would hear blaring out of Cuban living spaces.
After several months, I finally came to know the
community whose brief musical teasers drifted
onto the street.
After conducting an interview for my fieldwork,
friends of my informant gathered in a small upstairs apartment in Central Havana and started
playing rap and hip-hop music on their stereo
equipment.
This small group of Afro Cuban men was in their
mid-to-late twenties and early thirties, and they
were eager to show me their collection of music
from Keith Sweat and R. Kelly to Tupac and Biggie Smalls. These men had grown up in Cuba at
the same time that rap music was emerging in the
United States.
As with many African descendant populations in
the Americas, they were participating in a process
of Pan African communication that defied cultural boundaries.
Cuba and the United States have always had a
symbiotic relationship when it comes to conscious or unconscious cultural exchanges between Africans in the diaspora. During the

Harlem Renaissance, poets such as the Afro Cuban, Nicolas Guillén, and Afro American, Langston Hughes, influenced and were influenced by
each other. Their works explored their negritude
and the life experiences of Blacks in the Americas. They were particularly lauded for consciously bringing the rhythms of Africa into their
poetry and for exploring their feelings of “twoness” (a term coined by DuBois) in an American
landscape. Similarly, the musical styles of son,
conga, guaracha, rumba, blues, and jazz were going through their own innovations and collaborations with artists such as Dizzy Gillespie and
Chano Pozo. The emergence of salsa, rock, R&B,
funk, soul, reggae, rap, hip-hop, and reggaeton
has been a continuation of this conversational undertone with Africa.
There are several parts to the hidden text in this
conversation. One involves the audience and their
interaction with the music, including different
venues for different types of music; the other involves the artist(s) who are making the music and
who or what is influencing and informing their
work.
The venues where hip-hop and rap music were
being played are important. Aside from people’s
houses, I noticed that hip hop and rap music were
being played at dance clubs called “La Moña,” or
at state sponsored music festivals. The difference
between the venues had to do with what types of

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