Word: rapped
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When the sound system finally lit up, the crowd erupted in glee as the rap duo Grandes Ligas (Big Leagues) sprinted onstage hurling raps as sharp and rousing as any of those by American rap star Method Man. "!Manos arribas!" (Throw your hands in the air!) shouted Grandes Ligas. The audience let out a roar and answered in English, "And wave them like you just don't care!" Unlike American hip-hop audiences, who usually keep their feet planted on the floor, Cuban hip-hop fans frequently break into wild dancing. "Salsa is everywhere in Cuba...
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...
...first popular Cuban rap groups was Orishas. In a nation that has long moved to the pulse of son and salsa, the upstart group delivered the kind of musical shock that young Cubans may one day remember with the same fondness that American baby boomers feel when they recall first hearing Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode. Two years ago, Orishas introduced a new song, 537 Cuba, that transformed the stately Cuban classic Chan Chan (a universally recognized tune among Cubans, like Guantanamera) into a rollicking American-style hip-hop anthem. The song struck a chord; young fans began eagerly...
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...
...during the mid-1990s. Why did it take so long to get a foothold in Cuba, the richly musical culture that gave the world rumba and mambo? "Hip-hop everywhere else has one reality. We have another," explains Ariel Fernandez, 24, a DJ, organizer of Alamar's annual summer rap festival and a central figure in Havana hip-hop. Fernandez couldn't be more right: Cuba's record industry is entirely government run, from the recording studios to the record stores. Which means that raperos, like bus drivers, hotel clerks and doctors and lawyers, work for the state. And state...