Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity by Tanya L. Saunders (review)

In this exploration of Cuban hip-hop, the author ambitiously covers a range of topics: race in the Americas, Cuba’s racial history, musical connections to and within Cuba, feminism and sexuality in contemporary Cuban life, and the place of Afro Cubans in the island’s aesthetics. Of course, the major focus is on the hip-hop movement in Cuba, its genesis, its role as a motor of social activism, and its challenge to conventional assessments of Cuba’s racial equality. The years covered in this study of the Cuban underground hip hop movement are essentially1998 to 2006, because after 2006 some artists began to leave Cuba, and the leadership underwent transition.

As part of her analysis, Saunders looks at sociological constructs and explores the movement’s ties to global capitalist networks and markets and the tension such ties create with the maintenance of local culture and local identity. A consistent message is that through hip-hop Afro-descendant Cubans became part of a challenge to continuing coloniality. The book presents artists, albums, album images, advertisement posters, and photographs of hip-hop community members. However, there are far too many names and images to easily categorize or classify. Most of the photographs are either by the author or come to us through the courtesy of Cuban photographer Sahily Borrero and other acquaintances. One group that does receive extended attention is Las Krudas, a hip-hop group determined to help others understand the complexity of their identity as black lesbians. Chapter 7 is dedicated to this group and to the topics of black feminism and queer of color critique.

In many regards, this book is a personal narrative in which the author records visits to Cuba and her contacts with the hip-hop community and reacts to how she, as a black American, was perceived (mulata when she was thinner with straight hair and negra when she was heavier and had an afro). She pays attention to what her contacts say about race and racial terminology. Interviews with hip-hop artists and other Cubans are given in Spanish and then translated into English. Hip-hop voices are also heard directly through selected lyrics that are included in the text and translated into English and through the inclusion of part of The Final Declaration of the First Cuban Hip Hop Symposium, a document read and approved on November 27, 2005 (100–102).

A few of the interview transcripts seem imprecise in places, and some translations into English need fine-tuning. In addition to frequent use of terms such as “modernity,” “hegemonic,” and “coloniality,” there are occasional instances of unusual phrasing: “Black women . . . interpellated as men” (144); “people . . . who are socially interpellated as Black or mulat@” (161).

Notes and bibliography are thorough, although dates for interviews and field notes are given only by year, not by date. Broad assumptions about the history of race and race relations in Latin America lack a reliance on key historical sources and would have benefited from a grounding in texts such as those by Herbert Klein, George Reid Andrews, Michael L. Conniff, and T. J. Davis.

Cuban Underground Hip Hop topics are structured into chapters, but there is a fair amount of overlap. A more tightly organized and less repetitive approach would have made this a better introduction to a relatively under-researched topic.