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

The latest addition to Duke University Press’s Refiguring American Music series, Buena Vista in the Club offers a compelling analysis of the effects that the transnational circulation of music, scholarship, and capital have had on Cuban popular music. In doing so, Geoffrey Baker captures both musical and social life in contemporary Cuba and highlights the role of scholars in the global flow of cultural production.

Baker is an early music scholar who previously wrote about colonial Latin America. While some may view Buena Vista in the Club as a new and surprising direction in his research, it actually is the culmination of nearly seven years of research on rap and reggaetón in Havana, stretching from 2003 to 2010. Baker acknowledges that being white and British made him an outsider to the music. However, rather than being a hindrance, Baker’s position enables him to propose a critical, and at times revisionist, approach to the study of global hip hop.

No single thesis emerges from Buena Vista in the Club. Instead, the four main chapters function as nearly independent essays, each addressing a distinct problematic and contributing a different perspective to the study of urban beat-based musics in Cuba and their position in a global hip hop network. Baker’s greatest contribution to hip hop studies is his expansion of this network to encompass not only the circulation of musicians and recordings, but also the work of international scholars, journalists, and activists. Indeed, Baker argues that the many documents produced by foreigners do more than record the local manifestation of a cultural expression; rather, they have played an integral role in turning what started as dance music for a racially mixed crowd into a movement imbued with pro-Black, Marxist ideology.

A large portion of Buena Vista in the Club is devoted to an analysis of the transnational three-way dance among Cuban officials, rappers, and activists that shaped the sound and position of Cuban rap in the last decade of the 20th century. Insisting that the Cuban bureaucracy is too fragmented to produce an effective state policy, Baker explains how the nationalization of rap in Cuba has been the product of key Cuban and North American intermediaries with a strong knowledge of hip hop culture and a deep understanding of the practical workings of Cuban politics. These intermediaries built on longstanding ideological connections between North American Black Nationalist thought and Cuban revolutionary discourse in order to shore up official support for a potentially subversive music.

Baker’s analysis of hip hop as urban practice allows him to reveal the complex interplay between state support, government control, and artists’ resistance that is an integral part of the Cuban rap scene. Analyzing the many aspects of rap performance in the city, from stage appearances to the interplay between audience and artists, to the impromptu freestyle battles that occasionally break out in public spaces, Baker is able to reveal complex dialectics between elements that are too often presented as simply oppositional: the local and the global, hustling and moralizing attitudes, or “keeping it real” versus “selling out.”

Likewise, Baker challenges the dichotomy between rap and reggaetón, a new musical genre that emerged from the localizing of rap in Spanish-speaking Panama and Puerto Rico and took Cuba by storm starting in 2002. Although Cuban rappers, along with activists and scholars on both sides of the Florida Strait, have been quick to denounce reggaetón’s overt hedonism and supposed “lexical violence,” Baker demonstrates that the new music and its associated dance actually represent “a statement of liberation from social, political, and even economic constraints.” (137) Thus even reggaetón’s lyrics – with their focus on girls, sex, and dancing – express a political stance that resonates with many young male Cubans caught between a struggling socialist state and increased capitalist pressure.

Buena Vista in the Club is a fascinating read. By mixing ethnographic observations, personal interviews, secondary sources, and...