Content area
This thesis explores the dynamics involved in the implementation of cultural policies in Santiago de Cuba, as they relate to two musical phenomena: rap and reggaeton. More than a top-down report on state intervention in cultural affairs, this ethnography digs deeper to explore how cultural producers, mainly young black Cubans involved in hip-hop, are active agents in the everyday life reproduction and construction of a hegemonic formation; and the articulation of alternative hegemonic matrixes positioned within, on the margins and in parallel to the state formation. The relation between these young Cubans and the dominant formation is then approached outside of an oppositional and resistance model. The ideological articulations of rap producers - officially authenticated by cultural authorities - and reggaetoneros - from reggaeton: a recent but contagious Caribbean musical phenomenon - shed light on the various strategies of action developed by these actors to cope with the current Cuban conjunctures. Rappers and reggaetoneros have developed respective strategies to promote their incorporation within dominant networks of influence such as cultural state institutions and the international music industry. These strategies can be understood as expressions of their desire to increase their level of agency rather than evidence of co-optation. In addition to highlighting the dynamic and relational nature of state intervention in cultural affairs, this grounded ethnographic approach further explores how the state instantiates itself and thus appears in particular conjunctures, while always representing itself as omnipresent and omniscient, a representation which is especially significant in the Cuban case, and which weakens the post-hegemonic proposal. The local re-articulation of policies created at the national level further highlights scale discrepancies in which revolutionary projects are re-interpreted in light of alternative ideological referents. Finally, this thesis argues that 'horizontal' organizing of the hip-hop movement in eastern Cuba has destabilized hegemonic matrixes that positioned Havana as the rap mecca in Cuba and contributed to the cognitive mapping of Cuba as part of the Caribbean region, a geographic fact that has only recently been significantly revived by the revolutionary state. The audio-visual document Respect Your Necklaces (28 min.) presented in appendix to the written thesis illustrates how hip-hop activists and rappers from Santiago de Cuba attempt to make in-roads into the music world. The advertisement called Eslabon (30 sec.) produced in teamwork with Isnay Rodriguez Agramonte exposes the audio-visual conventions and aesthetics of hip hop made in Santiago.