Word: havana
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...getting hot in club Asylum, but the dancers just keep on going. Outside, the cops are putting up barricades for tomorrow's celebrations. Inside, the party has already begun. At this club and ones like it around the world--in Sao Paulo, in Dakar, in Havana, in New York City--Independence Day is every night...
...open-mike session in the yard of a run-down stone house in Havana's Vedado neighborhood, several hundred fans waited in the blazing sun for an hour as a crew struggled to get the sound equipment working. The walls of the house were scrawled with vivid slogans--VIVA CUBA, FREE MUMIA and NO MORE PRISONS, next to a painting of the Cuban flag. It was easy to spot the trappings of American hip-hop in the animated crowd--baggy pants, and T shirts splashed with the names of American artists (Mos Def, the Notorious B.I.G.) or record labels...
Cuban hip-hop is brimming with a we-can-change-the-world idealism, the sort of idealism American rappers cashed in long ago when rap became about Big Business and acquiring homes in the Hamptons. At outdoor block parties in Havana, in the basement of darkened theaters or in nightclubs that throw open their doors and go bust a few weeks later, raperos touch on themes ranging from racism to ecology. The city's hip-hop scene is alive with the kind of resourcefulness needed in a place where nightly electrical interruptions and the unrelenting tropical swelter can turn music...
Orishas' success has given hip-hop a sheen of legitimacy and energized the island's small but fervent rap community. In the past few years, some 200 rap groups have sprung up in and around Havana, bearing names like Obsesion (Obsession), Reyes de la Calle (Kings of the Street) and Anonimo Consejo (Anonymous Advice). Many of them hail from tough neighborhoods of Havana or Alamar, a town of 300,000 mostly Afro-Cubans living in concrete high-rises originally built to house Soviet laborers in the 1970s. Working with budgets so small they probably wouldn't be enough to cover...
...reality tours are as heavy on left-wing politics as the Chiapas trip. Global Exchange sponsors "Jammin' in Havana," with an emphasis on music, and its next visit to Iran focuses on Iranian cinema. Nor are all reality tourists liberals. "Republicans are not uncommon," claims Global Exchange spokesman Jason Mark. He recalls with fondness a Texan who broke into God Bless America during a Cuba tour. "The Cubans groaned, and he demanded to know 'What's the problem? God or America?'" The trips have been known to provoke participants to activism. Two participants on a Global Exchange trip to Haiti...