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This is dedicated to East Havana / where we party in the alleys / Micro 10,322, the wide street, Zona 11 / The capital of rap will always and forever be.
Soandry, Hermanos de Causa
About six miles east of Havana, just beyond the aquamarine blue of the Caribbean Sea and the low-density shrubs of the flat plains, stand the tall, rectangular buildings of the Alamar housing projects. The five- and six-story buildings were designed by Soviet architects and built by microbrigades (ordinary people organized into work teams) as a solution to housing shortages in Havana in the 1970s. As part of slum clearance programs, black communities from slum areas such as Llega y Pon, Las Yaguas, and Palo Cagao were relocated to Alamar. The 1970s were a grim era of Cuban history, known euphemistically as the quinquenio gris (gray five years) but that actually lasted closer to fifteen years, when the orthodoxy of Soviet socialism overshadowed cultural and social life on the island. The heavy and somber buildings immortalized the spirit of those years. With a population of 300,000 in over 2,000 buildings, Alamar is the largest housing project in the world. It's no wonder that Alamar has been called Cuba's South Bronx.
East of Havana is a tribute to the housing projects of Alamar that gave rise to Cuba's hip-hop movement. Among the plethora of documentaries that have recently been produced on Cuban hip-hop, including La Fabrika (Lisandro Pérez-Rey, 2004), Desde el Principio (Vanessa Díaz, 2006), Inventos (Eli Jacobs Fantuzzi, 2003), and The Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars (Joshua Bee Alafia, 2004), none addresses Alamar as deeply as this film.
From the beginning of the film, the viewer is exposed to the sounds of the unique and diverse genre of Cuban hip-hop. Because of the difficulties of having...