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Reviewed by:
  • Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba by Marc D. Perry
  • Reginald A. Bess
Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba: By Marc D. Perry. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016, p. 284, $26.95.

In Negro Soy Yo, Marc D. Perry’s main focus in the work is threefold as it applies to the raperos (rappers): how they seek to give voice to what they view as black Cuban identity and race; how they call for racial justice and full citizenship; and how they perceive Afro-Cuban marginalization in the face of the belief that has been maintained for a long time that Cuba is a nonracial nation.

From the introductory pages of the book, the author makes the reader aware that his is to be a “Sankofa” approach, i.e., “moving forward while looking back.” He locates the marginalization of Afro-Cuban life when the island suffered the economic crisis of the early 1900s (under Soviet occupation). He then attempts to delineate the present status of Afro-Cuban life through the work of male and female rappers. These hip-hop artists argue for Afro-Cubans’ participation in the social justice and economic systems. This would be a move from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism.

For those not familiar with Afro-Cuban life, the book is an excellent introduction to such, as it intersects the fields of Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Latin American Studies, and Ethnomusicology. The work, then, is a fresh and “welcome addition to the study of international hip hop (there is interaction with North American rappers as well as older Afro- Cuban intellectuals) contemporary Cuban culture and society and the Black Atlantic” (Wayne Russell, coeditor of Reggaetón).

The beauty of Perry’s text is that it is an excellent book for those not on the island who do not know how the music communicates things about Afro-Cuban society. To date readers cannot get this aspect of Cuban hip hop anywhere else. Perry’s work is perhaps the first to include the description of female Cuban rappers’ critique of Cuban patriarchy. There is in this the thrust of contemporary anti-racist movement.

Perry’s book ends with a discussion of the decreased support for the “economic, social, and ideological erosion on the island” (27). In spite of this, Perry states that the accomplishments of the rappers cannot be under- evaluated in their anti-racist efforts in Cuba. [End Page 260]

Reginald A. Bess
President-Elect of SECOLAS
Independent Scholar
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