Close to the Edge

by Sujatha Fernandes

  On the way out I bumped into Jorge, who was sitting by the door. “Are you a foreigner?” he asked. “Yes,” I mumbled, as if that last outburst hadn’t proved it. “Then we don’t have your pass,” he responded. “All foreigners must pick up their passes at the ticket booth on the first day of the festival.”

  The amphitheater in Alamar was a large open-air stadium with rows of concrete blocks for seating and patches of grassy area. It had been the site of the annual rap festival since the beginning. On the opening night of the festival in August 2001, the space was filled to capacity, with a sea of young people in baseball caps, bandannas, baseball jerseys, berets, guayaberas, and checkered shirts. The stage was bathed in alternating red and blue flashes from a strobe light. A set of turntables was mounted on a plank of wood held up by giant steel drums. At the front of the stage speakers towered over the audience. Draped behind the stage was a large Cuban flag, the red triangle with a five-pointed white star visible above the pumping fists of the performers on stage. To the left of the Cuban flag was a graffiti piece that read ALAMAR in block letters at the top.

  The ugly cement construction of the amphitheater, typical of the surrounding housing projects, came to life with the resounding thrum of the bass, the energy of the crowd with its hands in the air, and the tags of graffiti covering the walls.

  At the closing event the group Reyes de la Calle performed a song about the balseros, the Cubans who leave for Miami in boats. The rappers had wanted to include images of the balseros on a screen behind them. This was not acceptable to the president of the Youth League. He told Ariel, “CNN may be filming it, and this would lend support to the counterrevolutionaries.” So Ariel asked Reyes de la Calle to do the song without the images.

  DJ Flipper at Hip Hop Festival in Alamar, August 2001

  The Cuban government could support the rap festival so long as rappers stayed within certain prescribed boundaries. But some rappers wanted to talk about more controversial themes than before. How long would they accept directives from the Youth League president? Censorship was not always the most workable strategy. In these circumstances there was nothing like a crisis from the North to unite Cubans and give new fire to the meaning of revolution.

  The United States is under military attack! They’ve blown up the World Trade Center! They’ve blown up the Pentagon! Now they’re blowing up Peeeeeburgh!” the grandmother in the house where I stayed in El Vedado was shouting from the living room. I came running out of my room. We flicked between the two channels available on state TV. The images of planes crashing into buildings were unreal. None of the commentators seemed to know what was going on. And why would anyone want to blow up Pittsburgh? It was several hours later that the news came through about the hijackers of four planes who had reduced the twin towers to rubble and crashed into the side of the Pentagon and an empty field in rural Pennsylvania.

  I sat before the television watching the grainy images of the towers imploding over and over again. I was unsure if this was yet another Hollywood disaster movie or if it really happened. Fidel was involved in the inauguration of a new school that evening. Ariel came over, and we watched the live broadcast from the school where Fidel addressed a packed hall of elementary school kids. Fidel was resplendent in his military fatigues and for three hours cajoled, provoked, and meditated on the events of the day before a group of ten-and eleven-year-olds. He expressed his sympathies for the American people. He offered the resources of the country to assist in treatment of the victims. And he urged caution on the part of the American government.

  “Whenever there is a tragedy like this one, no matter how difficult to avoid it may be, I see no other way but to keep calm,” advised Fidel. “And if at some point I am allowed to make a suggestion to an adversary who has been tough with us for many years, we would advise the leaders of the powerful empire to keep their composure, to act calmly, not to be carried away by a fit of rage or hatred and not to start hunting people down, dropping bombs just anywhere.” He paused. “Put down that pencil,” he reprimanded a schoolgirl in the audience. “Don’t doodle. Try to pay attention while I’m talking.”

  The Casa de la Cultura in Central Havana at Carlos Tercera and Castillejo was an old mansion that had been converted into a culture center. In the back there was an open area where the Youth League had mounted a stage, set up with antiquated speakers and clunky microphone stands. Young people were milling around, waiting through numerous sound checks. Rappers responded with a combination of good humor and resignation to numerous nonfunctioning microphones. They winced at the piercing feedback that assaulted them from speakers placed too close together on the small stage.

  This was July 2002 and I was back in Cuba. In the short space of ten months much had changed. Julio was one of the first of several rappers to leave Cuba—he had stayed on in New York after participating in the first US tour of Cuban rappers. He was sleeping in a room the size of a closet in the cold of the bitter New York winter and wondered whether he had made the right decision. He was not an athlete or a professional musician with a future in the US or even someone with family in the States to look out for him. He was poor and black, one of the stars of a movement that came up from nothing. To survive in New York he would have to put his music career on hold and bus tables like many other immigrants in this city.

  The world had also changed irrevocably. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, all US airspace was closed to passenger planes leaving Cuba. Canada-bound planes with tourists who had been in Cuba were forced to fly an extra nine hours along the coast of the US, a harbinger of what was to follow. The US declared a global war on terror, and the charges that Cuba is a terrorist nation resurfaced, with accusations that the island was harboring fugitives, selling biotechnology, and trading with the enemies of the US. Five Cuban nationals carrying out counterterrorism work in the US were convicted in a federal court in Miami and sentenced to prison. There were stepped up efforts by US officials to find and prosecute former Black Panthers in Cuba. Assata Shakur—who was given political asylum in Cuba following her escape from jail in 1979—would soon be classified by the FBI as a “domestic terrorist” with a bounty of $1 million dollars on her head. Meanwhile, Cuban rappers were organizing events and had become bolder about saying things in public that earlier they had uttered only privately.

  At the Casa de la Cultura, Yosmel stood before a microphone. His hair was in short dreads. Yosmel had changed his name to Sekou Umoja to emphasize his spiritual connections with Africa. He was speaking passionately to the gathered crowd. “You have people saying, ‘You’re Cuban, you’re Cuban, but they’re not, they’re not.’ Well, then, where did ‘they’ come from? They come from Africa. We have Afro-Cubans in Cuba, Afro-Americans in America, Afro-British in England, and if you’re born in Russia with this color skin, are you gonna come to Cuba and try to say that I’m Russian?” He paused. There were laughs from the audience; the irony of that last comparison was not lost on them. “You’re separating yourself from who you are. This is who you are. When someone feels marginalized, it’s never because they wanted to feel that way. If the government wants us to respect José Martí, if they say we are all human, then first they have to respect us.” The crowd burst into cheers and whistles.

  “No war, no blood, peace now,” Yosmel, aka Sekou, said as he took the microphone and led the crowd in the chant. The words resounded in the small space.

  “Afghanistan has been the first casualty of the war on terror,” Sekou told the crowd. “Who will be next? Iraq? Maybe Cuba? We, as hip hop, say no to war and imperialism. Anónimo Consejo Revolución!” The crowd cheered. “Hip Hop Revolución. Put your fist in the air.” More cheers and whistles. The aging sound equipment came to life with a few static groans. As the beat kicked in, Sekou and his rapping partner Kokino, aka Adeyeme, began to rap, “No more war, No more blood, no more hunger!” “No more war! No more deaths!” continued Adeyeme. “Talkin’ ‘bout something real, this ain’t a game Prepare yourself for w
hat’s coming I know what it is, stay calm, I take action.” I recognized the phrases from Fidel’s speech on the night of 9/11. As the world was yet again being subjected to arbitrary acts of American imperial power, Fidel’s words resonated with Cuban rappers.

  Here, in a former mansion-turned-culture-house, technology courtesy of the Soviets, Cuban rappers were reworking the ideal of revolution to encompass the kind of changes they wanted to see as a local and global movement. The Hip Hop Revolucion drew inspiration from the Cuban Revolution and from Fidel, but it was also connected to the motherland. And perhaps this imagined connection to Africa was what kept rappers somewhat outside the orbit of the state, even as they continued to collaborate with it. So maybe the black planet was not turning out to be a reality, but did that really matter? So long as rappers could invoke this mythical global collectivity, imagine themselves as part of it, it was still meaningful. Their ties with French record labels and African American rappers, even fans in San Diego and Montreal, gave Cuban rappers a level of recognition. When black American celebrities like Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte came to Cuba to meet with local rappers, it meant that they were somebody.

  Anónimo Consejo

  Adeyeme Umoja of Anónimo Consejo

  “Hip Hop Cuba with Africa!” the rapper Amehel of the group Profundo said to a serious and focused audience with its fists raised in the air. “Hip Hop Cuba with Vieques! The undergroun’ protests Israeli repression of Palestinian children.” There was a shout from someone in the audience: “Free Mumia Abu Jamal. Libertad”

  The foreign news cameras were trained on Rubén Hernández, one of the top functionaries of the Youth League. Hernández was a white Cuban with a high forehead; he was slightly balding and plump and had a brisk businesslike manner. He was standing beneath an archway on the campus of the University of Havana, answering questions about the upcoming rap festival.

  “What about the criticisms of Castro coming from the rappers? Is this a new dissident movement?” asked the reporter.

  “No,” replied Hernández, unmoved by the question. “The rap movement here in Cuba expresses a lot of the same ideas that you see Fidel addressing—protesting against the war, expressing solidarity with political prisoners in the US and our five brothers imprisoned for counterterrorism, denouncing el imperio. They are not gusanos, no, rap in Cuba is a revolutionary movement.”

  When Hernández had finished speaking with the reporter, I approached him myself. “Rap is a new component of Cuban culture,” Hernández told me. “And right from the start, rap has had the support of the Youth League, which rappers see as the only institution or, sorry, I mean the institution that they can most organically incorporate into. These rappers are just kids with hardly any academic training in music. They have a formula that, although it has a social base, still lacks much in terms of aesthetics. The Youth League groups together the vanguard of the rap movement, helping it raise its level of artistic quality.”

  Magia was standing nearby. “He’s sooo patronizing,” I told her later, rolling my eyes. “How can a bunch of balding white bureaucrats think they can raise the artistic level of rappers?”

  “Suyee,” Magia sighed. “When you’ve lived in this country for years, when you have to conduct your professional life here, you see that things don’t work that way. The American press is a dangerous tool. They don’t really care about helping us. They have their own agenda. And arguing with bureaucrats doesn’t achieve anything.”

  Magia knew this from firsthand experience. This year the organization of the festival had been taken over completely by the Youth League. The panel of rapper-judges who organized the previous festival was kept in the dark. The Youth League decided on the locations, selected the sixteen groups to perform, scheduled them, and even designed the logo for sweatshirts. Ariel argued with Hernández and threatened to boycott the festival. But Magia could see that the younger rap groups would still want to participate. The festival would go ahead with no mention of the boycott in the state-controlled media and Cuban rap’s pioneers would be slowly edged out of their own movement. Magia argued that the showdown should take place between the Youth League and the rap movement, not between the Youth League and individual rappers, because the league couldn’t sideline a whole movement the way that it could sideline rap’s leaders. Magia’s intervention was characteristic of her firm yet self-effacing manner, which would unify the movement and catapult her to the head of the newly formed rap agency.

  The showdown did take place at the festival that year, as rappers produced some of the most biting social commentary heard in years. The state retaliated by keeping coverage of the festival off the radio and television. Rappers started to question whether they had lost their hard-earned space. But maybe it was the impetus they needed to cut their apron strings to the state and move out on their own.

  Iapproached the curved driveway of the Hotel Riviera and looked out onto the blue sea just beyond the Malecón. It was March 2004, and I had abandoned my jeans and tshirts for neat slacks and a collared shirt, as befitting the faculty leader of a tour of fifteen undergraduates from Princeton University, where I was now a postdoctoral fellow.

  I entered the air-conditioned environs of the hotel and walked past the bar where we had been offered complimentary cocktails and juice when we first arrived. I passed the front desk and was about to enter the elevator, when a security guard stopped me.

  “Permiso, señora, but only guests of this hotel are allowed to go upstairs.”

  I was stunned for a minute. But then I pulled out my hotel card to show him that I was a guest at the hotel, and he let me through. Once upstairs I started to get angry. Why didn’t they stop white tourists, or even white Cubans for that matter, from going upstairs? I grabbed a few things and went to wait in the lobby for Lily, who was coming to see me.

  It had been nearly two years since I had been back to Cuba, and I waited anxiously in the lobby to see Lily. She arrived, dressed in her dark blue work suit and toting a small briefcase. We hugged. We had missed each other so much.

  “Let’s go up to the room,” I told Lily. “You gotta see this place, there’s a view of the Malecon and the cleaning staff makes these bouquets—”

  “Ummm,” Lily looked hesitant. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  But I grabbed her by the arm, and we made our way past the same security guard.

  “Señora.” His voice had a warning edge to it. “You can’t go upstairs, only guests of the hotel are allowed upstairs.”

  “Didn’t I just show you my card earlier?” I replied testily.

  “Yes, but she is not a guest,” he pointed at Lily.

  “Let’s go,” Lily said quietly, her hand on my arm.

  But I was just getting started. “Well, I don’t see you stopping any white people here at this hotel,” I told the guard. A blond-haired woman in a hat, and another white couple walked straight past us. “Why don’t you stop them, huh? It’s because they’re white, isn’t it?”

  “Sorry, señora, but it is hotel policy not to allow any Cubans to enter the rooms.”

  “Well, that policy is ridiculous enough on its own,” I retorted. I was getting incensed. “But we all know this is also about race, because any of those people going in right now could be Cuban.” I gestured at the groups of white people entering the elevators. “But you only stop black and brown people here. That’s known as racial profiling.”

  Lily was looking embarrassed. “Please, Suyee, let’s just drop it.”

  But I didn’t want to drop it. I couldn’t let these people get away with it, and I couldn’t see that this was just making Lily feel worse.

  “I want to speak with a manager,” I demanded.

  The manager was a middle-aged, smartly dressed white Cuban woman in a suit and pink high heels. By the time she came down, we were surrounded by three or four other security guards. I explained the situation to her, and she asked for the name of the guard. I pointed him out, but he refused t
o give his name. Instead, he pulled out a list of guests from the hotel and began looking for my name on the list.

  “If your name is not on this list, then we will have to ask you to leave the premises,” he threatened. I looked at him incredulously.

  “This is a case of racism,” I told the gathered group. “My friend here and I are being discriminated on the basis of our skin color.”

  The guards and manager were outraged. “No, en Cuba no hay racismo,” they told me. In Cuba there is no racism. They repeated that refrain, against which there was no argument because it was the official line. The revolution had eradicated racism.

  One guard, tanned and broad shouldered with a close buzz cut, assured me, “Maybe you have experienced racism in the United States, but that doesn’t happen here in Cuba.”

  And then something unexpected happened. Lily started to agree with them. “She is not from here, she’s a foreigner,” Lily told them. “She will never understand how things are in this country.” It felt like a slap in the face. But I’ve spent years studying race relations in Cuba, I wanted to say to her. I understand how racism functions here, I wanted to tell a black woman who had spent her life under the revolution and was now just trying to bury her disappointment and discomfort. Instead, I burst into tears.

  Soon Lily was crying too, and we were both crying, tears of frustration and impotence and sadness. I imagined that Lily was crying as she remembered the nights that she spent here at the Hotel Riviera with her husband for only forty pesos a night after the revolution opened up Cuba’s grandest hotels to the poor, a hotel that now she couldn’t even enter. I imagined she was reminded of that husband, who left her as a young bride to raise their son on her own. I was crying because Lily was right. It finally dawned on me that the reason I really didn’t get it was because—like the foreign reporter—I was ultimately an outsider who had to be convinced of the merits of the revolution. My Cuban friends were not brainwashed or passive. Rather, it was I who had failed to see the intricate ways Cubans negotiated their revolution. So much for the grand global movement I imagined I might find. I couldn’t even connect with my own friend. And we were both crying with the emotion of seeing each other after so long, and having to share the moment with some buzz-cut security guards and a manager in pink high heels.