Wandering through the plaza in Old Havana, with tourist stalls selling Che Guevara ashtrays and Cuban Revolution T-shirts, one wonders if this is what the idea of revolution has been reduced to. But go to a Cuban rap concert, and it’s apparent that young black people are reworking the vision of revolution to encompass the kinds of changes they want to see. During a performance in Central Havana by Anónimo Consejo (Anonymous Advice), one of Cuba’s most popular rap groups, MC Sekuo Umoja, wearing a purple and yellow dashiki with his hair in short dreads, stood before a microphone. Sekuo, formerly known as Yosmel, had changed his name to emphasize his spiritual connections with Africa. “We, as hip-hop, say no to war and imperialism,” he said. “Anónimo Consejo revolución!” The crowd cheered. “Hip-hop revolución. Put your fist in the air.”
With ideas like “hip-hop revolución,” the children of 1959 are taking the slogans and analysis they were taught and using them to question the changes going on around them. As the revolutionary years gave way to the austere Special Period, racism became visible once again. And so Cuba’s young rappers ask: If the birthright of the revolution was to make all Cubans equal, why are some more equal than others? Why are blacks not treated the same as whites? Under this same rubric of equality, black women are fighting for equal space alongside black men. As the all-female lesbian trio Las Krudas rap: “There is no true revolution without women.” For Cuban rappers, this revolutionary imagination is part of a longer historical trajectory of black cultural resistance.
In a song titled “Mambí,” the rap group Obseción identify their struggle with the mambises, or Afro-Cuban fighters in the War of Independence against Spain. In “A Veces,” Anónimo Consejo connect the history of Cuban slaves with the situation of contemporary Afro-Cubans. They see the aspirations of slaves and independence fighters expressed in the Cuban revolution, and this desire for freedom continues to orient the thoughts and actions of a new generation. As Cuban poet and cultural critic Roberto Zurbano says, there is “one element that shapes the thought of the Cuban rapper and that, moreover, differentiates them from others in the world: the emancipatory imaginary that these youth share with the Cuban Revolution, its forms of struggle, its acts of resistance; as its characteristic cultural cimarronaje at work from the time of the Haitian Revolution through today’s Cuban culture and history.”2
The quality of cimarronaje, or the rebelliousness of the runaway slave, is identified with the Cuban revolution as a lone voice contesting neoliberalism in a global capitalist order. At the same time, rappers invoke cimarronaje as a way of criticizing the inequalities and hierarchies that are developing as market integration deepens.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, the past has also come to play an important role in reconfiguring the revolutionary imagination in the context of Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution. Venezuelan community media producers, for example, frequently make claims to indigenous and black identity as a way of positioning themselves in broader relations of class and marginality. “We are the children of Guaicaipuro,” says Carlos Carles of Radio Perola, referring to a mythical indigenous chief, “those who screamed in the last moments of their lives, ‘Come, Spaniards, and see how the last free man of this land dies.’ ”
In Chávez’s Venezuela, where the republican hero Bolívar occupies a central role in official narratives, barrio residents re-create marginalized figures from the past as the basis for their social activism. Palmiro Avilán, a community leader from the popular parish of Petare, is a devotee of Maria Lionza, a cult based on various spirits of indigenous and black fighters from the past, such as Guaicaipuro, Negro Primero, and Maria Lionza herself. “These spirits have the elements of blackness,” Avilán told me, “a spirituality that’s been gestating and has its roots in the rochelas [communities of escaped slaves] that existed for more than 250 years in the plains. It was in the plains that they created the liberation army of resistance to rescue five countries from Spanish imperialism. One of the first leaders was José Tomás Boves, who led a group of ragtag Indians and blacks against a republican army that was in the hands of mantuanos [creole elites].”
In nationalist histories, Boves is an anti-hero who betrayed the cause of independence by launching a rebellion against the Bolívar-led republican army in 1814. But he has been mythified in popular culture as a renegade caudillo who gave importance to marginalized Indians and blacks. Avilán sees himself as a modern-day Boves, leading an army of those excluded from society.