IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 98

Going back to roots
others, for the first time ever. The following is an excerpt in which they narrate historical events totally missing
from our schools’ curriculum: “Treason,
deceit, and supposed liberation for my
people/hacked en masse after the independence/Independent Party of Color/Men, women, children/La Maya,

Hip Hop comes into Cuba through
dance. Then came rap, graffiti, and B
Vox with their public interventions on
street corners, imitating the live sound
of beat machines and scratching. The
movement surged as an imitation of the
one born in New York. In the beginning, the dances, words and instruments
did not reflect Cuban reality at all.

Holguín, Santa Clara, Matanzas, unarmed massacre in combat they hid the
history, but memory attacks once
again…”

By the end of the nineties, a Hip Hop
reflective of the reality found in Cuban
homes begins to emerge; Rap is used to
highlight. Grupouno, a Cuban Rap
promoter run by Rodolfo Rensoli, created the first festival in 1995. From
1996 one, it takes place in Alamar and
similar ones take place at numerous
clubs, meeting places, colloquia and
conference about race. I remember of
song that won at this festival, “Achabón
cruzao,” by the Amenaza group, which
is today Orishas. It talked about miscegenation: “They said ‘black’ but didn’t
count me/they said ‘white’ by that clan
didn’t accept me/they said so many
things, I am the being no one wanted/black and white, the cry of a mestizo…”

Hermanos de Causa is another pioneer
group that takes up a critical discourse
in which one finds irrefutable proof of
racism and its characteristics in Cuba.
In their classic “Lágrimas negras” they
examine national attitudes about race in
the country. They begin thus: “Don’t
say there is no racism where there is
one racist” and go on to provide examples of the kind of representation blacks
get on TV, with their secondary roles as
slaves or thieves; stereotypes regarding
beauty in homes, the trite story of the
white father who doesn’t want his
daughter with a black man, and social
commentary regarding black men and
white women marrying. Every word in
this song has millions of witnesses in
Cuban reality, which is the context in
which I operate. The chorus goes: “I
feel deep hatred for your racism, you no
longer confuse me with your irony/and I
weep without you seen my tears, which
are black tears, like my life…”

Hip Hop begins to become critical of
the Cuban reality absent from televisions and radios: there are suddenly
lyrics that dust off black history.
Anónimo Consejo sings about the Independent Party of Color and the 1912
massacre: thousands of young people
hear the names of martyrs like Evaristo
Estenoz, Pedro Ivonet, Eugenio Lacoste
and Colonel Zacarías Suárez, and those
of activists like Gloria Rolando, Rogelio Martínez Furé, Leida Oquendo,
and Tomás Fernández Robaina, among

Other songs, like “Negro cubano,” reflect self-discrimination, with lines like:
“They’ve been soaking us in bleach
since we were kids,” and include racist

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