IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 105

most all the country’s cities, although
Havana has the greatest representation.
It reflects in its fundamental themes the
concerns, frustrations, desires and
search of a large number of youth that
sees no future or alternatives for personal growth and development in a system whose notion of wellbeing and
prosperity that cannot be produced by
the limited parameters of the government’s unquestionable and selfpromoting, official rhetoric.

schoolrooms solely for their sexual orientation. Cultural manifestations of African origin were also silences and prohibited.
The structural crisis of this failed model
generated all sorts of socioeconomic
commotion in the 1990s. This made
evident the enormous retrograde burden, injustice, and despair of a society
sick with intolerance, induced fear, and
overt repression.
In this context, a cultural movement
emerged from the very bottom of Cuban
society. It has incalculable dimensions
and possibilities for expressing the concerns, frustrations, needs and desires of
a people who no longer believe in the
government’s promises and speeches,
but lacks a voice and space in which to
make their rights, critiques and ideas
known.

An unending number of groups and
soloists from the poorest corners of our
cities, began to work on a new kind of
lyrics, a poetic discourse directly connected to our crudest realities, to the
problems and shortages that are the
scourge of t