Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba by Marc D. Perry (review)

This book establishes a dialogue between Afro-centric cultural practice, hip hop music, and racial and political identity in Cuba. Its importance resides in its contributions to the fields of Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Latin American Studies, and Ethnomusicology. At its core, this work also challenges much of the myth and conventional wisdom about racism in Cuba, chiefly the assertion that, in contrast to societies founded on capitalist principles, Cuban society is not racist. Indeed, in his longitudinal historical study of Cuban political history, realized alongside ethnographic research in Cuba's hip-hop community, Marc D. Perry pushes us to consider; "Amid an era increasingly brokered by market liberalizations, a withering socialist state, deepening social stratification, and—significantly—resurgent levels of racial inequality, how might such black self-fashionings complicate Cuban legacies of historical exceptionalism while advancing alternative citizenship claims both within and beyond the nation?" (4–5).

To consider this question, Perry employs a methodology that includes interviews, participant observation, analysis of song lyrics, and archival research. This methodology allows him to trace an intersectional trajectory that engages race, class, and gender to show the increasing racial inequality accompanying the introduction of neoliberal practices in post-revolutionary Cuba; it also allows him to show this growth as a countercurrent to hip hop's development as a black activist movement. The neoliberal economic turn coincides with the popularization of decidedly less political reggaetón music.

Indeed, one of the strengths of Negro Soy Yo is the intersectional analysis that frames its narrative structure. Moving from a historical analysis beginning in 1998, a date he identifies as crucial to the development of hip hop in and around Havana—a date that coincides with the legalization of the dollar—Perry contextualizes the rise of hip hop as a cultural movement connected to black liberation and the state's engagement with both. Following the first two chapters, Perry provides a contextual framework and analysis of his ethnographic setting, particularly examining a series of hip-hop festivals as performative spaces of race and collaboration among African American and Puerto Rican musicians, focusing on the Cuban duo Obsesión in Chapter 3. He follows this in Chapter 4 by taking up the issues of gender and the contestation of gender norms, through an analysis of female hip-hop musicians such as Las Krudas. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the role of the state as it seeks to incorporate hip hop into revolutionary national culture and look into the growth of other musical genres such as reggaetón as contestatory manifestations of black pride.

Key to the arguments of these last two chapters is the assertion that hip hop has shaped a "nascent black counterpublic rooted in claims of a black political difference within an otherwise nonracial Cuban national imaginary underscoring, in turn, dilemmas of Cuban race and national citizenship in the neoliberal era" (27). Chapter 6 further develops this point in view of the waning support of hip hop by the state, giving way to public and media debates from black intellectuals aligned with hip hop and independent strategies by rappers to articulate and perform blackness on the island, or depart to the diaspora.

Perry convincingly demonstrates how hip-hop activism reveals the prejudices suffered by black Cubans in the supposedly nonracial society of post-revolutionary Cuba. His analysis also suggests further inquiry into collaborations and black unity across the Caribbean, in the United States, and beyond.

Perhaps scholars inspired by this work could expand both the international and gender aspects of Perry's argument. He has shown that the economic, political, and musical shifts necessitate sustained study of Cuban hip hop and opened the door to expanded and further nuanced studies of the longitudinal development of Afro-Cuban activism and music overall, especially given the popularity of reggaetón and its place in the global market.