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<h1 class="page__title title" id="page-title">Why USAID Could Never
Spark a Hip Hop Revolution in Cuba</h1>
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<p>Any attempt to engineer a U.S.-affiliated movement from
above is destined to be revealed for the farce that it is.</p>
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<div class="field-item even">Sujatha Fernandes</div>
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content="2014-12-15T00:00:00-05:00">12/15/2014<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://nacla.org/news/2014/12/15/why-usaid-could-never-spark-hip-hop-revolution-cuba">https://nacla.org/news/2014/12/15/why-usaid-could-never-spark-hip-hop-revolution-cuba</a></small></small></b><br>
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<p>Between 2006 and 2007, I received numerous visits from two
State Department officials at my home in Harlem, New York. I
had just written a book on Cuban cultural production, with a
large section on rap. I was never home when they came, so
they left messages with my neighbors, telling them I should
urgently contact them. When they finally found me at home
one day, I agreed to meet with them at a nearby Starbucks.
During the meeting, they wanted to know about my research on
Cuban rap. One of the agents, a male, said that he enjoyed
Cuban rap, he listened to it frequently and wanted to know
what my favorite groups were. The other, a woman, pressed me
for more details about my work in Cuba. I didn’t give out
any information. I told them that anything I could say on
the topic was already written in my book. After this
meeting, the harassment continued. I finally sought out a
human rights lawyer, Michael Smith. He informed me that it
is never advisable to meet with an agent of the government
alone, and that if an agent should try to make contact, one
should have a lawyer write to the agent on one’s behalf.
Smith then sent them a letter saying that I did not wish to
speak to them anymore, and that if they had any questions,
they could contact him directly. We didn’t hear from them
again.</p>
<p>So last week, when the AP news story broke about <a
href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ce2a878ea7a941fb93fe718ee6d46e9e/us-co-opted-cubas-hip-hop-scene-spark-change"
target="_blank">USAID infiltrating Cuban rap groups</a>
between 2009 and 2010, I was not surprised. Infiltration is
something that Cuban rappers have been wary of for some
time. Navigating the legions of foreign journalists,
producers, researchers, and artists has always been a
challenge for Cuban rappers, especially during the heyday of
the movement in the early 2000s, and there was sometimes a
suspicion of people who didn’t enter the scene through
someone known to the community. But in the latter half of
the 2000s, when many rappers were emigrating and foreign
contacts and state support were drying up, Cuban rappers
were more vulnerable to the likes of outside actors like
USAID, who sought to infiltrate the movement and manipulate
it to its own ends.</p>
<p>But the USAID mission to “spark” a “pro-democracy” movement
of Cuban rappers was bound to fail for many reasons. Cubans
already had a movement. Over the last several decades, Cuban
hip hoppers have built a multi-faceted movement that raises
issues of racism within Cuban society, provides a channel of
expression for Afro-Cuban youth, makes connections with
activists and celebrated artists around the globe, and has
had a long-lasting impact on Cuban cultural production. It
was an organic movement built from the ground up, from the
streets and the housing projects. Cuban rap is hope, and
anger, and poetry, and no U.S. agency could create that.</p>
<p>The Cuban hip hop movement was not trying to overthrow the
Castro government. Artists found ways to work within the
system, while making their criticisms in veiled ways, or
even openly at times. The “Hip Hop <em>Revolución</em>”
that they talk about is one that is in dialogue with the
historic Cuban revolution, and youth have been putting
pressure on their leaders to live up to the promises of that
revolution. Even the younger, more confrontational artists
like Los Aldeanos, one of the groups that USAID tried to
infiltrate, didn’t see themselves as trying to topple the
government. That was never part of their agenda.</p>
<p>Pro-democracy means something completely different to Cuban
rappers than it does to USAID. For Cuban rappers, democracy
has been about a more full sense of participation and
recognition within their society. It has been about being
able to influence policy and express their ideas about
racism, inequality, and the contradictions that free market
policies have brought to an increasingly dysfunctional
bureaucratic socialism. It has been about trying to rethink
what revolution might mean for the next generation and how
they could see that in practice. For USAID, democracy
promotion means overthrowing the Cuban government and
ushering in a free market regime friendly to the United
States. Those two goals have never been and could never be
compatible.</p>
<p>The documents secured by the AP reveal a frightening level
of manipulation of Cuban rappers by USAID. Like with
ZunZuneo, the failed <a
href="https://nacla.org/news/2014/4/14/why-usaid%E2%80%99s-cuban-twitter-program-was-secret"
target="_blank">Cuban twitter project also engineered by
USAID</a>, the actions of this agency put Cubans at risk
of state repression and threatened a closure of the critical
spaces that rappers had already built and defended. USAID
realizes the power of culture to provide a powerful
political voice for young people. What it doesn’t realize is
that in a society shaped by successive generations of
revolutionary projects, any attempt to engineer a
U.S.-affiliated movement from above is destined to be
revealed for the farce that it is.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Sujatha Fernandes teaches Sociology at Queens College
and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of
several books including </em>Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts,
State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures<em>
(Duke University Press, 2006), and, most recently, </em>Close
to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation<em>
(Verso, 2011).</em></p>
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