Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana by Geoffrey Baker (review)

My first encounter with Geoffrey Baker’s Buena Vista in the Club was rather unique. I was told I was “in it” and as any curious scholar might, I flipped quickly to the bibliography to find my reference. However, my name wasn’t in the bibliography. I skimmed through a few pages to discover I was in the actual text. I had conducted my doctoral research in Havana over much of the same timeframe as Baker, and worked with many of the same rappers he makes reference to. Suddenly I realized I had entered Baker’s ethnographic orb, and found myself amongst his subjects. His introduction eloquently reminds us, as cultural scholars “we can no longer be airbrushed from the picture we create” (p. 22).

Baker presents us with an extremely valuable contribution to ethnomusicology and Caribbean studies, making Buena Vista in the Club a must read for scholars of global hip-hop or Cuban culture. His exquisite writing style and inquisitive tone guide the reader through his analysis which presents a profound ethnographic study of rap and reggaetón in Havana. What I found most interesting however, was how he intertwines a second narrative about Cuban scholarship and institutional politics that molded the local music scene. The commoditization and globalization of Cuban music by foreign explorers (artists, activists, and scholars) is a fundamental theme of the book, and is the primary focus of my review.

Baker compares the overseas frenzy propelled by the album and film project “Buena Vista Social Club” (Cooder 1997, Wenders 1999) to that which occurred with Cuban rap during the same years (pp. 3-6). Through an analysis of discourse, Baker highlights the parallels between the foreign popularity generated in son by the “Buena Vista Social Club,” and the wave of attraction that followed the New York based Black August Hip-Hop Collective’s discovery of Havana’s rap scene in the late 1990s. Both of these projects generated a first-world search for lost purity and authenticity in Cuba’s musical genres. By considering why there was an explosion of interest by scholars and filmmakers in Cuban rap, and what their resulting documents or films were, Baker allows us to see how these projects impacted their (and in-turn, his) subjects of study (p. 249-250).

The book is separated into four lengthy chapters. These focus on: the nationalization of Cuban rap and its relationship with the state; the growth of reggaetón’s popularity; the urban geography of music; and the rise and fall of an afro-centric black power era of Cuban rap. Baker’s investigation is drawn from fieldwork conducted in Havana between 2003-2010, complemented by a historical review of Cuban rap scholarship for six years prior to his arrival. His analysis centers on language and text, built from a combination of rap lyrics, local and foreign news reports, scholarly publications, and documentary films. These are then interposed with first hand interviews and ethnographic experiences. In regards to the later, I would have liked Baker to provide us with a more in-depth discussion about his methodology, rather than piecing it together from endnotes and references.

Baker effectively brings to the forefront the disjuncture between what U.S. artists and activists sought after in Cuban rap, versus what Cuban rappers were actually producing (p. 244-248). The Black August Hip-Hop Collective, along with a troupe of well-known U.S. rap artists, arrived in Havana during the late 1990s in a quest for an ideological oasis of afro-centric rap, resistance to U.S. capitalism, and a celebration of Cuba’s Black Panther exiles. Local rappers, keen to what foreigners wanted to discover, and influenced by the potential for success abroad in the midst of the Special Period, adopted and tailored their narratives to suit the much-sought-after image. How much of this adoption was an organic acculturation versus an...