Cuban Fusion

Cuban Fusion
The Transnational Cuban

Alternative Music Scene
Eva Silot Bravo

Cuban Fusion
“An invaluable study of Cuban music making in diaspora. Based on extensive

interviews with the artistic community and informed by the author’s own expe-
riences as a migrant, Silot Bravo explores the cultural agendas and personal poli-
tics of musicians and the ways they contest and transform conventional notions
of cubanidad.”
—Robin D. Moore, Professor of Ethnomusicology, Butler School of Music,
The University of Texas at Austin, USA
“Eva Silot Bravo’s groundbreaking study delves into the profound impact of
Cuban music in the Diaspora, shedding light on a select group of musicians who
have catalyzed an evolution within traditional Cuban music. Silot Bravo,
uniquely positioned with unparalleled access and insight, offers a balanced and
nuanced exploration of these artists’ work, a departure from the often politically
polarized discourse dominating the study of Cuba.
Her perspective unravels the significance of these musical expressions, illus-
trating how they serve as a transformative force both within and beyond Cuba.
By incorporating diverse influences into their work, these musicians have not
only challenged musical boundaries but also transcended political divides. Silot
Bravo’s study thus provides a rare glimpse into a space where artists navigate
between political constraints, fostering a global citizenship that goes beyond the
rigid political lines often associated with Cuban studies.”
—Greg Landau, PhD, Producer, Educator & Music Historian, USA
“Cuban Fusion is an urgently needed corrective to the long-held, narrow view

that only artists born and living in Cuba get to claim cubanidad. Through a care-
ful study of oft-neglected alternative artists living transnationally like Yusa,
Habana Abierta, and Dafnis Prieto, Bravo provokes a broader conversation
about what it means to represent Cuban music in an era when migration and
transnationalism have become the norm for so many. Drawing from decades of
experience in diplomacy, music scholarship, and arts advocacy, Bravo’s rigorous
manuscript is sure to challenge thinking surrounding what Cuban music sounds
like and who gets to participate.”
—Mike Levine, Assistant Professor in Musicology,
Christopher Newport University, USA
Eva Silot Bravo
Cuban Fusion
The Transnational Cuban Alternative
Music Scene
Eva Silot Bravo
Oakland School for the Arts
Oakland, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-53691-5 ISBN 978-3-031-53692-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53692-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2024
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or
information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Joao & Malcom
In loving memory of my father: Dr. Angel Silvano Silot Gutiérrez
“Luz para tu Espíritu”
In loving memory of an Afro-Cuban scholar, mother and friend who left
too soon:
Yesenia Fernández Selier
Preface
Cuban music holds world heritage value. The Cuban diaspora is among
the five most important Latinx migrant groups in the United States.
However, it appears that no significant development has occurred in
Cuban music outside the island since the turn of the twenty-first century.
With the well and less known exceptions of Celia Cruz, Afro-Cuban Jazz,
Mario Bauzá, Machito, Arsenio Rodríguez, Perez Prado, Miguelito
Valdés, Bebo Valdés, La Lupe, Olga Guillot, Israel López Valdés “Cachao,”
the Miami Sound Machine, Gloria Estefan, Willy Chirino, the Buena
Vista Social Club, and the Cubatón—the Cuban Reggaetón’ scene.
Although all important aspects of Cuban music in diaspora, much is still
lacking in understanding the significant advancement of Cuban diasporic
music since the turn of the twentieth century, beyond mainstream music
markets and Cold War narratives.
After the demise of the socialist world at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury, Cubans have become a global diaspora with ethnic enclaves located
in multiple nations, after decades of failed socialist praxis in the island.
However, little scholarly attention has been devoted to assessing the impact
of the globalization of Cuban culture and cultural production since then.
This manuscript, titled Cuban Fusion: The Transnational Cuban Alternative
Music Scene, addresses this gap. The text is the result of years of personal
endeavors, living in the intersections of being an Afro-Cuban female
vii
viii Preface
first-generation migrant, single mother, cultural promoter and curator,

writer, graduate student, teacher and independent scholar on Cuban
music, Miami culture, alternative and urban cultural scenes, literary and
cultural studies, and the legacy of the African diaspora on questions of
identity and culture. My lens is also informed by my personal artivism and
former experience as a Cuban diplomat and international negotiator in
the United Nations, all of which has given me a global and multidisci-
plinary vision. Therefore, this text deals with Cuban issues informed by
voices of postcolonial, ethnomusicology, human geography, sociology,
migrant and cultural studies authors. It’s also inspired by previous works
from many scholars in Cuban studies, specifically on the impact of trans-
nationalism and cultural politics in Cuban culture. It’s also the result of
decades of inquiries on the impact and silences created by dominant
narratives of Cuban nationalism within and outside the island.
The manuscript surveys the impact of the 1990s crisis in the deconstruc-
tion of both the revolutionary and exile imaginary in Cuban music, by
less politically visible agents and cultural spaces within and outside the
island. By conducting an analysis of the negotiation of narratives of iden-
tity and practices of music production, the manuscript documents a rela-
tively unexplored transnational network of music collaborations among
Cuban singers, songwriters, and academically trained musicians that has
massively migrated across the globe since then.
As a result of the 1990s Cuban crisis, new transnational and alternative
narrative spaces emerged, resulting in what I purposefully call “cubanidad
in-between” space, reflecting the emergence of post-national and post-
socialist aesthetic Cuban imaginaries across the globe. These cultural
spaces portrait generational connections between diasporic musicians
that propose plural narrative approaches to Cubanness. The manuscript
encourages a critical multidisciplinary conversation about the sustained
process of transnationalization of Cuban cultural production since the
turn of the twenty-first century. This book is ultimately a tribute to the
diverse ways in which the music legacy of the African diaspora has manifested
in the Cuban culture, its music, and its musicians across the globe.
Oakland, CA, USA Eva Silot Bravo

Acknowledgments
To Elegguá, Yemayá, my saints, ancestors, and spirits.

To the spiritual and healing power of music.
To all the music referenced in this book, most of which has accompa-
nied me during my life in diaspora.
To all the musicians, creatives, colleagues and friends who gracefully
donated images to include in this book, helped me rewieving the book
proposal, and to those that participated and helped me with the inter-
views and lyrics’ translation.
To friends, family, professors, and colleagues that have supported and
accompanied my curiosity and ongoing need for intellectual inquiry and
to support Cuban music and the arts throughout the years.
ix
Contents
1 I ntroduction 1
2 Towards
a Post-national Cuban Imaginary: Theoretical
and Historical Context 13
Nationalism Revisited at the Turn of the Century 14
Cuba as an Imagined National Community 19
Cultural Politics of the Nation-State 22
The “Special Period”: The Deconstruction of the
“Revolutionary” Nation 26
The Transnational Space: Por un “patriotismo abierto” (For a
“Soft Patriotism”) 31
Moments of Transnationalism in Cuban Music 36
3 Cubanidad “in-between”: The Transnational Cuban

Alternative Music Scene (TCAMS) 51
Habanization 54
Alternative Music in Cuba After 1959 61
Madrid 67
Habana Abierta: Alternative Cuban Trova 70
Narratives of Cubanness 72
Mapping Music Reception 73
xi
xii Contents
Negotiating Post-Soviet Narratives 76

Cuban Fusion: Timba Style 82
Ivan Melón Lewis: Cosmopolitan Cuban jazz 83
Alain Pérez—Timba–Cuban Jazz Fusion 86
New York 90
Dafnis Prieto: Intertextuality in Cuban Jazz 94
Yosvany Terry: Redefining Afro-Cuban Jazz 96
Pedrito Martínez: African Diaspora Music Round Trip 99
Miami 101
Mapping TCAMS: Miami Style 102
Eclectic Cuban Fusion 110
4 TCAMS
and the Music Industry119
Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Global Cuban Jazz 123
Yusa: World Cuban Fusion from the Twentieth Century 125
Descemer Bueno: Alternative Afro-Cuban and Afro-Latino
Music 128
Leslie Cartaya: Cuban Latin Fusion, Miami Style 131
5 Conclusions: Cuban Fusion Music Across Borders135
R
eferences149
I ndex169
About the Author
Eva Silot Bravo was born and raised in Cuba and has lived in the US
since the 2000s. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies, Spanish and
Literatures from the University of Miami, FL, an MA in International
Studies from Florida International University, and a BA in International
Political Relations from Instituto Superior de Relaciones Internacionales,
from Havana, Cuba. She studied classical piano and music at the Manuel
Saumell Conservatory in Havana, Cuba. In the US, she has taught at the
University of Miami & Barry University, in Miami, FL, and at the
Branson School and the Oakland School for the Arts in California. Silot
Bravo has published peer-reviewed, online articles and made presenta-
tions on Cuban music, literature, the Afro-Cuban diaspora and other
cultural topics. Her sustained commitment for documenting creative
voices of migrants, Afro-descendents and women led her to create the
blog Cubanidadinbetween, and two bilingual podcasts “Miami
Alternativo” and “Word Culture.” She also produced concerts and col-
laborated with local cultural institutions in Miami, promoting Cuban
alternative music and arts. She is a former diplomat and negotiator rep-
resenting Cuba and developing nations at the United Nations, New York,
in managerial, budgetary, reform, and financial negotiations.
xiii
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Willy Chirino in the set of the recording of Cuba Libre’s
music video. Miami, FL. 2008. Photo Courtesy of Ernesto
Fundora’s personal archives 43
Fig. 2.2 Orishas in Concert with Yadam González and Braily Ramos
on stage. Fillmore Theater. Miami Beach, FL. 2019. Photo
Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal archives 46
Fig. 2.3 X Alfonso in concert. Miami Dade County Auditorium.
2012. Miami, FL. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal
archives48
Fig. 3.1 David Torrens in the video set of Sentimientos Ajenos.
México, D.F. 1996. Photo Courtesy of Ernesto Fundora’s
personal archives 53
Fig. 3.2 Habanization. Panel discussion. Modern Languages
Department and Miami Observatory. University of Miami.
Coral Gables, FL. 2012. Flyer. Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo
personal archive 56
Fig. 3.3 Gema Corredera & Yosvany Terry in concert. Yerba Buena
Gardens. Summer Festival. San Francisco, CA. 2023.
Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s personal archives 68
Fig. 3.4 Pavel Urquiza y La Ruta de las Almas-Africa Gallego, Iván
Ruiz Machado, Kiki Ferrer, Mahan Mirarab, Javier Márquez,
and Tania Vinokur. Global Cuba Fest 2016. Miami Dade
xv
xvi List of Figures
County Auditorium, Miami, FL, 2016. Photo Courtesy of

Ever Chavez, FUNDarte 70
Fig. 3.5 Habana Abierta-Alejandro Gutiérrez, Pepe del Valle y José
Luis Medina. Las Vistillas, Madrid. 2016. Photo Courtesy of
Felix Varela’s personal archives 75
Fig. 3.6 Kelvis Ochoa & band, and Alfredo Chacón on stage,
presented by VSC. Havana 1957. Brickell,Miami, FL. 2017.
Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s personal archives 82
Fig. 3.7 Ivan Melón Lewis al piano, Spain. 2023. Foto Courtesy of
Ivan Melón Lewis’ personal archives 84
Fig. 3.8 Alain Pérez & Julio Montalvo performing, Global Cuba
Fest Miami, FL. 2021. Photo Courtesy of Ever Chávez,
FUNDarte87
Fig. 3.9 Omar Sosa & The NDR Big Band and EL Negro Hernández
on stage. “Jazz in Marciac,” Marciac, France, 2011. Photo
Courtesy of Hervé Villieu’s personal archives 89
Fig. 3.10 Daymé Arocena in concert. Presented by Miami Light
Project. The Black Box. Wynwood, Miami, FL. Photo
Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s personal archives 90
Fig. 3.11 Dafnis Prieto & Bebo Valdés. Recording “Bebo de Cuba”.
Studio, New York. Photo Courtesy of Dafnis Prieto’s
Fig. 3.12 Yosvany Terry & his band, Yunior Terry & Gema Corredera,
Yerba Buena Summer Festival. San Francisco, CA, 2023.
Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo personal archives 98
Fig. 3.13 Pedrito Martínez & his band. The Brown University Latin
Jazz and Pop Festival. Brown University, Providence,
R.I.2015. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo personal
archives100
Fig. 3.14 (From left to right)—Descemer Bueno, Roman Díaz, Eva
Silot Bravo, Pedrito Martínez & Philbert Armenteros. The
Brown University Latin Jazz and Pop Festival. Brown
University, Providence, R.I. 2015. Photo Courtesy of Eva
Silot Bravo personal archives 102
List of Figures xvii
Fig. 3.15 Sol Ruiz & Rey Rodríguez on stage. Global Cuba Fest. 2017,
Miami, FL. Photo by Generación Asere. Courtesy of Ever
Chávez, FUNDarte 103
Fig. 3.16 Aymee Nuviola, Yusa, Tony Perez & Manuel Orza. Yusa
in Concert. Miami Dade County Auditorium. Global Cuba
Fest. 2018, Miami, FL. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza
Fig. 3.17 Tiempo Libre on stage. Habana 305. Little Havana, Miami,
FL. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal archives 106
Fig. 3.18 Interactivo, Robertico Carcassés, Telmary Díaz, Yusa, Brenda
Navarrete, Julito Padrón, and Nestor del Prado, presented by
VSC. Downtown, Miami, FL 2016. Photo Courtesy of
Diana Liza’s personal archives 107
Fig. 3.19 Alfredito Rodríguez on stage. Global Cuba Fest 2022. North
Beach Band Shell. Miami, FL 2022. Photo Courtesy of Ever
Chávez, FUNDarte 109
Fig. 3.20 Danay Suárez, Aldo, El B, and the Nu Deco Ensemble
on stage at the North Beach Band Shell. Miami Beach,
FL. 2018. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo archives 111
Fig. 3.21 Pavel Urquiza in concert, with Yusa performing on stage
at El Tucán. Downtown Miami, by Habana en Miami.
FL. 2017. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo archives 114
Fig. 3.22 Michael Gil playing. Miami, FL. Photo by & Courtesy of
Humberto Ochoa’s personal archives 116
Fig. 4.1 Glenda del E singing and performing piano. Glenda
performing at Mar-i-Jazz Festival. Valencia, Spain. 2022.
Photo by Lili del Sol. Courtesy of Glenda del E’s personal
archives121
Fig. 4.2 Gonzalo Rubalcaba on piano and keyboards. Volcán in
concert—Horacio “El Negro” Hernández, José Armando
Gola & Giovanni Hidalgo. Global Cuba Fest. Miami Dade
County Auditorium. Miami, FL. 2015. Photo Courtesy of
Ever Chávez, FUNDarte 124
Fig. 4.3 Yusa in concert, with Manuel Orza, Ivette Falcón, Horacio
“El Negro”Hernández, Tony Pérez, and Jennifer Hernández.
Global Cuba Fest. Miami Dade County Auditorium. Miami,
FL. 2020. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal archives 126
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 4.4 Descemer Bueno & Magilée Alvarez in the set of the video
“Mueve”. Miami, FL. 2005. Photo Courtesy of Ernesto
Fundora’s personal archives 128
Fig. 5.1 Telmary & Habana Sana in concert, Raíces Series, presented
by John Santos. Freight & Salvage. Berkeley, CA. 2022.
Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s personal archives 136
Fig. 5.2 Cimafunk in concert. Global Cuba Fest. North Beach
Band Shell. Miami Beach, FL. 2019. Photo by Elvis
Suarez, Glassworks Multimedia. Courtesy of Ever Chavez,
FUNDarte139
Fig. 5.3 Krudas Cubensi, Afro-Cuban Queer Hip-Hop. Alameda,
Oakland, C.A. 2023. Photo by Greg Landau. Courtesy
of Las Kruda’s personal archives 142
Fig. 5.4 Brenda Navarrete & Yelsi Heredia performing on stage with
El Gola. Global Cuba Fest. Miami, FL. 2020. Photo by
Generación Asere. Courtesy of Ever Chavez, FUNDarte 144
Fig. 5.5 La Dame Blanche. The New Parish. Downton Oakland,
C.A. 2023. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s personal
archives146
Fig. 5.6 Ibeyi live at North Band Shell. North Beach Band Shell.
North Miami Beach, FL. 2016. Photo Courtesy of Diana
Liza’s personal archives 147
1
Introduction
Abstract The Introduction recounts the author’s motivation to study

Cuban music in diaspora, after her journey from Cuba to New York,
Mexico, and Miami amid the 1990s crisis, defecting from a diplomatic
career in the United Nations. The chapter exposes the global dispersion
of Cuban musicians post-crisis. The author explores the impact of the
crisis on Cuban arts, challenging traditional Cold War narratives, and
revealing distinct perspectives on Cuban diaspora culture since the turn
of the twenty-first century. The text is motivated by the need to study
alternative music circuits and rethink Cuban culture in a changing global
context. Inspired by postcolonial scholars, the manuscript aims to con-
tribute to Cuban and Ethnomusicology Studies, providing a critical lens
on transnational Cuban cultural production since the twenty-first
century.
Keywords Cubanidad • Transnationalism • Post-Soviet generation
When I first landed in Miami traveling from Mexico in July 2003, I was
pregnant with my son; therefore, deciding to establish a new life in Miami
was at the same time hopeful and uncertain. Three months before I
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 1

E. S. Bravo, Cuban Fusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53692-2_1
2 E. S. Bravo
defected from a fascinating and personally challenging job as a Cuban

diplomat and international negotiator in the United Nations, New York,
after 7 years living and working between Havana and New York. My
escape was prompted by my family’s decision, after being arbitrarily pres-
sured by Cuban authorities to return to the island and leave their work
and lives in Mexico. Living in Mexico was the main source of survival for
my family and our immediate relatives back in the island, faced with the
extreme challenges of the 1990s Cuban crisis.
Once in Miami, I was shocked by how little Cuban music made on the
island, and by recent migrants, was heard in public places in the early
2000s, despite the image of Miami as a modern diverse global city por-
trayed by many in the news, social media, fiction and non-fiction. The
surrounding aesthetics and background music in most Cuban places in
Miami in the early 2000s were basically a reproduction of the 1950s
Cuban aesthetics, as if suddenly I traveled back in time to the island to
the epoch of my grandparents. That was a contrast to the situation of
Cuban music in New York, where recent Cuban diasporic musicians had
an emerging and increasingly visible scene in jazz clubs and other venues
throughout the city, documented in films like Calle 54, by Spanish film-
maker, director and Cuban music lover Fernando Trueba.
I personally witnessed firsthand a cultural explosion of Cuban music
production by recent migrants and fruitful cultural exchanges with musi-
cians from the island. I also realized the pervasive influence of the binary
Cold War narratives in the US academia, and how little Cuban music was
visible in the Latino music market at the time, where little attention was
devoted to local and global events where diasporic Cubans were involved.
That situation has evolved since then through ongoing flows of Cuban
migration and changes in the bilateral context, resulting in Cuban dia-
sporic musicians gaining spaces and increased recognition in the Latino,
Jazz, Tropical and Alternativo music market. In addition, I identified a
sort of mantra in the texts and conversations among many of my migrant
cohorts that strongly believed Cuban culture basically “died” after the
late 1980s. For them, coming from an elitist perspective which basically
disregards most Afro-Cuban, street, and less visible creativity as “second-
ary,” the massive global dispersion resulting from the 1990s crisis, hip-
hop and all the way to reggaetón was the “coup de grace” for Cuban arts.
1 Introduction 3
I knew that Cuban migrant artists transitioned from a moment when

their careers started to take off on the island to anonymity in an unfamil-
iar territory. Like myself, these migrant artists had great expectations but
little knowledge about how to operate outside the paternalistic and con-
trolled economic context in which they were born and raised on the
island as a norm, relying on their craft and talents in the “new world.”
However, given my studies of music on the island, my subsequent
diplomatic experience in the United Nations, New York, and some fam-
ily trips to Madrid and Mexico, I knew firsthand that among the nineties’
migrants there was an important group of singers, songwriters, and jazz
musicians spread all over the world, and with some of whom I had been
in contact throughout years and geographies. Living abroad, they signifi-
cantly kept in touch with each other through the Internet and touring.
They continued producing art despite the little attention they received
from cultural institutions with few exceptions.
Long before the announced rapprochement between the governments
of Cuba and the United States (US) on December 17th, 2014, by the
Obama Administration, Cuban artists from both shores have been at the
forefront of paving the way for the “normalization” of personal and cul-
tural contact among Cubans from all over, navigating all sorts of bureau-
cratic and political obstacles. I have personally witnessed this process for
several years. I was also exposed to the work of Cuban authors of the time
known as Los Novísimos, some of them still living on the island, like Ena
Lucía Portela and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. They produced an important
body of texts that strongly resonated with my generational concerns
about the impact of the 1990s crisis on our life and identity, and that for
years was mainly distributed and consumed outside the island.
Throughout the last decades, those realizations transformed into a
constant personal inquiry about the effects of the crisis on Cuban arts.
Later during my graduate studies in Florida, I became aware I was doing
qualitative research without even knowing. I also realized that in aca-
demic Cuban affairs, voices of Afro-Cuban females and first-generation
migrants like me were practically nonexistent. Then, I decided to seri-
ously study and write about what seemed to be alternative circuits of
music beyond mainstream that lack visibility or critical attention. I real-
ized that Cuban culture was not “in bad shape” at the turn of the century,
4 E. S. Bravo
but that the conditions for cultural production had changed radically in
ways hardly explored by post-1959 Cuban studies. I recognized the need
to be more creative and open minded in studying and thinking about
Cuban culture, as impacted by a shifting local context and a more global-
ized world since the turn of the century. These are the initial existential
and motivational coordinates that made this manuscript possible.
The profound economic crisis that took place in Cuba in the 1990s,
spurred by the demise of the Soviet Union and the eastern European
socialist bloc, led to the most significant exodus to the US, Europe and
Latin-America of Cuban singers-songwriters and jazz musicians born and
raised after the revolution. Living abroad, these musicians formed a trans-
national network of regular musical collaborations that include the island.
The impact of the economic crisis translated into a devaluation of aes-
thetics inherited from Socialist Realism, the shift to pragmatism and
engagement with the outside world, the adoption of aesthetics of sur-
vival, and the pursuit of access to the market. What does “the significant
trans-territoriality of Cuban culture” (de la Nuez, 29) mean when more
than ever artistic production in various disciplines that is regarded as
Cuban is produced, circulated, and consumed transnationally in alterna-
tive circuits, mainly outside the territorial borders of the island?
Despite the massive dispersion of Cuban artists, reinforced by the cri-
sis of the 1990s, is there any dialogue across cultural fields in aesthetic,
ideological and generational terms? I survey the post-1990s deconstruc-
tion of the revolutionary and exile imaginaries, by less politically visible
agents and cultural spaces, particularly in music, mainly outside the
island. For that purpose, I examine how narratives about lo cubano and
cubanidad are negotiated since the 1990s on music, and the impact of the
crisis on the emergence of a post-socialist and/or post-national aesthetic
condition.
This manuscript is inspired by the works of postcolonial scholars like
Homy Bhabha on the “in-between” or “third space”. Bhabha’s view on
the impact of the process of globalization in the creation of alternative
senses of culture manifested in a more transnational sense of hybridity
and contestation of modern regimes at the turn of the century. I argue
that in the aftermath of the 1990s crisis in the island, transnational and
alternative narrative spaces emerged in Cuban music, resulting in creative
1 Introduction 5
“in-between” spaces, which I call Cubanidad in-between, that deconstruct

dominant narratives about the nation and lo cubano produced by the
official discourse on the island and among traditional exiles in Miami.
I identify generational connections between musicians characterized
by distinct transnational and dystopian approaches to Cubanness at the
turn of the century. This diasporic alternative music portrays the emer-
gence of distinct and plural cultural spaces and narrative voices across
international borders, where there has been a sustained negotiation and
deconstruction of the centrality of the revolutionary nation and the “New
Man” as the dominant national subject.1
My aim with this book is to contribute to Cuban and Ethnomusicology
Studies from the interdisciplinary and critical lens provided by Cultural
and Postcolonial Studies, by revealing the common narratives and/or aes-
thetics of a post-Soviet generation of migrant artists existing in transna-
tional networks. Moreover, I interpret this relationship as a deconstruction
of the dominant national subject and narratives in the context of the
1990s crisis.
The text encourages a multidisciplinary scholarly conversation about
the sustained process of transnationalization of Cuban cultural produc-
tion since the turn of the twenty-first century.
In the case of music studies, I shed light on the transnational music
scene that I identify as the creation of Cuban singers, singer-songwriters
and jazz musicians since the 1990s. The history and analysis of this scene
expands the scope of research on alternative spaces in the Cuban musical
context. The manuscript updates and problematizes inquiries into this
diasporic group whose experiences transcend Cold War and “balsero”
(rafter) stereotypes as a monolithic category of representation of Cuban
1
El Hombre Nuevo (The “New Man”) was an idea suggested by Che Guevara in El socialismo y el
hombre en Cuba (1965), an open letter in the form of an essay made by him on a trip to Africa. It
became a discursive paradigm for the social construction of a new national subject after the 1959
regime change. The “New Man” embodied a national project of social engineering to transform the
masses. It encouraged the adoption of patterns of heavily ideological and patriarchal-centered social
behaviors, characterized by highly rhetorical and altruistic values, based on constant personal sacri-
fices and the creation of a new consciousness. Ultimately the “New Man” was one of the most
effective discursive tools for the government to ideologically control the society, creating double
standards, and reinforcing patriarchal social norms, providing “moral” excuses for ideological and
cultural bureaucrats to exercise arbitrariness and censorship in cultural creation and shaped Cuban’s
everyday life matters, family and personal spaces.
6 E. S. Bravo
migration at the end of the twentieth century. It also proposes future

conversations about Cuban Fusion, as a narrative category of representa-
tion in musical and cultural terms, when studying Cuban culture as a
flexible, international and mobile social space. The text adds to scholarly
conversations on the impact of transnational practices and narratives on
nations and national identities in a global context, as well as on postmod-
ern inquiries about a post-national condition. I propose terms like Cuban
Fusion, Cubanidad in-between and the Transnational Cuban Alternative
Music Scene to talk about this network of identity negotiation and music
production. These terms are more than anything analytical provocations
and temporal conventions which invite future inquiries on alternative
music production and narratives of Cuban identity in the transnational
context.
The book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the
Introduction, which presents the book’s structure and the interdisciplin-
ary context that informs the book. The second chapter, “Towards a Post-
national Cuban Imaginary,” provides a historical contextualization of the
process of negotiation of narratives of Cubanness since the emergence of
the Cuban nation in the nineteenth century. The chapter critically exam-
ines some relevant theoretical debates about nationalism, Cubanness and
transnationalism within and outside the island. That review is comple-
mented by an analysis of the historical context, through some key
moments in the relationship between culture and politics and its impact
on the Cuban cultural production after 1959. The theoretical and histori-
cal background of moments of transnationalism in Cuban music since
the nineteenth century contextualizes the subsequent analysis of alterna-
tive and transnational explosion of narratives of Cubanness in music at
the turn of the twenty-first century provided in Chap. 3.
The third chapter, “Cubanidad ‘in-between’: The Transnational Cuban
Alternative Music Scene,” examines the negotiation of narratives of iden-
tity and practices of music production of some Cuban singers, songwrit-
ers and academically trained musicians that migrated massively after the
1990s crisis. I propose the term the Transnational Cuban Alternative
Music Scene (TCAMS) to illustrate this open-ended transnational net-
work of music making, which broadens the cosmopolitan character of
Cuban music through constant fusion and cultural counterpoints with
1 Introduction 7
an array of generational local and global music references beyond genre

concerns. The chapter documents how Cuban music is produced, distrib-
uted and consumed across urban centers like Miami, New York and
Madrid through constant collaborations made possible by the firsthand
interaction of these musicians in a global context. I argue that these musi-
cians’ transnational lives and lyrics assume an apparently depoliticized
and middle-ground attitude in relation to dominant narratives of dis-
courses on Cubanness both by island authorities and traditional exiles.
The research presented in this chapter highlights another dimension to
studies of less visible but important music scenes in the Cuban cultural
context since the crisis, so far focused on hip-hop, timba, The Buena
Vista Social Club phenomenon and more recently reggaetón.
The fourth chapter, “TCAMS and the Music Industry” engages in
other case studies to advance some reflections on the “location” of Cuban
Fusion music in the Latino, world and jazz music markets. This chapter
also opens a discussion on Cuban Fusion as a narrative and cultural cat-
egory of representation, to think about the implications of the transna-
tionalization of Cuban music since the 1990s. The chapter aims to
highlight the need to update and diversify the polarized framework of
perspectives produced by dominant narratives of Cubanidad within and
outside the island, to approach the study and reflections on Cuban music
as a transnational enterprise since the turn of the century, beyond and
across the traditional Cuban Cold War binary epistemological coordinates.
Following the Conclusions in Chap. 5, the manuscript provides the
playlist Cuban Fusion, made in Spotify since 2018 to 2022 with more
than 2000 songs—15 hours of music. The playlist aims to illustrate a
soundscape of what I understand by Cuban Fusion and TCAMS. It
shows the range and open-ended character of the aesthetics and music
language of this network of Cuban music production across the world
and from within the island. The playlist is not exhaustive, but it’s more an
invitation to promote further conversations, studies and projects focus
on the important process of transnationalization of Cuban music and
culture that is happening since the 1990s.
I take a transdisciplinary approach that explores aesthetics connections
between the nineties’ Cuban musicians resulting from the crisis. I have
put together an analytical framework composed of complementary
8 E. S. Bravo
theoretical approaches grounded in sociology, anthropology, migrant

studies, ethnomusicology, postcolonial and cultural studies. The manu-
script is also informed by postmodern inquiries into post-national condi-
tions; these are useful in promoting a critical conversation about the
Cuban context of cultural production at the turn of the century within
and outside the island.
The primary theoretical inquiry concerns the negotiation of narratives
of nation and national identities in cultural spaces across the epistemo-
logical borders imposed by nation-states. For that purpose, I work with
Benedict Anderson’s (1991) idea of nation and nationalism as an imag-
ined community, shaped around certain common historical and cultural
referents that promote a strong emotional sense of belonging. This defini-
tion helps understand the socially constructed character of notions of
cubanidad or Cubanness. They are the result of ongoing negotiations
among competing narratives across geographical locations and historical
time in cultural texts of all kinds.
Derived from the above, I also inquire through this text how the 1959
revolution in Cuba led to a significant reconfiguration of the national
imaginary. The Cuban revolution subordinated all aspects of cultural life
to the construction of a nation-state and the adoption of the narrative of
the “New Man” as the subject of the revolutionary nation. A very central-
ist, ideological and patriarchal bureaucracy and regime of cultural poli-
cies was adopted with the Cuban revolution that prompted, on the one
hand, a massive access to culture and education and, on the other hand,
a strict and centralized system of control and censorship put in place by
the revolutionary cultural establishment, where narratives of dissent and
alternatives to the official discourse were silenced and excluded. For
example, the Cuban diaspora is systematically excluded or disregarded
from cultural accounts by dominant narratives in the island.
In Una Isla sin fin (1998), Rafael Rojas identifies one of the dominant
narratives, which he calls the “identificatory narrative,” that shaped the
teleology of the Cuban nation. After 1959, this narrative subordinated
the myth of national identity to the embodiment of the nation-state as
the origin and final destiny; promoted a symbiosis among concepts like
Patria, Nation, State, Republic, Revolution and Socialism; and subordi-
nated intellectuals and their work to institutional power. The
1 Introduction 9
“identificatory” myth has become an obstacle to the performance of plu-

ral memories and identities (47–60; 82). On the other hand, Grenier and
Pérez in the Legacy of the Exile (2003), point out that the traditional
Cuban exile has also developed a very ideological and rigid narrative and
performance of cubanidad, frozen in the republican past before 1959 and
intolerant of others’ views within and outside the diaspora that do not
jibe with their way of thinking (87).
In this text I propose to consider lo cubano (Cubanness) as an imagi-
nary and de-territorialized cultural space of representation and identity
negotiation that promotes strong emotional sense of belonging and iden-
tity, constructed around certain historical and cultural narratives.
Cubanness is also a performative site of political representation through
much verbal and online performativity, never-ending confrontations,
traumas, manipulations, illusions, ignorance, desires and utopias,
between dominant/vocal and less prevalent/silenced discourses on the
island and in the diaspora. Historically, what is regarded as lo cubano is a
cultural hybrid with an intrinsic sense of exteriority and connection to
the world; therefore, it’s not exclusively associated with territory and fixed
cultural roots, but also with the cultural production of Cubans living
outside the island. Lo cubano has been constantly negotiated in cultural
texts with different visibility within and outside the island, a negotiation
where tensions with politics of the nation translated into the adoption of
rigid aesthetics, cultural policies and narratives.
Cultural and postcolonial studies are an important scholarly interdis-
ciplinary framework to question the process of knowledge production in
relation to power relationships. For Yúdice, the cultural manifests itself as
the conflictive and articulatory terrain of legitimate and contestatory
knowledge (341). Culture is the negotiation and search for legitimization
among discourses, representations, identities, social norms and perfor-
mances by different agents. Williams considers that cultural studies
should analyze how human life is experienced and the forms of significa-
tion and representation that circulate socially (91–92). That is the schol-
arly terrain where this manuscript is located. It focuses on what I perceive
to be an important turning point in the long-term process of deconstruc-
tion of the national imaginary of the Cuban revolution in aesthetic and
narrative terms, since the turn of the twenty-first century. There were
10 E. S. Bravo
important aesthetic and generational shifts in the 1990s as a period of

crisis that give rise to “in-between” spaces of creativity. In those spaces,
narratives about the Cuban nation and cubanidad were reconfigured in a
post-socialist and/or post-national moment.
In the case of transnationalism, the text is informed by the contribu-
tions of scholars like Stuart Hall in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”
(1990), Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large (1996), Aiwa Ong in
Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999),
Alejandro Portes in City on Edge (1998), Damián Fernandez, in Cuba
Transnational (2005) and Adriana O’ Reilly, in Cuba: Idea of a Nation
Displaced (2007), among others. According to the distinct but comple-
mentary theoretical contributions from those authors, whose insights I
deploy in Chap. 2, the Transnational framework enables perceiving social,
economic and ideational exchanges across geopolitical and cultural bor-
ders resulting in culturally hybrid identities.
I consider Transnationalism as a space of re-articulation between the
global and the local that takes place in the realm of cultural identity, as a
multidimensional positioning of being, belonging, identification and
rupture with historical and cultural common narratives from the past.
For Thomas, in “Cosmopolitan, Transnational and International:
Locating Cuban Music” (2005), the transnational counteracts the increas-
ingly prevalent narratives of purity and authenticity that have been devel-
oped both by the nostalgia-seekers of the West and the socialist state
apparatus on the island, which has striven to recast Cuban musical heri-
tage as a product of an insular, and increasingly defensive, nationalist
project (105). In the transnational context there are possibilities for for-
mulating a more fluid and critical alternative that allows for discrepant
histories and discursive practices about the Cuban nation and Cubanness.
To study the impact of the new transnational moment at the turn of
the century in connection with the cultural production of Cuban musi-
cians living abroad since the 1990s, I conducted participatory observa-
tions at studio recordings, concerts, festivals and panels. I supported my
observations with open-ended interviews and with the analysis of several
albums, videos and documentaries. I also conducted discursive analysis of
some of these musicians’ lyrics. I have had ongoing interactions with this
community of musicians for decades, since I studied classical music in
1 Introduction 11
the “Manuel Saumell” conservatory of music in Havana, Cuba, in the

1980s. Later, I interacted with many of these musicians in concerts, stu-
dio recordings, music venues and personally in New York, Miami, and
Madrid. In Miami, I also produced, coproduced and collaborated with
some concerts and music festivals and organized academic panels about
the work of some of these musicians while I was doing my PhD studies,
with the support of the Modern Languages Department at the University
of Miami. My research led to the creation of a personal blog
Cubanidadinbetween, in which I published some of the interviews with
these musicians, related videos, documentaries, reviews, and information
about relevant events I organized or collaborated with. I have also pub-
lished several texts about this music scene in online magazines about the
Cuban diaspora and in scholarly journals. Some of these artists were
invited to lecture in classes I designed and taught at the University of
Miami on national and transnational narratives and Cuban culture.
It’s important to continue the conversation about postmodern and
postcolonial narratives in the Cuban context, which although not new,
are particularly relevant since the crisis at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury. This manuscript is informed by a postmodern sensibility that reflects
on the need to deconstruct modern narratives like nationalism, nation-
state, and national identity. It also invites to study the complex reality of
“other” relevant subjects, identities, and narratives, such as those of Afro-
descendants, recent migrants, women, LGBTQ, displaced, marginalized
and dissident subjects, usually disregarded in studies of Cuban music and
culture. It’s important to look critically at the constraints posed to human
imagination and cultural creation by the narrowness of authoritarian,
patriarchal, and elitist discursive practices of Cuban institutions as a
norm. Also, it’s relevant to address the challenges and possibilities posed
by the process of globalization to Cuban cultural practices and forms of
identity negotiation.
2
Towards a Post-national Cuban
Imaginary: Theoretical and Historical
Context
Abstract This chapter provides a historical contextualization of the pro-

cess of negotiation of narratives of Cubanness since the emergence of the
Cuban nation in the nineteenth century. The author critically examines
some relevant theoretical debates about nationalism, Cubanness and
transnationalism within and outside the island. That review is comple-
mented by an analysis of some key moments in the relationship between
culture and politics and its impact on the Cuban cultural production
after 1959. The manuscript also provides a theoretical and historical
background of moments of transnationalism in Cuban music since the
nineteenth century, which contextualizes the subsequent analysis of alter-
native and transnational explosion of narratives of Cubanness in music at
the turn of the twenty-first century provided in Chap. 3.
Keywords Cuban cultural politics • Cuban diasporic imaginaries •

Cuban music transnational moments

14 E. S. Bravo
ationalism Revisited at the Turn

N
of the Century
National imaginaries have been among the most salient epistemological
frameworks to comprehend, organize, and represent the human experi-
ence since the onset of Modernity, with the emergence of print media,
the legacy of colonialism and the spread of a Western “rationality” associ-
ated with the so-called Enlightenment period. In Imagined Communities
(1994), Benedict Anderson views nationalism not as a permanent phe-
nomenon of Modernity, but as a historically situated process of social
construction made possible by the development of capitalism and in par-
ticular print technology since the end of the eighteenth century. According
to this view, national identities are “imagined political communities” in
which many individuals and groups probably would never meet each
other; however, they may develop a strong sense of emotional awareness
and belonging coalesced by certain narratives, cultural symbols, texts,
and technologies like print media (6; 37–47). Anderson’s view does not
underestimate the importance of the attachments and emotions prompted
by national myths and symbols. For him, they are not permanent or
immutable identity referents but constitute a socially constructed process
of human imagination around certain common narratives contingent to
historical moments and geographical spaces.
In Nations and Nationalism (1983), Gellner provides a more instru-
mental view about nationalisms as organizational and ideological tools
through which power subjects and institutions impose the idea of national
identity as a force of ideological, political, and cultural homogenization.
In this view, nationalisms have been important referents for power insti-
tutions and agents to impose certain values and cultural practices, aes-
thetic preferences, and canons. As a result, narratives of nationalism have
also promoted elitism, hierarchies, silences, repression, and exclusion of
other subjects and narratives they fail to represent. However, nationalism
is not only an instrument of power and ideology, but also a complex nar-
rative space where values, structures of feeling, cultural practices, social
contracts, and norms are constantly negotiated.
2 Towards a Post-national Cuban Imaginary: Theoretical… 15
After the collapse of the socialist eastern European bloc at the end of
the twentieth century, some academic and public debates optimistically
proclaimed “the end of history,” the globalization of the “benefits” of
capitalism worldwide and the decline of nations and nationalism with
the emergence of “a global village.”1 The increased pace of technological
developments prompted an environment of greater interconnectivity,
human mobility, and ideational exchange across the globe. Online trans-
actions and electronic media increasingly mediate human interactions
and prompt the emergence of faster and instant ways of communicating
through a seemingly unlimited virtual space. The modern “anxiety” to
categorize, conceptualize, and predict, shifted towards scholarly fashion
and aesthetics of greater skepticism, contestation, and deconstruction of
foundational modern narratives of nation and nationalisms.
For Anderson, narratives of national identities were imaginable
through print media since the eighteenth century, when capitalism con-
solidated in Europe and later expanded to other regions. Amidst the pro-
cess of globalization at the end of the twentieth century, Appadurai
perceived a different process of cultural imagination where the global is
imagined at the local level through increasing flows of mass-mediated
images aided by electronic technologies and migration. In his view, this
new process of imagination creates diasporic public spheres, as alternative
spaces that represent sites of encounter and contestation to nation-state
interests. Stuart Hall situates the process of articulation between the
global and the local in the realm of cultural identity, as a multidimen-
sional positioning of being, belonging, identification, and rupture with
historical and cultural common narratives from the past (“Cultural
Identity” 223–225).
For postcolonial authors like Bhabha in The Third Space (1990) and
The Location of Culture (1994), there was an alternative sense of culture at
the turn of the century, based on the articulation of a more transnational
sense of hybridity through simultaneous processes of rupture, interac-
tions, promotion, and contestation of normative regimes of modernity.
1
For more detailed accounts on the relationship between the global condition and narratives of
nations and nationalism, see Levitt; Fukuyama; Huntington and Appadurai.
16 E. S. Bravo
This “third or in- between space” is a site for recognition of more complex
cultural and political boundaries than the traditionally opposed modern
political spheres and grand binary narratives. In this cultural space, the
meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity, and
can be appropriated, translated, re-historicized, and read in new ways,
raising new areas of negotiation of meaning and representation; there
arise spaces for a contingent and indeterminate articulation of emergent
cultural identities. Also, from a postcolonial perspective, Mignolo identi-
fies the emergence of what he calls “border thinking,” or re-articulated
forms of subaltern knowledge that are seen as objects of study—and not
agents of change—by the overcharged imaginary of the modern/colonial
world (ix-x; 13).
This moment of reflection is inscribed in late-twentieth-century
debates about a postmodern condition that originated in the arts and
architecture and broke away from the predictability and totality of mod-
ern narratives such as nationalism, the main referential framework of this
manuscript. Postmodernism has been credited or considered with suspi-
cion. In some versions, postmodernism is considered continuous with
modernity, a new moment in the international development of capital-
ism, as in Jameson’s view. For Lyotard, the postmodern condition is a
philosophical incredulity toward modern master narratives. Foucault
argues for thinking beyond the institutions of power, instead of legitimat-
ing what is already known. By focusing on the exploration of principles
of difference and multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari try to dismantle
modern beliefs associated with identity, unity and hierarchy. Derrida dis-
regards the possibility of meaning creation outside the written text. For
Habermas, postmodernism is a rhetorical strategy in the arts appropri-
ated from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century avant-garde movements.
Postmodernism is also associated with the end of utopias, an attitude
of pessimism, disbelief, and skepticism. Particularly since the end of the
twentieth century, narratives and human interactions are mainly con-
structed, negotiated, and disseminated through social media and mobile
communication. The processing of information takes center stage as an
important mode of production, human interactions, and meaning
negotiation across the globe. Virtual communities became relevant actors

for artistic, intellectual, and social agency. Metanarratives, modern val-
ues, and the historicity of memories are under interrogation, while skep-
ticism and relativism prevail. Self-consciousness and self-analysis
undergird the individual and cultural production. Patriarchal orders and
traditional gender roles are increasingly put into question, contested, and
modified (Nemoainu 3–17).
I approach this book with a postcolonial sensibility, recognizing the
need to reflect on the limitations of modern Cuban narratives like nation-
alism, national identity, and national subject, to represent the diversity
and complex reality of “other” relevant subjects, identities, and narra-
tives, such as transnational subjects, afro-descendents, migrants, indige-
nous, women, LGBTQ, displaced, marginalized, and dissidents. This
approach also looks critically at the constraints on human imagination
and cultural creation by authoritarian and elitist discursive practices of
normative national institutions. In addition, it addresses the challenges
and opportunities posed by the process of globalization to cultural prac-
tices and processes of identity negotiation in transnational contexts. This
text is a response to a postmodern call to unpack other voices and less
visible narratives beyond the exhausted framework of the Cold War, to
think about the impact of nationalism and diaspora in Cuban cultural
production. It also resonates with recent suggestions made by authors like
Ada Ferrer in Cuba: An American History who, inspired by Tolstoi, sug-
gests focusing on “the history of the life of the people,” instead of mon-
archs, presidents, and writers (3).
Another important referential framework for this book is debates on
transnational cultural spaces that result from increasing diasporic move-
ments at the end of the twentieth century. Transnationalism is an open-
ended narrative space of cultural creation and identity negotiation across
borders, the process through which migrants build and maintain socio-
economic and cultural ties across the borders established by nation-states.
The activities and practices carried out within transnational networks
imply regular and intense contacts between diasporic subjects living
between two or more countries. These transnational practices lead to the
18 E. S. Bravo
creation of hybrid identities that challenge the image of the nation as a

source of a homogeneous and well-bounded identity.2
Transnationalism differs from more traditional patterns of migration
like assimilation, which implies a unidirectional process of cultural
change leading to the settlement of migrants in new societies. In transna-
tional networks, migrants literally participate in more than one national
society and ideational exchanges; these networks straddle international
borders, leading to transnational social fields (Glick Schiller 96). The
social field is a set of multiple interlocking networks of social relation-
ships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally
exchanged, organized, and transformed. National boundaries are not
necessarily contiguous with the boundaries of social fields. National
social fields are those that stay within national boundaries, while transna-
tional social fields connect actors through direct and indirect relations
across borders (Glick Schiller et al. qtd. in Portes and DeWind 188).
The national container view does not entirely capture the complex
interconnectedness of contemporary reality (Idem 185–86).
Transnationalism poses new questions to the study of national imaginar-
ies by providing a view of the social landscape, of economic and ide-
ational exchanges across borders by non-state actors, individuals,
organizations, and networks (Fernandez xv). It represents a multidimen-
sional space of adaptation to the challenges of late capitalism where the
cultural specificities of global processes take place, a glocal space of re-
articulation between the global and the local (Ong 4). From a utopian
perspective, Ong recognizes the potential of transnational mobility as a
site of encounter among minority claims and subaltern subjects, against
global and nation-state power structures. However, simple oppositions
between transnational forces and the nation-state cannot be universally
sustained. Even under conditions of transnationality, Ong considers that
the political rationality and cultural mechanisms of nation-states con-
tinue to define, discipline, control, regulate, and civilize subjects in place
or on the move (14–22).
2
For a more detailed discussion about transnationalism from sociological and migrant studies per-
spectives see Glick Schiller et al.; Portes and deWind; and Duany (Reconstructing).
Cuba as an Imagined National Community

Lo cubano (Cubanness) is an imaginary de-territorialized cultural space of
representation and identity negotiation that promotes strong emotional
sense of belonging and identity, constructed around certain historical and
cultural narratives. It’s also a performative site of political confrontation,
trauma, desire and utopia, between dominant/vocal and less prevalent/
silenced discourses on the island and in diaspora. What is regarded as lo
cubano is a cultural hybrid with an intrinsic sense of exteriority and con-
nection to the world; therefore, it’s not exclusively associated with terri-
tory and fixed cultural roots but also with the cultural production of
Cubans all over the world. Lo cubano is heavily formed and sustained by
the cultural legacy of the African diaspora in Cuba and the Caribbean
and its transcultural nature. Lo cubano has been constantly negotiated in
cultural texts with different visibility within and outside the island, a
negotiation in which politics has a significant presence.
The idea of Cuba as a nation and national identity consolidated after
the wars of independence from the colonial Spanish power at the end of
the nineteenth century. In Una Isla sin Fin (1998), Rojas argues that
Cuban nationalism forged in the last two centuries has been the result of
an “insufficient modernity,” characterized by a conciliatory, self-righteous
and egalitarian imaginary that has limited liberal representations of the
nation. He traces important debates about Cubanness since the nine-
teenth century in the work of some intellectuals like priest Felix Varela’s
insular doctrina de la impiedad (impiety doctrine) based on a patriotic
sentiment of sovereignty opposed to any mercantile thinking. Rojas also
discusses the positivist aesthetic of José de la Luz y Caballero and Jose
Martí’s inclusive political project of La República para todos y para el bien
de todos (The Republic for all and for the well-being of all). For Rojas,
Cuban nationalism in the nineteenth century resulted from opposition to
instrumental rationality and resistance to a liberal modernity and capital-
ism. In his view, the national rationality was accompanied by an ethos
based on participation in history as an essence of cubanidad. This notion
that associates national identity with political agency translated into a
political utopia of national renovation and was part of the 1940
20 E. S. Bravo
Constitution. However, the demagogic moral emphasis of this utopian

nationalism planted the seeds of state corruption, ideological demagogy,
and revolutionary violence (47–60; 82).
Afrocuban is one of the main cultural influences in the formation of
the idea of Cuban culture. Ferrer, in Insurgent Cuba, points out how dur-
ing the independence wars in the nineteenth century, the legacy of colo-
nialism and the fear of a black revolt after Haiti’s revolution have been
pervasive in the nation’s history, over insurrection and emancipation. Jose
Marti’s foundational ideas of the new independent Cuba were based on
the concept of a multiracial nation. The nation was imagined not as the
result of a physical or cultural union but as the product of a revolutionary
cross-racial alliance (4). In the first half of the twentieth century, in some
intellectual circles there was also an acknowledgment of the African leg-
acy in the modern Cuban imaginary. The work of ethnologist Fernando
Ortiz—in Contrapunteo del tabaco y el azúcar and Los factores humanos de
la cubanidad in the 1940s—was crucial for the creation of the term trans-
culturation, a neologism that refers to the process of cultural contact and
counterpoint between different ethnic groups, cultural forms, and mate-
rial conditions that constituted Cuba as a national cultural space. For
Ortiz, transculturation was “…the extremely complex transmutation of
cultures, the result of a particular appropriation of African and Spanish
influences…” (98).
But if the meaning of transculturation is reduced to inter-ethnic inte-
gration, its content is drastically simplified. The scope of transculturation
involves a range of economic, social and cultural processes that go beyond
ethnic social relations among different groups. In this regard, transcul-
turation has a foundational meaning, through which it creates new social
structures and relations. According to Portuondo, the meaning of trans-
culturation is not reduced to inter-ethnic integration because that would
simplify its content. Ortiz’s conceptualization of transculturation exceeds
the limits of empirical and scientific description. More than a result,
transculturation is the possibility of a new human project—the emer-
gence of a distinct Cuban national culture. Therefore, it’s not a precon-
ceived idea of a “possible experience,” but the opening to the unusual and
the unexpected realms of possibilities. As a space of dialogue, interpreta-
tion, syncretism, and interaction among different cultures,
transculturation is a useful conceptual framework to think about the rela-

tional nature of the Cuban subject formation as a process of counter-
pointing cultural construction. It’s fundamental to understand cubanidad
in its uniqueness, but also as a fluid and open space of constant dialogue,
interpretations, and interactions with different cultures. What is regarded
as lo cubano is a cultural hybrid represented in particular ways throughout
different narratives. However, transculturation should be considered in
conjunction with critical views that address its limitations in terms of, for
example, the social and ethnic tensions that it may obscure.
One of these critical views is developed by Moore in Nationalizing
Blackness (1997). He argues that the process of cultural encounter that
led to identify modern Cuba as a unique Afrohispanic composite—the
result of racial mixing, the fusion of distinct systems of language, religion,
artistic forms and other expressions like musical production—not only
reflected social inequalities, but manifested racial tensions, economic
exploitation, and dominant political discourses (1, 219). He considers
Afrocubanism as an ideology that embraced black expression discursively
and points out that although it accepted certain forms of black music, it
did not necessarily imply greater social equality or empowerment for
Afrocubans (5). Moore demystifies the ways in which transculturation
characterizes the encounter of cultures produced in the emergence of the
modern Cuban imaginary. He highlights the asymmetries of power rela-
tionships in the encounter and fusion between cultures that led to the
formation of the modern Cuban nation, by focusing on racial inequali-
ties and the subordinate position of Afro Cubans in the national culture.
Cuban nationalism has also been to a large extent constructed and
sustained as a narrative construction resulting from a controversial rela-
tionship with the US. Several accounts have focused on the US as a hege-
monic force in the formation of the Cuban nation since the
Spanish–American War in the nineteenth century, as the “other” against
which it has historically defined itself. In a contrasting view, Louis
A. Perez, in On becoming Cuban (1999) draws attention to the influence
of the neocolonial relationship between the US and Cuba as a crucial
ingredient in the formation of the modern Cuban nation in the symbolic
realm. For Perez, by the beginning of the twentieth century there were
many instances of Americanization of the Cuban imaginary due to the
22 E. S. Bravo
intense cultural and economic activity between the two countries because
of their proximity. On the island, American cultural iconography was
captured in films, TV, fashion, sports, the automobile industry, music,
economic forms like sugar plantations and the consumption of American
products. In Cuba, an American History, Ferrer points out the historical
controversies and resentments regarding the role of the US in Cuban
independence since the end of the nineteenth century, either as a bene-
factor or a colonial power. Beyond that framework, which is still subject
to ongoing debates, she highlights the importance of the dense network
of human contact forged over decades by people of all kinds from both
countries (4). Ferrer looks at the history of Cuba as narratives of a “con-
troversial” mirror to the history of the US since the island’s colonization
to after the post–Cold War era.
The Cuban nation is an imaginary construct to which many other
relevant narratives have contributed: patriotism, annexation, exceptional-
ism, Latin-Americanism, pessimism, pragmatism, lack of ethics, racism,
el choteo (mockery), patriarchy, and sexism. For Cámara and Fernandez,
a more realistic way to represent (imagine) lo cubano is through tension
and diversity rather than harmony or monolithic unity. They acknowl-
edge the multiple aspects and agents of Cuban culture, many of which
have been misrepresented or ignored (6–8).
Cultural Politics of the Nation-State

After 1959, the revolutionary government enforced the creation of a
monolithic, ideological, and populist nationalism that progressively was
imposed as the dominant political and cultural project. The Cuban revo-
lution narratives acquired substantive recognition in intellectual circles
within and outside the island during the 1960s, by combining Marti ́’s
utopian ideals with the international anti-imperialist rhetoric. The offi-
cial revolutionary discourse generated a national identity tied to the revo-
lution as cubanidad’s origin and destiny, its essence and existence (Rojas,
Una Isla 49–50). The government promoted the rewriting of narratives of
the Cuban past in all political, cultural, and educational institutions. The
media and cultural industries were nationalized by the revolutionary gov-
ernment. Any private initiative was soon considered illegal and penalized.
This top-down political process led to the adoption of a highly ideologi-

cal, defensive, and “messianic” nationalistic discourse, which became rap-
idly embedded in a “culture of the masses.” The revolutionary government
undertook a very centralized and ideological construction of a new
national project with a wide populist appeal that soon began criminaliz-
ing any acts of criticism, dissent, and/or opposition. Those who disagreed
with state tutelage were ostracized, repressed, or fled the island. In Visions
of Power (2012), Lilian Guerra examines this process of ideological re-
construction of Cubanness forced by the revolutionary apparatus, result-
ing in negligent economic politics and the policing of dissident voices
from within. Those voices challenged the environment of political
manipulation and massive social coercion imposed by the new govern-
ment, manifested in patriarchal, racial, and ideological discriminatory
practices behind the scenes of the revolutionary and anti-imperialist
altruistic rhetoric.
All these shaped the official discourse after 1959 as a site of bilateral
and irreconcilable confrontation with its “enemies,” “the other” against
which the new Cuban revolutionary nation was being constructed. That
discourse translated into a narrative of isolation and messianic exception-
ality that has been constantly exploited by the Cuban government: a
small Caribbean developing nation, entrusted with the “historical” mis-
sion to “resist” and “oppose” the US as the largest hegemonic and impe-
rialist power in the world.
To emulate Cuba as the biblical small David fighting against the giant
Goliath became a common image used by the Cuban official discourse.
The “other” against which the Cuban nation was constructed since 1959
would include a range of actors, from hostile enemies of the revolution,
all those who critique and oppose the government’s ideas, to any internal
opposition, any intellectual critique enacted in texts or by individuals,
the US government, and especially Cuban exiles. Duany observes that
one of the results of this ideological projection has been the exclusion of
the diaspora from serious reflection on the Cuban nation (34–35).
The government officials’ discursive practices and cultural politics
became an important tool in the articulation of the new national project.
One of the first steps taken by the new government was to set the stan-
dards and assume the control of artistic and intellectual production in the
changing circumstances. An example was the censorship in 1961 of P.M.,
24 E. S. Bravo
a documentary about Cuban nightlife by filmmakers Saba Cabrera and

Orlando Jiménez. The background of the film was the political tension
generated by the imminent invasion of the “Bay of Pigs” by the US mili-
tary. The documentary was rejected for decades by the cultural bureau-
cracy as celebratory “…of and easy and free impression of life in Havana”
(Quiroga 251). Castro’s well-known speech Palabras a los Intelectuales
(Words to the Intellectuals) in the same year, defined a hierarchical rela-
tionship of political power-wielders over the artists and intellectuals, con-
veyed by the phrase: “Dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución,
ningún derecho” (Within the Revolution, everything; against the
Revolution, nothing).3 Since then, the artistic and intellectual produc-
tion on the island has been mediated by state policies, censorship, and the
arbitrariness of its bureaucracy.
A key discursive paradigm for the construction of a new national sub-
ject was the so-called El Hombre Nuevo (“New Man”), proclaimed by Che
Guevara in El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1965).4 For Guevara, it was
necessary to eliminate any trace of bourgeois liberal thinking to carry out
the construction of a socialist society. That endeavor implied the subordi-
nation of any individual values and interests for the collective good,
incarnated in the “New Man.” The ultimate goal of this notion was for
the masses to adopt a system of social behaviors characterized by highly
rhetorical altruistic and patriarchal values, based on constant personal
sacrifices and the creation of a “new consciousness.” Ultimately, the “New
Man” was one of the most effective discursive tools for the government to
ideologically control the society, creating double standards and hypocrisy
between the social and private lives of Cuban subjects, and providing
“moral” excuses for ideological and cultural bureaucrats to exercise patri-
archy, arbitrariness, and censorship in cultural creation and to intervene
in everyday life matters.
The ideologization and centralization of the cultural life in the 1970s—
the period known as El Quinquenio and/or Decenio Gris (Gray
Quinquennium or Decade)—promoted an environment of blunt
3
See Palabras a los Intelectuales, a statement made by Fidel Castro at a meeting at the National
Library between artists, intellectuals, and the government in June 1961. Discursively, this state-
ment proclaimed the subordination of any cultural production and artistic creation to the revolu-
tionary government’s control.
4
See El Socialismo y el Hombre en Cuba, published first in 1965 by Marcha, a Uruguayan weekly
publication.
censorship, and several documented acts of discrimination, silencing, and

erratic policies aimed to curtail any form of intellectual agency beyond
the official realm. That was the time of the shuttering of the Philosophy
Department at the University of Havana, and of Pensamiento Crítico
magazine.
The most-discussed instance of this crackdown was the so-called
Padilla Affair.5 Poet Heberto Padilla was arrested in 1971 by the Cuban
government for having critical ideas about the revolution in his writing,
right after being awarded the UNEAC Prize (National Union of Cuban
Writers and Artists) for his poetry book Fuera de juego (1998). Later, he
publicly confessed his “mea culpa” for not being a “true revolutionary,” a
confession that seems to have been forced and extracted by the revolu-
tionary establishment, hence many intellectuals from Europe and Latin
American openly criticized or broke up with the Cuban revolutionary
government. Padilla’s work was subsequently censored in the island, and
after years he migrated.
This was also the period when art was declared “a weapon for the revo-
lution” at the First Congress of Education and Culture. This unfortunate
and extreme moment of censorship and repression led to the persecution
of homosexuals, religious practitioners, and any youth profiled as free
thinkers by the government, for innocuous and subjective behaviors like
wearing foreign fashion, long hair, or listening to American music. Such
“infractions” led to confinement in forced labor camps known as UMAP.6
Intellectual and cultural production became key venues for dissemination
of government ideas. The official institutions and bureaucrats tried to
impose themselves through cultural policies regarding what they consid-
ered to be “properly” Cuban through highly political, selective, and arbi-
trary means. For Duany, the post-1959 national project is simple,
coherent, and essentialist, with culture defined as homogeneous and
5
See Fornés, El quinquenio gris; Criterios, La política cultural del período revolucionario; and Giroud,
El caso Padilla.
6
The revolutionary government created UMAP during the 1960s, which stands for Unidades
Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (Military Units to Aid Production). They were labor camps in
the countryside run by the military. Through roundups and arbitrary detentions, around 35, 000
homosexuals, intellectuals, artists, religious practitioners from several denominations, and anyone
considered counterrevolutionary and “weak” by government authorities were confined to these
places for long periods of time and were subjected to forced labor and political reeducation. See
Joseph Tahbaz, “Demystifying las UMAP” and Abel Sierra Madero “Academias para producir
machos en Cuba.”
26 E. S. Bravo
geography as ultimately determinant. Cuba is conceived as a coherent

nation without internal divisions except for those who seek exile.
However, the essentialist viewpoint is too simplistic to account for the
complexity and fluidity of Cuban identities (“From the Cuban Ajiaco” 5).
At the same time, the nationalist project since 1959 promoted impor-
tant developments in some cultural sectors, within and beyond the mar-
gins of the official realm. The massive 1961 literacy campaign was a
significant starting point. Moore refers to the proliferation of several cul-
tural institutions for art promotion and public access to education and
culture, among them ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute), the Cuban National
Theater, Casa de las Américas (House of the Americas), Instituto del
Libro (National Book Institute) and Ballet Nacional de Cuba (Cuban
National Ballet). The reproduction of universal literature, dismissing any
regard for intellectual rights, was massive. Artistic production became
accessible through the proliferation of cultural events and centers
throughout the country. A national system of public schools of the arts
was established, with demanding curricula and high standards of artistic
education, where many generations of Cuban artists got rigorous training
in music, visual arts, theater, and dance. Periodic international and
national festivals and conferences on a range of art forms took place regu-
larly. However, for many Cuban artists the cultural bureaucracy, govern-
ment policies, and inefficiency continue to interfere with their freedom
of expression and artistic empowerment (Music and Revolution 80–106).
he “Special Period”: The Deconstruction

T
of the “Revolutionary” Nation
The 1980s marked a turning point for the relationship between the arts
and the national project. The massive Mariel exodus to the US of around
125, 000 persons born and raised during the revolution was a clear sign
that the revolutionary utopia was not working for many across the board.
Moreover, Glasnost and Perestroika, which transformed the eastern
socialist bloc, resonated in Cuba through magazines and other publica-
tions that were rapidly censored.
Around 80% of the revolutionary Cuban economy was subsidized by

the Soviet Union, after the enactment of the US embargo and the radi-
calization of the Cuban revolution towards the USSR model of socialism
from the 1960s. That special relationship lasted until the demise of the
socialist bloc in Eastern Europe since 1989. The enjoyment of that special
economic relationship for several decades allowed the Cuban government
to subsidize strategic sectors like education and public health, and to
perform “experiments” of all kinds beyond its real economic capacity as a
postcolonial Caribbean island-nation. These social experiments were
highly costly in terms of lives and finances, like the war in Angola in the
1970s, incursions in Cold War conflicts in Central America, and the
development of the biotechnology industry later. That relationship also
led to the generalization of an economic culture of verticality, paternal-
ism, improvisation, generalized inefficiency, and corruption. The loss of
the Soviet subsidy led to the most dramatic economic crisis post-1959,
known as the Special Period, which no sector or person could escape. The
depth of the crisis brought radical transformations and long-term severe
impact for the Cuban society still present today.7
The above-mentioned loss of Soviet aid virtually paralyzed the Cuban
economy. The island experienced the most severe crisis since 1959, with
significant effects on the sustainability and legitimacy of the Cuban
socialist “paradigm” that are still smoldering today: shortages of basic
products like food, water, gasoline, medicines, and transportation; a pro-
liferation of preventable illnesses; increased poverty and marginalization;
significant drop in employment opportunities; and a bigger presence of
criminality and corruption after the dollarization of the economy. The
desperate search for foreign currency led the government to focus on the
development of the tourism industry and to open up some cultural sec-
tors for the marketing and commercialization of cultural products like
publications, music, and visual arts.
This transformation, known as “El Período Especial” (The Special
Period), set in motion a new wave of migration to the US, Europe, and
several Latin-American countries. In those dramatic circumstances, the
For a more detailed account about the impact of the Special Period, please see González Corzo,
7
Mario A. “Transition or Survival?” and Carmelo Mesa- Lago, Cuban’s Aborted Reform.
28 E. S. Bravo
Cuban government adopted a strategy of survival to perpetuate itself in

power by all possible means. As part of this more pragmatic approach,
Cuban society began to open as the government put in place mild eco-
nomic reforms that allowed a measure of foreign private investment, cor-
porate property in joint ventures with the government and a mild process
of narrative reconstruction of the official discourse to attract new foreign
partners and supporters. Hence, narratives of “reconciliation” with claims
from some sectors of the Cuban diaspora were selectively promoted,
which privileged the cultural realm as the place of encounters for Cubans.
Those were the moments where the work of former censored Cuban writ-
ers and intellectuals like Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, and El Grupo
Orígenes was recovered and legitimized.
The government put in place a set of policies called Rectificación de
Errores y Tendencias Negativas (Rectification of Mistakes and Negative
Trends) to promote a “reflection” on the nation’s destiny and adopted a
series of “corrective” measures to eliminate inefficiencies and institutional
corruption, to avert the dissolution of socialism as in Eastern Europe. In
this context there was a process of contestation, a renaissance of artistic
production in different cultural fields like music, theater, literature,
dance, and visual arts, which led to memorable art projects, spaces, or
groups, like Volumen 1, Arte Calle, El Castillo de la Fuerza, PURE,
PADEIA, and Novísima Trova.8 This new generation of artists espoused
alternative critical reflections within the island on the promises of the
revolutionary national utopia, and on the need for economic, social, and
cultural agency outside the state’s initiative and control.
In such an ideological and controlled society, the negotiation of
national identity is in permanent tension with the constraints imposed by
the official discourse. However, as a multifaceted cultural field, multiple
actors, and influences intersect, contestation takes place in more open or
closed spaces and cubanidad is constantly negotiated within and beyond
the official space. Some scholars have identified some of these alternative
cultural processes at the turn of the century, for example: the spread of
8
“Novísima trova” is a term commonly used to describe a generation of less committed and more
critical songwriters that supersede the so-called Nueva Trova movement during the 1980s. It
included musicians like Carlos Varela, Gerardo Alfonso, Santiago Feliú, Frank Delgado, Donato
Poveda, Xiomara Laugart, Pedro Luis Ferrer and Polito Ibañez, among others.
Afro Cuban religious practices and art expressions, despite ambivalent

governmental policies and prejudices against them (Moore Nationalizing
Blackness); the progressive visibility of rock and hippie underground
scenes, despite decades of official censorship against them (Castellanos);
the punk scene (Torre Pérez) a counterculture inherited from the “frik-
kies” movement that emerged during the 1990s crisis, as another protest
and alternative scene; the rap and hip-hop scenes openly voicing racial
discontent and critique, despite continuous egalitarian claims by the offi-
cial discourse (Fernandez Cuba Represent; ); popular dance musical
genres—like the so-called timba in the 1990s—with lyrics often criticiz-
ing the shortcomings of Cuban daily life, the social impact of the shift
towards a tourism- oriented economy, and the emergence of increased
marginal sectors (Froeliche);9 and the renaissance of artistic “social com-
mentators,” like the so-called Eighties Generation in the visual arts and
Novísima Trova in music, as well as Los Novísimos writers in the nine-
ties—who through their novels exercised unprecedented open criticism
of different aspects of the national socialist project.10 The above were
spaces of connection with the forbidden, the silenced, and the outside
world; cultural practices through which artists and people appropriated
marginalized and external cultural influences creating alternative cultures
and narratives of identity to the official ones. They were processes in
which transnational networks emerged and where connections were
forged with the Cuban diaspora and the outside world beyond the official
tutelage.
One of the first measures by Díaz Canel government (Raúl Castro’s
successor since 2019) was the adoption of the so-called Decreto 349.
According to Ferrer, this and other related governmental regulations
9
Timba was the most popular dance music genre in the island in the 1990s, pumped by the tourist
industry. A local, very eclectic and musically complex evolution of more traditional genres like son,
guaracha, mambo, and cha-cha-chá, heavily influenced by Afro- Cuban rhythms, chants, and instru-
mental arrangements from American jazz, funk, and pop. Timba dance is usually frenetic and more
freestyle than salsa; with lyrics often sexually charged that usually borrow direct calls from street
slang, working class and Afro-Cuban cultural narratives.
10
Los Novísimos was a term coined by literary critic Salvador Redonet in the anthology Los últimos
serán los primeros (1993), to identify a group of dystopian Cuban writers born and raised within the
Revolution, who during the 1990s economic crisis openly disengaged from the saga of Socialist
Realism, aesthetic and ideology inserted by cultural bureaucrats in the literary canon on the island
particularly during El Quinquenio Gris in the 1970s.
30 E. S. Bravo
increased surveillance of dissidents, providing the Ministry of Culture

with absolute control over public performances and ruling over the pub-
lic use of Cuban patriotic symbols. That new regime of constraints in the
cultural field and freedom of speech stepped up harassment to journal-
ists, artists, and activists, made opposition to the government more dif-
ficult (464) and converted many public art performances as political
oppositional acts by default. Due to the overwhelming influence of insti-
tutional cultural politics, at the turn of the century Cuba witnessed the
emergence of alternative and contestatory spaces originating from beyond
the Cuban official realm. Spaces like the poetry collective Omni Zona
Franca, Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra de Conducta and Hannan Harendt
International Institute of Artivism, Sandra Ceballos’s Espacio Aglutinador,
Yoani Sánchez’ Generación Y blog, Periodismo de Barrio, El Estornudo’s
magazine and underground media distribution called El Paquete, con-
tributed to the subsequent emergence of a wave of independent press led
by Cuban millennials, manifested in the proliferation of contestatary
podcasts, blogs, and social media channels.
In the last decades, and since the profound crisis led by the effects of
the COVID-19 pandemic in the island, groups of creatives like multidis-
ciplinary artists Luis Manuel Alcántara, Yanelis Nuñez Leyva, Anamelis
Ramos, musician Maykel Castillo Perez, the San Isidro Movement,
Hamlet Lavastida, Katherine Basquet, Carlos Manuel Alvarez, Abraham
Jiménez Enoa, and many others artivists have increasingly and openly
challenged the state’s communist promises and propaganda of political,
economic, and racial equalities for all through their narratives and artistic
expressions. Alcántara and Castillo are currently in jail in the island, iso-
lated and treated as political prisoners for their artistic peaceful manifes-
tations. Some others were forced to exile. These artists were also criticizing
the effects of the communist propaganda and policies in the restriction of
any artistic activity that implies dissent with the official cubanidad. Taking
advantage of the recent use of the Internet of social media, after years of
prohibition, it’s common to find in social media footage of Internet vid-
eos and posts made by the Cuban people anywhere in the island, showing
the reinforcement of oppression and the strangulation of individual ini-
tiative. As Chaguaceda and Fusco point out, Cubans that openly and
massively took to the streets on July 11, 2021, want more than an end to
the US embargo. They want to put an end to the arrest of artists, the
constant surveillance, to food and medicines shortages, repeated interro-
gations and defamation campaigns led by the state media (Guerra).
The increasing and overwhelming official oppression against any form
of dissent and freedom of expression led to the emergence of far more
reaching social movements like Proyecto Varela, La Primavera Negra and
Las Damas de Blanco, and more recently #27N #NoalDecreto349,
#Cubaesdetodos and el Movimiento San Isidro #MSI, leading to #11J, the
most spontaneous and largest wave of massive social protests, unrest, and
ongoing repression ever known during the revolutionary period in the
island, on July 11, 2021. These spaces have become transnational net-
works and are a manifestation of a significant process of devaluation and
cracking down of the official revolutionary narratives by growing new
political forces coming mainly from the cultural and creative fields, which
are pushing and creating alternative symbolic orders through highly
repressed acts of protests and dissent.
he Transnational Space: Por un “patriotismo

T
abierto” (For a “Soft Patriotism”)
Uncertainties, repression, censorship, opposition, and economic consid-
erations regarding the implications of the revolutionary process from
1959 led to successive waves of Cuban migrations, mainly to the US. Since
then, the Cuban diaspora has shifted from being an exile community—
with the idea of a quick return—to become part of the wide spectrum of
US migrant minorities. Every group of Cuban migrants has created its
own politics of memory as a response to the Cuban government’s con-
struction of nationalism (O’ Reilly Remembering Cuba 25). Grenier and
Pérez point out that the first exile generation of Cubans who migrated to
the US in the 1960s developed a very ideological and rigid notion of
cubanidad frozen in the republican past before 1959 and intolerant of
others’ views within and outside the diaspora that do not jibe with their
way of thinking, narrating, and performing lo cubano (87).
32 E. S. Bravo
According to Max Castro, the first exile wave believes that it is a reposi-
tory and a trustee of what is most authentic in Cuban culture, which, in
his view, has been virtually destroyed on the island by decades of com-
munism. M. Castro adds that the unrealized character and enduring hold
of the exile project has meant that Cubans have concentrated most of
their political energies on the anti-Castro struggle, with little left over for
other important social issues as bilingual education and cultural diversity,
which also have taken a back seat to the pursuit of exiles’ economic suc-
cess (306–307).
In Grenier and Pérez’s view, the socioeconomic selectivity of the 1960s
Cuban migration translated, among other things, into a pervasive and
persistent exile ethos and ideology within the Cuban diasporic commu-
nity (12). For these authors, forging and maintaining the exile ideology
have contributed to the creation of a particular Cuban way of looking at
the social and political environment. The ideology of the exile has become
a critical reference point for the identity of Cuban Americans. Despite
that, both authors rightly point out that the Cuban community’s political
culture is far from being monolithic (87).
The traditional exile notion of cubanidad described by Grenier and
Perez had been codified into a political and normative system in the US
bilateral policy with Cuba, exemplified by the rhetoric of Cuban American
representatives in Congress and in the complex system of regulations
established by the embargo since 1961, and reinforced by the Torricelli
(1992), Helms Burton Acts (1996), and Trump Administration’s bilateral
policy regime. It has also translated into common narrative of how Cuban
affairs are discussed in radio, TV, and social media programs. For O’
Reilly, the traditional exile’s narrative of lo cubano formalized a notion of
cultural and national identity that erects a hierarchy of authenticity that
is at once authoritative, essentialist, and exclusive. The traditional exile’s
narrative depends on a series of polarized distinctions of what is “authen-
tically” Cuban.
The exile discourse privileges the idea of Cuban exceptionalism and
creates the illusion of a homogeneous and univocal community. It
expresses a sense of homeland as a fixed place of attachment and has

imposed a sort of homogenous “imaginary” about the Cuban diasporic
experience that has been relatively constant over the years, obscuring
diverse histories and alternative voices within that community (18; 181).
Both the Cuban official discourse and the traditional exile narratives
turned into political agendas that have promoted a problematic and
apparently irreconcilable context of bilateral relationships until recently.
Both narratives have attempted to “demarcate” the Cuban nation and
cultures through essentialist, antagonist, and selective discursive prac-
tices, rigid emotional and ideological commitments, and certain aesthetic
preferences on how to imagine, listen, and think about it, Cold War style.
Within the Cuban diaspora, there’s little sense of belonging and connec-
tions with any other Latinx or Afro descendent cultural or migrant com-
munities or minorities beyond national affairs, narratives, memories,
values, and sense of history.
Successive waves of Cuban migrants have contributed to the diversifi-
cation of the Cuban diaspora in the US and other countries. Grenier and
Pérez make reference to the so-called Airlift, which took place between
1965 and 1973, and brought 260, 500 Cuban migrants to the US, mostly
middle and skilled working classes. They also refer to the Mariel boatlift
in the 1980s, and Los Balseros or Rafters in 1994, which brought thou-
sands of Cuban migrants, including many from lower socioeconomic
sectors and non-white populations. However, it would be a mistake to
associate both waves strictly with those sectors. The class composition of
Marielitos and Balseros represents the whole spectrum of Cuban society,
ranging from convicted felons, children and young students, dissidents,
and LGBTQ (many of them forced to leave the country by Cuban
authorities) to working class, professionals, intellectuals, and government
officials.
Since then, Cuban migration has been subject to a more orderly pro-
cess aimed to discourage illegal immigration following the Cuban and
US governments’ agreement under the Clinton administration to admit
at least 20, 000 Cubans every year legally and to return any future
34 E. S. Bravo
unauthorized migrants captured by the US Coast Guard before reaching

US shores (Grenier & Pérez 25), the so-called Wet Foot/Dry Foot policy.11
That policy has not impeded Cuban migration but has made it way
more difficult. It has also contributed to the emergence and diversifica-
tion of alternative Cuban diasporic discourses, more reflective of the new
migratory circumstances and different interests of Cuban migrants in the
US after the massive migration since the 1990s crisis, in comparison to
previous waves, especially the traditional exile community. In polls by the
Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, the opin-
ions of the majority of Cuban Americans in Florida have shifted in favor
of lifting the US trade embargo against Cuba. Recent migrants even favor
the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two governments
during the Obama Administration (Cuba-US Transition Polls 2008–2014).
Several factors influenced this shift towards more moderate positions,
among them the aging and relative decline of hard-liner and conservative
Cuban Americans, the so-called traditional exiles; the arrival of younger
Cuban immigrant generations who in many cases left family behind and
are interested in keeping ties with the island despite political consider-
ations; and the relative prominence of Cuban Americans who are less
emotionally engaged with the rigid ideology of the traditional exile com-
munity, more inclusive and in search for alternative strategies in order to
create spaces of understanding among Cuban migrants and influence
affairs on the island. The effects of the conservative Trump Administration
policies on Cuba reverted the steps taken by Obama and contributed to
the polarization of Cuban affairs—Cold War style, especially in places
like Miami, Florida. The Biden Administration has made several declara-
tions supporting civic unrest in Cuba and has recently started to revert
the Trump Admin’s regime of bilateral sanctions.
11
The Wet Foot/Dry Foot policy comprises a revision of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, by
which anyone who fled Cuba and got into the United States would be allowed to pursue residency
a year later. After talks with the Cuban government, the Clinton administration came to an agree-
ment with Cuba that it would stop admitting people found at sea. Since then, in what has become
known as the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, a Cuban caught on the waters between the two nations
(i.e., with “wet feet”) would summarily be sent home or to a third country. One who makes it to
shore (“dry feet”) gets a chance to remain in the US, and later would qualify for expedited “legal
permanent resident” status and US citizenship. The Obama Administration put an end to this
policy in 2017.
Studying intellectual and artistic expressions of the Cuban diaspora, in

“Diaspora and Memory” Rojas argues that each migratory wave arrives
with its own memory about the significance of the Cuban past and the
revolutionary period, its own record of victimization and guilt, and its
own rationality for disengagement with the Cuban regime. Rojas also
identifies some of the main narratives that set newer Cuban diasporas
apart from the traditional exiles. For example, in the case of intellectuals
who migrated in the first two decades after having taken part in the revo-
lution, the motive to break with the Cuban regime was a result of their
opposition to the “sovietization” of Cuban socialism, and not so much to
the revolution itself. In the case of the Mariel generation, Rojas finds
their motivations more linked to a rejection of every form of moral
authoritarianism than with political disenchantment with the Castro
regime. The Mariel generation was not only the victim of political and
social repression on the island, but also subject to discrimination and
distrust by traditional exiles. The generation of Cuban migrants from the
1990s on—although essentially also opposed to the Cuban regime—was
more reconciled with its revolutionary past, showing a less traumatic and
more contemplative experience of the revolution. For Rojas, this group of
migrants recognized the revolution’s cultural legacy (241–245).
Rojas also identifies narratives of Cuban-American scholars in the
1990s that acknowledge pre-revolutionary times in less ideal terms and at
the same time are critical of the revolution and distance themselves from
the traditional exile ideology. In his view, these scholars helped expand
the memory of the exile community and favor national reconciliation, at
least within the intellectual field. For Rojas, one of the main contribu-
tions of Cuban-American scholars is their theorization of the concept of
Cuban diaspora as a viable strategy for the articulation of the Cuban
cultural experience in the US. That reflects more accurately the complex-
ity and diversity of experiences and narratives of cubanidad among Cuban
migrants, mainly but not only in the US. To think critically about the
cultural experience of the Cuban diaspora recognizes at the same time the
exile experience, the impossibility of returning to the homeland and the
problematic political and ideological dilemmas with the Cuban regime.
In addition, it also emphasizes the narrative continuities and disruptions
36 E. S. Bravo
within that community in terms of how to imagine and perform notions

of Cubanness (Idem).
In O’ Reilly’s view, younger diasporic generations of Cubans adhere to
(different) national projects and have created new politics of memory
that subvert and criticize both revolutionary and exile nationalism and
embrace cosmopolitan and postmodern discourses of hybridity, where
Cuba is remembered as a place of poverty and deprivation, but the home-
land is envisioned as an affective network of kin, friends, and neighbor-
hood, not the nation or patria (25). According to O’ Reilly, there are
possibilities at the borders of competing discourses of Cuban national
identity in the transnational context. She refers to the possibility of for-
mulating a more fluid, critical alternative that admits multigenerational
transmissions of cultural tradition and consciousness, reflects the
exchanges that arise by the process of globalization, and allows for dis-
crepant histories and discursive practices that collectively constitute the
“traveling nation” that is Cuba (184).
Moments of Transnationalism in Cuban Music

Music is one of the most visible cultural expressions in the construction
of the Cuban national “imaginary” since the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Carpentier refers to the prevailing presence of music in the national
imagination in the following terms: “Cuba, a country where popular
music has always occupied a greater place than the visual arts, produced
admirable classical composers long before it could even boast of its first
newspaper, a single painter, or one novelist” (21). The works of intellectu-
als like Carpentier and Fernando Ortiz, in the first half of the twentieth
century, were noteworthy for the recognition of the hybrid cultural char-
acter and distinctiveness of Cuban music. They highlighted the signifi-
cant presence of black music and African influences on the development
of Cuban nationalism. They theorized about Cuban music as a cultural
product resulting from ongoing interactions of diverse cultures in con-
stant dialogue, including African, Spanish, Caribbean, and North
American cultures.
Cuban music has a transnational trajectory that informs the construc-

tion of Cuban identities and the Cuban nation. Thomas proposes three
conceptual frameworks to understand the diverse ways in which Cuban
music has historically participated in cross cultural, ethnic, and national
exchanges: cosmopolitanism, internationalism and transnationalism.
Cosmopolitanism refers to the high level of incorporation of music genres
from all over the world into Cuban music. Internationalism regards the
opposite process, by which Cuban music influenced other musical and
cultural spaces worldwide. Transnationalism refers to a different and
more interactive practice of music making that takes place across borders,
and which has become especially salient since the 1990s (105; 108–110).
I am particularly interested in the transnational dimension of Cuban
music and its latest distinctiveness. I understand cosmopolitanism and
internationalism as complementary and interrelated categories with
which to explore the transnational experience of Cuban music.
In academic texts, the study of the international presence of what is
known as Cuban music as a modern category to think about the Cuban
nation dates back at least to the encounters of Cuban musicians with jazz
in New Orleans after the migration of black Cubans to that US region,
resulting from the abolition of slavery on the island in the nineteenth
century. Some would argue that Cuban music appeared on the interna-
tional scene even earlier, considering the migrant experience of many
important Cuban musicians like Ignacio Cervantes, José White and
Manuel Pérez. The case of Louis Moreau Gottschalk—an American from
New Orleans and frequent traveler to Cuba—is referred to by some
authors as being one of the first known American musicians to widely
incorporate Cuban music in his compositions.
The first half of the twentieth century was a fertile period for Cuban
music, because of the emergence of several genres that marked a special
moment in the construction of the idea of a Cuban nation and identities.
Benítez Rojo (“Music and Nation”), Díaz Ayala (Música Cubana and
Cuando salí de la Habana), and Pérez (On Becoming Cuban) have docu-
mented the emergence of music genres like rumba and son in the 1930s,
mambo in the 1940s to cha cha cha in 1950s, as national landmarks that
reinforced the existence of a Cuban national and cultural “imaginaries.”
38 E. S. Bravo
The above-mentioned musical genres also had a great influence on US

popular music and jazz. Froeliche highlights the successive waves of
Cuban popular music forms and musicians to the US between 1939 and
1959, and the exaltation they created among North American listeners
(2). The Mambo craze in the 1950s was an important moment of trans-
nationalism in Cuban music. During the proliferation of jazz bands on
the island, composer Pérez Prado experimented with Cuban dance ele-
ments in jazz orchestration. Prado divided the band into two registers,
“one high register with the trumpets and one low one with the saxes, both
in constant counterpoint and contrast, also making the function of the
sections more melodic-rhythmic than melodic-harmonic” (Acosta 88–89).
The dance genre that emerged from Prado’s arrangements, which incor-
porated rumba and son rhythms around a constant clave, was the mambo,
which became a huge hit in Mexico and the US shortly after emerging in
Cuba. In fact, mambo’s popularity in the US far outweighed its popular-
ity in Cuba in the early 1950s, as big bands led by musicians like Machito,
Tito Rodríguez, and Tito Puente turned it into a national fad (Storhoff 39).
The interactions of Cuban musicians with Puerto-Rican artists estab-
lished in New York strongly influenced the beginnings of the Latin music
market in the US by the mid-1950s. Acosta points to the explosion of
Cubop or Afro-Cuban jazz in the US music scene of the 1940s resulting
from the evolution and interplay of Cuban and American music styles
like bebop, the filing movement and mambo (115). The contributions of
outstanding Cuban musicians living in the US at that time—like
Machito, Mario Bauzá, and Chano Pozo among others—were important
not only in introducing Cuban musical elements to American jazz. They
have been recognized among the pioneers in the emergence of Afro-
Cuban jazz, by interactions and experimentations with American musi-
cians like the legendary Dizzie Gillespie. Afro-Cuban jazz has been very
influential in the subsequent history of different genres like Latin jazz,
salsa, and in the American jazz scene and Cuban popular music. The
direct presence and interaction of Cuban musicians in the American Jazz
scene in the 1940s is one of the clearest historical antecedents of transna-
tionalism in Cuban music in the 1990s. Arsenio Rodriguez’s contribu-
tions to the re-Africanization of Cuban music by expanding of the son
conjunto, and his unique layered guajeos were progressively adopted and
popularized by many other Cuban and Latino musicians as groundbreak-

ing for the subsequent transnational development of transnational Cuban
music genres in the 1940s and 1950s, translated into mambo and salsa.
The profound changes brought about by the nationalist project
enforced by the Cuban revolution since 1959 were accompanied by suc-
cessive and massive waves of Cuban migrants, mainly to the US and to a
lesser degree to other countries. The Cuban diasporic movement after
1959 influenced the transnational presence of Cuban music in particular
ways. Cuba’s cultural and migratory policies, the state of the official US–
Cuba relationship, and the dominant political narratives in the Cuban
diaspora, among others, would become decisive influences in this
scenario.
The radical anti-bourgeoisie revolutionary agenda from the early days
of the revolution translated into a series of cultural policies and actions
that constrained the entertainment and related music scenes. Cuban
nightlife was practically suppressed by shutting down cabarets, clubs, and
many dance places. All cultural matters became extremely centralized by
the government—including the control and decisions over performances
of Cuban musicians, their traveling opportunities, and salaries. That cen-
tralization reproduced inefficiency and arbitrariness, like the abolition of
copyrights and royalty payments. In addition to Anglo rock, even
American jazz was forbidden as “music from the enemy” and several jazz
venues closed. According to Acosta, this was “the most disastrous moment
for Cuban popular music and in general for the country’s social life,
because of administrative measures whose negative consequences we are
suffering thirty years later” (202).
Those cultural policies prompted the migration of many musicians.
Migration became a highly political act in the Cuban context by the insti-
tutional establishment, especially during the first decades after the revo-
lution. Even if those who migrated were renowned national and/or
international artists, they were generally considered political “traitors”
and illegal subjects by the Cuban establishment and therefore silenced for
a long time. Omissions, silences, and prohibitions were common actions
against artist migrants in the official historiography of post-1959 Cuban
culture for many decades. As a result, the life and work of many Cuban
musicians in the US, among them legendary figures who in many cases
40 E. S. Bravo
had to assimilate as they couldn’t or didn’t want to go back to the island,

like Celia Cruz, La Lupe, Olga Guillot, Miguelito Valdés, Arsenio
Rodriguez, Rolando La Serie, Orestes López “Cachao,” and Bebo Valdés
in Europe, among many others of the time, are unknown to many Cubans
born and raised after 1959 on the island. However, these musicians
strongly contributed to spreading and developing Cuban music world-
wide. They also influenced further developments in the Latin jazz and
salsa scenes across the world with their talent and rich Cuban musical
backgrounds.
Cuban musicians and music made on the island post-1959 gradually
lost presence in US music circuits, with few exceptions. The situation
worsened with the US embargo’s restrictions on the exchange of cultural
materials and artists since 1962, as visas to enter the US were systemati-
cally denied to musicians living on the island. As a result, and until the
end of the twentieth century, Cuban music made on the island post 1959
was practically absent on US radio, TV stations, dance venues and clubs,
particularly in Miami. Many musicians from the island who managed to
get gigs in the US were subject to threats and political turmoil by the
traditional exile community. This was the case when Van Van—the most
popular dance band on the island—played at a concert at the American
Airlines Arena in 1999 in Miami.12 That concert was a peak moment in
what became a political war by the traditional exile against Cuban musi-
cians and promoters from the island for a while. According to Pacini-
Hernández, that context of threats determined to a large extent the refusal
of the US-based Latin music industry to promote music from the
island (24).13
An important relaxation of the US embargo in the cultural field took
place in 1988 with the Berman Amendment, which allowed for the cir-
culation and exchange of Cuban cultural materials, including live and
recorded music, for educational and cultural purposes. That enabled the
distribution of original Cuban recordings in the US if they were issued
12
See Cantor-Navas, “Van-Van Plays On” for a detailed account of the hostile environment experi-
enced in Miami by several musicians living on the island, such as Van-Van in 1999, and of a pre-
sentation in Miami by jazz musician Gonzalo Rubalcaba in 1996, among many others.
13
See Sublette, “The Missing Cuban Musicians,” for a detailed analysis of the impact of the US
regime of restrictions on cultural exchange with Cuba.
abroad by a non-US party. While this policy only allowed the licensing of
already-made recordings and did not permit US companies to create and
sell new records of Cuban artists, the law facilitated the release of hun-
dreds of albums by Cuban musicians and created new audiences for
Cuban artists (Sublette 11). However, for Hernández-Reguant this open-
ing did not help raise the interest of major record labels, relegating Cuban
music to small entrepreneurs linked to the new world music scene mostly
in college towns and cosmopolitan cities (“World Music” 117).
One of the most important transnational moments in Cuban music
was the international success of the Buena Vista Social Club phenome-
non (henceforth BVSC) at the end of the 1990s, composed of Cuba-
based old musicians, such as singer and guitarist Compay Segundo, singer
Ibrahim Ferrer, and pianist Ruben González, among others. The music
producer of the project was Cuban musician Juan de Marcos González,
and the general producer was American Musician Ry Cooder. BVSC
became a successful global trademark and led to a spate of recordings,
world tours, collaborations, record sales, awards, and a documentary by
filmmaker Wim Wender.
The international recognition reached by BVSC rekindled a world-
wide interest in traditional Cuban music, positioning it in the interna-
tional music industry through the world music scene. The BVSC music
reinforced internationally an aesthetic centered in stereotyped narratives
of nostalgia for the Cuban past, where musical developments that took
place after the 1950s lacked any relevance. Back on the island, the BVSC
phenomenon generated an unprecedented replication of traditional
music ensembles associated with tourism venues that exploited its inter-
national craze to attract foreign currency. Similar phenomena can be seen
in the streets of Calle 8 in Miami, FL. However, BVSC did not resonate
much in the island’s local popular music dance scene for a while, domi-
nated by timba bands at the turn of the century.
After restrictions were relaxed in the early 1990s, Cuban music from
the island reentered the US marketplace, inducing great interest among
American audiences. Several major bands and artists from the timba
scene, the major popular Cuban dance music at that moment on the
island—like Isaac Delgado, Van Van, Paulo FG, and La Charanga
Habanera—toured regularly in different American cities and their music
42 E. S. Bravo
became available in US stores nationwide. I witnessed many of these

bands’ concerts during the 1990s at SOB, Sound of Brazil, a legendary
music venue in Soho, New York. Pacini-Hernández indicates that this
reentry of Cuban music in the US did not happen via Latin music net-
works, due in her view to the impact of the restrictive bilateral political
regime described above, but instead it took place through the world
music market (24) as in the case of BVSC.
During the George Bush republican administration in the first decade
of the 2000s, cultural exchange between Cuba and the US experienced its
lowest levels, compared only to the future Trump Administration times.
The travel ban to Cuba was intensified; the renewal of licenses for cultural
and academic exchanges between US and Cuban institutions was sus-
pended; Cuban musicians’ visas to enter the US were routinely denied;
and the bureaucratic process to bring a Cuban artist to the US was cum-
bersome and discouraging, even for musicians born in Cuba and residing
in other countries (Sublette 13–16). One of the most heated moments
was back in 2001, when the Latin Grammys decided to move from
Miami to Los Angeles, due to the strong reactions and threats made by
several organizations from the traditional exile community against the
presence of Cuban musicians from the island. For almost 50 years there
were practically no public contacts and musical collaborations between
Cuban musicians living in Miami with those on the island.
Another important and different moment of transnationalism in
Cuban music took place from the Miami Cuban enclave. In the late
1970s to 1980s, a group of Cuban musicians who arrived as children in
the 1960s created a style of music known as “Miami Sound,” in which
Cuban music was the main ingredient but in a very commercial fusion
with rock, pop, and other Latin influences from Brazil, Colombia, Puerto
Rico, and the Dominican Republic. These Miami musicians instinctively
used lyrics in Spanish and/or English. The Miami Sound, in particular
singers like Willy Chirino and Gloria Estefan, had commercial success
and generated a large audience on the island, despite being officially for-
bidden by the Cuban state, and across other world geographies. Authors
like Guevara have observed that the traditional Cuban exile community,
represented by these artists, promoted a radical nationalism by explicitly

expressing a nostalgic patriotism and longing for an idealized past (42).
That basically remained the discursive context encountered by the
wave of Cuban migrant musicians in the 1980s that settled in the US,
Mexico, and Spain.14 In general, the work of this wave of musicians in the
transnational context has rarely been acknowledged, the case of trumpet
player Arturo Sandoval, saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera, and singer Albita
Rodriguez. These talented musicians have managed to successfully
develop their professional careers outside Cuba, and at the same time
have been among the most openly vocal artists of their generation on
Cuban issues.
The dominant political narratives on both sides of the Florida straits
have significantly prevailed and shaped the transnational trajectory of
Fig. 2.1 Willy Chirino in the set of the recording of Cuba Libre’s music video.
Miami, FL. 2008. Photo Courtesy of Ernesto Fundora’s personal archives
Arturo Sandoval, Paquito de Rivera, Ignacio Berroa, Carlos Averhoff, Ahmed Barroso, Albita
14
Rodríguez, Meme Solís, Lucrecia, Donato Poveda, Malena Burque, Mike Purcel, and Pancho
Céspedes among many others, are among the generation of Cuban musicians who migrated in the
1980s and early 1990s.
44 E. S. Bravo
Cuban music after 1959. Cepeda points to the existence of “hegemonic

silences” in popular media representations of Latino music in the US
(58), referring to the difficult entry into the US of Cuban music made on
the island during the second half of the twentieth century. The first big
exception was the BVSC phenomenon, which put Cuban music made
50 years ago back on the world map, and Cubatón in the beginning of the
twenty-first century. The creation of WRMA, Ritmo 95.7 since 2016, a
radio station in Miami devoted to Cubatón, the happening of regular and
massive reggaetón concerts in the Florida straight, and the appearance of
reggaetón musicians in local media, really created spaces for the music
made in the island in the United States like no other music genre was able
to do before.
During the early Obama administration in 2008, cultural exchanges
between Cuba and the US in the music sector reached their zenith since
1959. President Obama used his executive power prerogatives to loosen
travel restrictions for Cuban Americans to visit their families in Cuba.
Though travel for tourism for US citizens was still not permitted as part
of the embargo regulations, a system of licenses from the Office of Foreign
Assets Control (OFAC) from the Treasury Department was put in place,
which provided the possibility to visit the island for people-to-people
contact, meaning for educational, religious, cultural, and research pur-
poses. Restrictions for Cuban Americans to send remittances to their
families on the island were loosened. On the island, the Cuban govern-
ment rescinded the need for an exit permit for Cuban citizens in 2013.
All Cubans needed to travel from the island were a Cuban passport valid
for two years, and the visa from the country they intended to visit.
Importantly, they no longer risked losing citizenship privileges (Betancourt
175–86). However, they still needed to validate their passports on a regu-
lar basis in a relatively short period of time and pay a high price in foreign
currency for their travel documents. Back on the island, musicians could
travel abroad for longer periods and finally obtained more control over
their earnings without losing their rights and property back on the island.
However, they were selectively requested to participate and perform in
political acts promoted by the government, a tactic used to pressure and
compromise their relatively increased independence gained since the
1990s crisis.
Those measures have been part of a gradual and ambivalent system of

economic reforms put in place by the government since Raúl Castro
came to power in 2006 until 2018. The reforms progressively liberalized
some sectors like small business, farms, self-employment, and real estate.
They established a dual economy in the hands of the military that deep-
ened income gaps, life opportunities, and social differences based on
access to convertible currency. They also keep state control at all levels on
most of the dividends of the economic activity from any sector. The new
context of relaxation of bilateral policies and regulations contributed to a
significant flaw of travel, regular presence, and the normalization of pre-
sentations of Cuban musicians from the island in the US, especially in
Miami, until Trump times.
Borges Triana adopted the term Música Cubana Alternativa (MCA)
(Alternative Cuban Music) to refer to the emergence of a particular form
of song in the nineties that reflected a generational experience with a
more hybrid sound, cosmopolitan and post-national spirit than previous
song movements like nueva trova (La luz 16).15 He characterized MCA
musicians as those who share an “underground” sensibility and genera-
tional experience, as well as a symbolic resistance to the hegemonic dis-
courses on the island and stateside and offer a different discourse
(Concierto 73; 76–77).
The 1990s’ massive migration marked a distinct moment in the trans-
national experience of Cuban music with the significant relocation of
many musicians—especially singers and songwriters from MCA, and
academically trained musicians—to Miami, Rome, New York, Los
Angeles, México, Quito, Guatemala, Toronto, Madrid, Barcelona, and
Paris, among other world cities. Most of them left the island at the begin-
ning of their careers and suddenly became migrants with little knowledge
15
Nueva trova was an important song movement from the 1960s inspired by the so-called Hispanic
“nueva canción” (new song) movement and North American protest songs. They proposed highly
poetic and socially conscious lyrics as a norm. They were inspired by traditional Cuban songs and
influenced by rock, pop, and Brazilian musicians from the Tropicalia movement. By the mid-1970s,
nueva trova became a national institutionalized movement with hundreds of members throughout
the island, with the full support of other institutions like ICAIC (Cuban Institute of the Arts and
Cinematography Industry). Nueva trova also acquired a significant international fan base that was
instrumental to the island’s cultural establishment. See also Giro Radamés, Diccionario Enciclopédico
de la Música en Cuba (Tomo 4) (212–215).
46 E. S. Bravo
of how to operate in the global music market. They faced a dramatic

transition, moving from the paralyzing paternalism of a subsidized social-
ist economy to the challenges and uncertainties of the capitalist world,
especially intense for first-generation migrants.
According to Thomas:
The changing perceptions of those living in the diaspora, developments in

communications such as the Internet, email and instant messaging, and
technological advances in recording and digital mastering have greatly
altered the ways Cuban music is imagined, realized, marketed, and con-
sumed. (109–10)
After decades of mutual prohibitions and isolation, and in the after-

math of Obama’s election as a US president, multi-awarded Miami-based
Fig. 2.2 Orishas in Concert with Yadam González and Braily Ramos on stage.
Fillmore Theater. Miami Beach, FL. 2019. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal
archives
Colombian musician Juanez organized an international massive concert

in Havana’s main public Revolution Square, called Peace without Borders.
That concert was put together with the idea to break up decades of
estrangement and isolation prompted by the extremes of both Cuban
narratives of nationalism within and outside the island, which was heav-
ily criticized by the exile community and somehow supported by Cuban
dissidents, according to news report of the time. The concert Peace with-
out Borders was historic in the transnational trajectory of Cuban music,
as it became one of the few instances where Cuban musicians living in
diaspora were able to perform in the island, like hip-hop band Orisha,
Cucu Diamantes, and Yerbabuena, sharing stages with island’s renowned
musicians like Equis Alfonso and Síntesis, Carlos Varela, Los Van Van,
and Silvio Rodríguez.
In December 2014, the governments of the US and Cuba announced
their intention to reestablish diplomatic relations for the first time in
more than 50 years. Together with the release and exchange of several
political prisoners, the US government agreed to further ease restrictions
for US citizens on remittances, travel, banking, and telecommunication
transactions with the island, and to review Cuba’s designation as a state
sponsor of terrorism. The US public received the announcement posi-
tively for the most part. Those who visited the island frequently and
diverse press venues report a similar positive response by the Cuban pop-
ulation in general. Some sectors of the island’s opposition have expressed
their concern regarding the announcement, mainly regarding the repres-
sive government’s stance against any form of opposition, the lack of polit-
ical freedoms, and the disregard for human rights. The Cuban-American
lobby in Congress, representative of the traditional exile community, has
openly expressed their frustrations over the negotiations with the island’s
government. They have systematically opposed any actions leading to the
removal of the embargo and any rapprochement that requires legislative
prerogatives on bilateral issues.
Subsequently, the Cuban government announced several conditions
for the bilateral negotiations to move forward, including historic demands
like the end of the US embargo, and the devolution of the Guantanamo
Bay military base. Although both governments formally restored diplo-
matic relationships in July 2015, the restrictions adopted by the Trump
48 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 2.3 X Alfonso in concert. Miami Dade County Auditorium. 2012. Miami,
FL. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal archives
administration later on and the rise of political persecution and oppres-

sion by the Cuban government made the new bilateral moment a diffi-
cult path, with a lot of uncertainties and fundamental obstacles.
The reestablishment of bilateral relationships during the Obama
Administration translated into more presence of Cuban musicians in the
US market since the second half of the 2000s. US musicians enjoyed
fewer restrictions to visit and play on the island. Restrictions on com-
mercial incentives required for major events were lifted until the Trump
Administration. According to current regulations, Cuban artists who

reside on the island can only collect per-diems when touring in the
US. To avoid those obstacles, some of these musicians became US resi-
dents, like acclaimed reggaetón duo Gente de Zona (Cantor-Navas
“What the U.S.-Cuba”) now that they don’t lose their citizen privileges
on the island. Some Cuban migrants were doing regular presentations
back home, where a nostalgic fan base still follows them after they have
lived abroad for more than a decade.
Despite the ebbs and flows of each U.S. administration’s bilateral poli-
cies, and of the island’s cultural policies and bureaucratic restrictions,
musicians have been pioneers in paving the road to socio-cultural engage-
ment between the two countries by promoting personal communication,
collaboration and exchanges with their art that in practical terms have
seeded transnational networks of cultural production.
3
Cubanidad “in-between”:
The Transnational Cuban Alternative
Music Scene (TCAMS)
Abstract The chapter examines the negotiation of narratives of identity

and practices of music production of Cuban singers, songwriters and aca-
demically trained musicians that migrated massively after the 1990s cri-
sis. It proposes the term the Transnational Cuban Alternative Music
Scene (TCAMS) to illustrate this open-ended transnational network of
music making, through constant fusion and cultural counterpoints with
an array of Cuban and global music references. It documents how Cuban
music is produced, distributed, and consumed across urban centers like
Miami, New York, and Madrid through constant collaborations made
possible by firsthand interaction of these musicians in a global context.
The chapter argues that these musicians’ transnational lives and lyrics
assume an apparently depoliticized and middle-ground attitude in rela-
tion to dominant Cold War narratives on Cubanness.
Keywords Cubanidad in-between • The Transnational Cuban

Alternative Music Scene (TCAMS) • Cuban fusion

52 E. S. Bravo
“Yo te bailo un rock and roll,

aunque la rumba me llama,
con los pies en Nueva York,
y el corazón en la Habana,
Oh la Habana, Oh la Habana.”
I dance a rock and roll for you,

although rumba is calling me,
standing up in New York,
but with my heart in Havana,
Oh Havana, Oh Havana.
(Torrens “Ni de aquí ni de allá”)
After decades of political turmoil against any visit of musicians from

the island, collaborations between Cuban musicians from las dos orillas
(the two shores) progressively became the norm during the 2000s in
Miami, where it became common to find every week several options of
live concerts, theater performances, literary presentations, and visual art
openings in which Cuban artists living inside or outside the island regu-
larly gathered to collaborate professionally. How did these collaborations
become regular in places like Miami?.
Since the 1990s, Cuban music production has become the norm across
international borders, resulting from firsthand encounters of Cuban sing-
ers, songwriters, and academically trained musicians who migrate to for-
eign cultures. I argue that these musicians have formed a Transnational
Cuban Alternative Music Scene (TCAMS), a network of significant
music production mostly in nontraditional music industry circuits that
transcends national borders and projects a post-national imaginary. This
alternative music scene employs Fusion as its main musical language,
which doesn’t fit easily into recognized Cuban music genres in Latin or
mainstream markets. These musicians have created a transnational inde-
pendent space of music production, distribution, and consumption, sup-
ported by what Thomas points out: access to broadband Internet, new
recording technologies, and the increased mobility acquired by these
musicians after migrating (“Cosmopolitan” 110).
3 Cubanidad “in-between”: The Transnational Cuban… 53
Fig. 3.1 David Torrens in the video set of Sentimientos Ajenos. México, D.F. 1996.
Photo Courtesy of Ernesto Fundora’s personal archives
TCAMS encompasses a generation of Cuban expatriates from the

1990s spread across several continents, who frequently travel to the
island for family and professional reasons (Idem). This network exempli-
fies claims about the increasingly transnational character on the perfor-
mance of Cubanness across the diaspora, especially since the turn of the
century. TCAMS could be “located” beyond traditional politics of
cubanidad, and as a post-soviet and post-national Cuban imaginary.
Their transnational lives and their lyric discourses are in constant nego-
tiation and assume an apparent depoliticized attitude in relation to more
visible ideological narratives about cubanidad (Cubanness) emanating
from the nationalist discourse of the island’s officials and the traditional
exile. That context has been changing due to the effects of the massive
protests of July 11, 2021, in the island, which radicalized many Cuban
artists from all over, united by a common reaction of solidarity and sup-
port to the demands of the Cuban people against the significant expan-
sion of Díaz Canel government’s repression.
54 E. S. Bravo
How have these “hijos de la revolución” (daughters and sons of the revo-
lution)—raised in a very paternalistic, vertical, and ideologically rigid sys-
tem of national identity and socialist morals—have reinvented themselves
as migrants and accommodated their art to the realities of the globalized
capitalist market and world? Have they really adapted, assimilated, or do
they exhibit distinctive diasporic practices in comparison with previous
and later Cuban waves? What does it mean for the project of the nation-
state, so overwhelmingly defended by the revolutionary government and
for Cuban music historiography, that a significant group of these mostly
highly educated “New Men” (and Women) artists had to massively relo-
cate throughout the world when as young as in their twenties? What does
“the significant trans-territoriality of Cuban culture” (de la Nuez, 29),
especially after the 1990s crisis, mean for the study of Cuban cultural
production, specifically music, when an important volume of music
regarded as Cuban is made outside the territorial frontiers of the island?
To answer these questions, I will survey some case studies of TCAMS,
focusing on the singer-songwriters and academically trained musicians
and their collaborations throughout New York, Madrid, and Miami. The
chapter first provides an introductory section followed by a historiograph-
ical background on the presence and evolution of alternative music in
Cuba after 1959. Then, my analysis delineates the presence of this trans-
national music scene in those cities through some thematic coordinates:
forms of music production and collaboration across borders; the circuit of
local and trans local venues where these musicians perform; audiences and
music reception; discursive practices of this diasporic cohort; the “loca-
tion” of this network in the international music industry and some reflec-
tions about what Cuban Fusion entails as a musical and cultural language.
Habanization
In February 2012, a music project called Habanization visited Miami to
perform at Manuel Artime Theater.1 Habanization was an ad hoc collec-
tive formed in Havana by some Cuban singers and songwriters who
1
See Silot Bravo “Se Habaniza Miami” (2012).
migrated in the 1990s to Spain, France, Mexico, and the US. After
15 years living abroad, they returned to live on the island or shuttle
between Cuba and other countries.2 Some of these musicians took advan-
tage of the certain lessening over earnings and travel decisions resulting
from the 1990s crisis on the island. They also benefited from the ease of
cultural exchanges between Cuba and the US during the Clinton
Administration and of travel regulations enacted by President Obama in
2011. In 1999, the Clinton Administration exempted Cuban artists from
the Reagan Proclamation 5377, making it much simpler for Cuban musi-
cians to perform in the US and for promoters to arrange their visits and
concerts. Additionally, it allowed US citizens to visit Cuba for religious,
humanitarian, and academic purposes and many musicians were able to
justify trips as educational experiences. Legal travel to Cuba by US citi-
zens was made easier by traveling with an organization that possessed a
“people-to-people” license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control
OFAC. These licenses specifically forbade tourism as an acceptable activ-
ity so trips to beaches and resorts were not permitted, and travelers were
instead required to stick to itineraries of educational experiences and
structured interactions with Cuban citizens (Sublette qtd. in Storhoff
57). The George W. Bush Administration dealt these exchanges a severe
setback and froze Cuba–US cultural exchange. With the Obama
Administration, new OFAC regulations were issued in 2011 that made it
possible for religious and academic groups to travel to the island nation
with only a general license, meaning that they did not need specific per-
mission from the Department of Treasury or other government agency.
They also made it possible for travel providers to organize cultural
exchange tours and permitted more airports to allow charter flights to
Cuba (Storhoff 66–67).
As part of this relatively brief project, Habanization made presenta-
tions in France, Havana, and the US. The American TV public channel
P.B.S. made the documentary Habana, Habana.
2
Singers and songwriters from Habanization were: Raúl Paz (Paris-Havana), Descemer Bueno
(Miami-New York-Havana), David Torréns (Mexico-Havana) and Kelvis Ochoa (Madrid-Havana).
Mr. Haka (Miami) and Diana Fuentes (Puerto Rico-Havana). Singer Haydée Milanes (Havana-
Miami) was also invited to participate in some presentations.
56 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.2 Habanization. Panel discussion. Modern Languages Department and

Miami Observatory. University of Miami. Coral Gables, FL. 2012. Flyer. Courtesy of
Eva Silot Bravo personal archive
For the Miami concert, Habanization made several promotional

appearances on local TV and radio stations and relied on local musicians
for their backup band. Most of the musicians were former school peers
on the island in the 1980s–1990s. The audience was composed mainly of
recent Cuban migrants in their thirties to fifties; they enthusiastically
sang and danced during the entire concert. Between songs the musicians
talked about the significance of this concert in Miami for them, as an
opportunity to connect with family and friends and to contribute to the
unity of Cubans from all over. As a researcher and audience member, I
witnessed and at the same time felt part of this community of affection
created throughout the world around the music and subjectivities of
these Cuban musicians and songwriters from the nineties. The conta-
gious enthusiasm of the audience constituted a public in the sense put
forth by Warner in “Publics and Counterpublics,” that is, as a space of
discourse constituted by the discussions of the music and lyrics, to which
I add of common educational and sociocultural background. The presen-
tation of this type of collaborative project among Cuban singer-
songwriters and jazz-academically trained musicians from both shores,
which was one of a kind at the time, became the norm since then in
several venues and stages across Miami and Florida.
Changes in the music field at the turn of the century are connected to
the effects of the crisis. The 1990s massive wave of Cuban migration that
spread throughout the US, Europe, and Latin America included the most
significant relocation of Cuban artists and musicians born and raised dur-
ing the revolution.3 Many of them were part of what Borges Triana calls
Música Cubana Alternativa (Cuban Alternative Music), a term that refers
to the emergence of a particular form of music-making in 1990s Cuba
that reflected a generational experience with a more hybrid sound, cos-
mopolitan and post-national spirit than previous song movements like
nueva trova (La luz 16).4 Borges Triana also characterized MCA as a cul-
tural scene that included musicians from the rock, pop, rap, hip-hop and
jazz scenes on the island. These musicians celebrate a shared “underground”
sensibility and generational experience, independent of el pensamiento
official (official discourse). This scene also reveals a discursive
3
According to data from IPUMS USA (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) from the US
Census until 2012, there was a significant increase in the number of Cuban artists, musicians, and
related workers who migrated to the US since the 1980s, and especially since 1995, in the midst of
the Cuban economic crisis. See also González Echevarría and Anke Birkenmaier.
4
Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez, Noel Nicola, Vicente Feliu, Augusto Blanca, and Sara González
were among the main exponents of early nueva trova movement that originated thanks to the sup-
port of Haydee Santamaría, Casa de las Américas’ director and revolutionary leader. Progressively
other musicians like Amaury Pérez, Pedro Luis Ferrer, and Marta Campos, and bands like Moncada,
Manguaré, and Mayohuacán, among many others, became prominent within the movement.
58 E. S. Bravo
strategy—coming from the context of popular culture—reflecting the

worldview of a particular Cuban generation as well as a framework of
symbolic cultural resistance positioned against the hegemonic discourses
of their time (Concierto Cubano 73; 76–77).
Since the publication of Concierto Cubano, Borges Triana recognized
that many of MCA musicians have moved away from the island. They
became the focus of his book, Músicos de Cuba y del mundo. Nadie se va
del todo (2012). After almost two decades of massive migration of Cuban
musicians, Borges Triana published that book as a response to the omis-
sions and censorship still in place, with few exceptions, regarding several
important Cuban migrant musicians, based on either ideological criteria
and/or the inertia of cultural politics. In other words, Borges Triana refers
to the lack of research on the significance of Cuban diasporic music prac-
tice on the island (Músicos 16; 59). Through a very comprehensive
approach, Borges Triana engages in considerations about the lack of a
domestic market for Cuban diasporic musicians on the island and pro-
vides a review of different moments in the migration of Cuban musicians
to the US. TCAMS is inspired and at the same time updates Borges-
Triana’s studies on Cuban alternative music. TCAMS refers to the music
scenes formed by singers-songwriters and academically trained musicians,
in terms of identity negotiation and music production, who migrated
since the 1990s or live between Cuba and other world cities.
Cuba is a country with a high percentage of emigrant population:
about 15–20% of a population of 11 million (de la Nuez 28). Historically,
Cuban migrants have been key in their contributions to create recogniz-
able symbols of the national culture and narratives. The steady flow of
emigrant artists and musicians since the 1990s has been the most signifi-
cant since the revolution. However, few studies could be found about
diasporic singers-songwriters and academically trained musicians. On the
island, Borges Triana has published more extensively about the 1990s
music scene between Havana and Madrid. That has also been the subject
of journalistic commentaries mainly in online publications and blogs by

Cuban authors.5
Cuban Studies have focused mainly on other music scenes, that is,
more visible popular music made on the island like timba; the impact of
global trends in the local music context through genres like rap and hip-
hop; and the insertion of Cuban music in global circuits through world
music as in the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. There also are
more recent studies about Cubaton, the local re-signification of the world-
wide commercial explosion of reggaetón from authors like Gámez-Torrez
and Geoffrey Baker. One of the few exceptions is Susan Thomas, who has
published texts about representations and negotiations of the often invis-
ible and usually disregarded queer (particularly lesbian identities) in the
male-dominated contemporary Cuban singer-songwriter movement; the
centrality of Havana in the imaginary or worldview of Cuban singer-
songwriters both on and off the island; and the different ways that Cuban
music has historically participated in the shaping of a global musical cul-
ture, particularly in the transnationalization of Cuban music since the
end of the twentieth century.6 Arsenio Rodriguez recently published a
book about Habana Abierta as Cuban rock.7
I’m interested in the global dispersion of these musicians; their rela-
tively limited visibility in either mainstream or world music markets;
and/or their apparent “low profile” political narratives on Cuban issues
5
Books, journalistic commentaries, blog entries, concert reviews, and articles about this generation
of musicians have been made by critics and authors Dennys Matos, Enrique del Risco, Ernesto
Fundora, Arsenio Rodríguez Quintana, Julio Fowler, Adrián Morales, Santiago “El Chago” Mendez
Alpízar, Felix Varela, Borges-Triana, Juan Camacho, Humberto Manduley, Bladimir Zamora, and
Rogelio Ramos Domínguez, among others.
6
See Thomas, Susan: “Did Nobody”, “Musical Cartographies,” and “Cosmopolitan.” See also
López Cano.
7
See Rodríguez Quintana, Arsenio. El Divino Guión de Habana Abierta.
60 E. S. Bravo
until recently.8 Many of these musicians migrated when their careers

started to develop or were unknown in the island, and have developed a
significant production of music while living outside the island, mostly in
nontraditional music industry circuits. Their music could be interpreted
as both a break and continuation with previous and established music
scenes on the island, mainly nueva trova, novísima trova, timba, and
Cuban jazz, and as a preamble of future important transnational music
moments like the one created by the song Patria y Vida, during the mas-
sive protests in the island in July 2021.
To study the music production and discursive practices of TCAMS in
Miami, New York, and Madrid since the 1990s, I’ve conducted participa-
tory observations at studio recording sessions, concerts, festivals, and
panels. I supported my observations with open-ended interviews in per-
son and through podcasts, and with the analysis of several albums, vid-
eos, and documentaries. I also conducted a discursive analysis of some of
these musicians’ lyrics. I have had ongoing interactions with this
8
The following musicians are a good part of what I considered the initial Transnational Cuban
Alternative Music Scene. For this manuscript, they are clustered by the cities studied: Madrid,
Miami, and New York. They are also grouped by type of music in two main large categories, sing-
ers, singers-songwriters and academically trained musicians. The group that first settled in Spain
includes singers and songwriters Gema Corredera and Pavel Urquiza; current and formers members
of Habana Abierta (Vanito Brown, Alejandro Gutiérrez, José Luis Medina, Luis Barbería, Pepe del
Valle, Andy Villalón, Boris Larramendi, and Kelvis Ochoa); Raúl Torres, Alejandro Frómeta, Julio
Fowler, Adrián Morales, Athanai Castro, Nilo Castillo, Rubén Aguiar and Magilé Alvarez. Other
TCAMS musicians in Spain, in the jazz and commercial scenes are Gema 4, Alain Pérez, Yadam
González, Kiki Ferrer, Javier “Caramelo” Masó, Roman Filiú, Iván Melón Lewis, José Ramón
Mestre, Alfredo Chacón, Julio Montalvo, Carlos Puig-Hatem, Iván Ruiz Machado, and Daján
Abad. In and close to New York, a group of academically trained and nontrained musicians who
are located mainly in the jazz scene are Yosvany and Yunior Terry, Dafnis Prieto, Manuel Varela,
Pedrito Martínez, Felipe Lamoglia, José “El Gola”, Osmany Paredes, Elio Villlafranca, Oriente
López, Axel Laugart, Glenda del E., Melvis Santa and David Virelles, and singer-songwriters
Xiomara Laugart and Roberto Poveda. The group of musicians who reside in Miami is the largest
one within TCAMS, and include singers and songwriters like Amaury Gutierrez, Descemer Bueno,
Mr. Haka, Elaín Morales, El Chinodreadlion, Luis Boffill, Leslie Cartaya, Yisel Duque, Mónica
Sierra, Lena Burke, Alcides Herrera, Las Blumers, Yesler de la Cruz, and Michel Peraza. In many
cases, Miami’s musicians are also instrumentalists, composers, and/or producers, including Glenda
del E., Ahmed Barroso, Hilario Bell, Michel Fragoso, Manuel Orza, William Paredes, Ramier
Olalde, Reinier Guerra, Los Pututis (Alexis, Angel & Armando), Braulio Fernández, Angel Nápoles,
Danielito López, Jorge Gómez, Leandro González, Raúl & Joel del Sol, Hammadi Bayard, Nestor
del Prado, Edgar Magdariaga, Mikel Olivera, Jorge Arronte, Philbert Armenteros and Mercedes
Abal, among many others. Some of these musicians relocated from Spain to the US (mainly to
Miami), after the latest economic Spanish crisis. Others from New York to Miami, and a few have
returned to reside in Cuba, or are living between the island and other countries.
community of musicians for decades since some of them studied music

in the school of the arts system in Cuba since the 1980s–1990s.
Subsequently, I interacted with many of them in concerts, studio-ses-
sions, music venues, and personally in New York, Miami, and Madrid. In
Miami, I also produced or coproduced concerts and music festivals, orga-
nized academic panels, and produced two bilingual podcasts about local
and transnational creatives,9 including some of these artists. My research
led to the creation of my blog Cubanidadinbetween, where I’ve been
publishing interviews with these musicians, related videos, podcasts, doc-
umentaries, reviews, and information about the events I organized, col-
laborated with, or was an audience. I have also published several texts
about this music scene in academic and online magazines.
Alternative Music in Cuba After 1959

In The A to X in Alternative Music (2004), Taylor’s ideas about alternative
music in the Western world are relevant to think about this topic in the
context of Cuban music after 1959. I found Taylor’s ideas helpful to
think about TCAMS as alternative in terms of musical language and on
their discourses about Cubannesss. For Taylor, the use of the term alter-
native has been associated mainly with the Western music scenes across
the world, which tends to eschew known music canons and the produc-
tion of mainstream music as a norm. Alternative musicians are neither
guided by commercial imperatives nor attracted to immediate social rec-
ognition. Instead, they are oriented by a need to produce their own music
and to explore practices that are not necessarily accepted in the popular
realm. Alternative music is not intended to connect with mass audiences
immediately. It targets more specific groups with shared common experi-
ences, ideas, and aesthetics (Idem). In addition, Burkhalter’s studies of
music scenes in Beirut as transnational cultural spaces are also pertinent.
He identifies cultural spaces where musicians are considered alternative
because “they tried to fight old ‘eurocentric’ Euro-American perceptions
9
See Silot Bravo, Eva. Miami Alternativo and Word Culture/Cultura de la Palabra podcasts.
62 E. S. Bravo
of their home countries, by challenging and mixing up ideas about cul-

ture, place, locality, tradition and authenticity in music” (12).
In post-1959 Cuban music field, one of the most salient expressions of
alternativity took place among singers-songwriters throughout three gen-
erations represented by: nueva trova (1960s–1980s); novísima trova
(1970s–1980s); and MCA (1990s–2000s) as the third generation of
singers and songwriters that later became part of TCAMS. Nueva trova
was influenced by Latin American, Hispanic, and Anglo protest songs
that emerged in the late 1960s across the world. In Music and Revolution:
Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (2006), Moore points out that nueva
trova began as an oppositional form of aesthetic and sometimes political
expression, incorporating, for example, rock music, although it was pro-
hibited by the cultural authorities. Nueva trova was also characterized by
an attitude of nonconformity adopted in its early moments by some of its
leading exponents (135–141).
Nueva trova became widely popular, especially in the 1970s and set the
standard for many singer-songwriters in terms of its poetic narrative and
music contributions. However, its increased popularity and international
exposure became instrumental for the revolution’s nationalist project.
Progressively, nueva trova transformed itself into a solemn mainstream
cultural movement within the purview of the official cultural establish-
ment. There has been no other movement or genre in the Cuban music
scene post 1959 with the same level of institutional support enjoyed by
nueva trova throughout its existence, not only on the island but also
internationally, because it was associated with “the voice of the revolu-
tion” and the anti-imperialist agenda adopted as an official narrative of
the nation-state.
By the 1980s, young people and even followers of nueva trova were
looking for new music forms, and as a result a new generation of young
singers and songwriters emerged known as la novisima trova, like Carlos
Varela, Gerardo Alfonso, Xiomara Laugart, Donato Poveda, Santiago
Feliú, Frank Delgado, etc. According to Moore, they:
(…) tended to play songs with an aesthetic distinct from that of earlier
times. They recognize their debt to past repertoire but referred to their own
music as novísima trova, in order to underscore its unique qualities (161)
(…) [They] are more cosmopolitan than the music from previous genera-
tions (…) they tend to move with ease between styles from diverse loca-
tions and ethnic origins (162) (…) and address domestic concerns with a
directness and bite that is striking (163). (Music and Revolution)
This generation of musicians was not necessarily committed to or sup-

ported by cultural institutions like nueva trova members were. Novísimos
songwriters were part of a cadre of critical voices in various cultural fields,
especially in the visual arts and literature. From more critical positions
their art provided an assessment of the promises of the Cuban socialist
project 30 years after the onset of the revolution. The legitimacy and
continuity of the nation’s project, after the crisis of socialism in Eastern
Europe, became the subject of more open social and cultural critique.10
Cultural movements like nueva trova experienced a decline during this
period. Indeed, more danceable- and Afro-repertoires rose in popularity
then (Music and Revolution 158).
In the 1990s, the environment of increasing uncertainty and disen-
chantment brought by the socialist crisis made obsolete the “commit-
ment” by members of previous protest song movements to create art
“within the revolution.” The beginning of a post-socialist phase on the
island with the dollarization of the economy, the opening to foreign
investment and joint ventures, the reliance on the tourism industry, the
deepening of socioeconomic disparities and marginalization, and the
increased disconnection between official discourse and the harsh realities
for most of the population, set the tone for the emergence of alternative
art expressions.
Cuban rap, hip-hop, timba, rock, and punk have also been associated
with alternative scenes in the music context post 1959. I also consider
them as other important music references for TCAMS. Self-made musi-
cians began adapting aesthetics and sounds from American rap and hip-
hop and combining them with Afro-Cuban and local sounds, prompting
the emergence of Cuban rap and hip-hop in the 1990s. In some of their
lyrics, rappers and hip-hop musicians made visible concerns and critical
views about the revolutionary project, which intensified in the midst of
10
Songwriter Carlos Varela is the most recognizable and immediate antecedent for the new type of
song that emerged in the 1990s. His live performances in movie theaters like Charles Chaplin, and
23 y 12 in El Vedado neighborhood in Havana, became spaces where young audiences manifested
their frustrations with the political manipulations and rhetoric of revolutionary mythology, in
many cases accompanied by police presence.
64 E. S. Bravo
the crisis. They also gave voice to groups supposedly represented but
often overlooked in the “revolutionary” national discourse and practice—
like the socially marginal and Afro descendant population. Furthermore,
Cuban rap and hip-hop touched upon the dramatic socioeconomic con-
text of 1990s Cuba, including the increased visibility of racial discrimina-
tion, marginality, corruption, the frustrations provoked by lack of
opportunities for young people, and the gap between the government lies
and the hardships of daily life. Something similar happened in more pop-
ular music genres like timba.
All these music scenes did not escape censorship by the cultural autoc-
racy since they posed alternatives to the official narratives of the nation-
state. Beneath the apparent concern with the preservation of “the
revolutionary morality” such censorship reflected an “anthological” elit-
ism rooted in institutional and intellectual realms. This notion masked
embedded historical prejudices, fears, and rejection against Afro descen-
dants, marginal and popular culture portrayed in those music genres. The
long-held discrimination by the official discourse and institutions against
rock musicians and fans made this genre alternative in the Cuban con-
text, which socialist bureaucrats proclaimed for the longest time as “music
of the ‘enemy.’”11
In that same period, a third generation of singers, songwriters, stu-
dents, and bohemians began to interact in informal gatherings in places
like Teatro Estudio, La Peña de 13 y 8 and El Anfiteatro del Río Almendares.
Underground bands such as Lucha Almada, Superávit, Cuatro Gatos,
Cachivache, Debajo, and En Serie, among others, also emerged in those
years. These bands and urban spaces provided another alternative cultural
landscape, mostly for singers and songwriters. From diverse and mostly
self-trained musical backgrounds, these musicians began updating the
legacy of nueva and novísima trova with multiple references common to
their generational musical universe, such as: Tropicalist Brazilian harmo-
nies and rhythms from musicians like Djavan, Chico Buarque, Gal Costa,
Maria Bethânia, and Caetano Veloso; Argentinian rock, grunge, pop,
funk, reggae, and R&B. In addition, this generation of singers and song-
writers were more inclined to introduce rhythmic references from rap,
11
For an in-depth study about the history of rock during the Cuban revolution, see Manduley.
hip-hop, funk, R&B. Many of them exhibited a high level of intertextu-

ality with Afro-Cuban and Cuban popular music.
In “Boomerang: Entre Mitos y Flautas” (2007) Fowler notes that mak-
ing socially conscious music that can also be danced represented a funda-
mental change from the solemnity of nueva trova movement, which relied
mostly on the intimate image of the songwriter accompanied by his gui-
tar. This change also collapsed boundaries between music for listening
and for dancing that elicited mindsets in the revolutionary Cuban song
context. As a result, songs from this generation didn’t rely exclusively on
the more established trova format of a singer with her guitar and on a
focus on lyrics to convey their message. They were more interactive with
the audiences by incorporating dance forms (Idem). The repertoire and
live presentations by Habana Abierta are an example, which initially were
received with certain resistance among some musicians who regarded an
“aesthetic superiority” to the format of the singer and the guitar of more
traditional trova songs. Later on, Habana Abierta’s strategy of trova-like
messages with danceable rhythms became progressively the language of
most TCAMS singer-songwriters’ musicians.
Gema y Pavel
I locate this third alternative generation of songwriters and singers with

the Gema y Pavel duet as foundational. Both musicians had clear influ-
ences from nueva trova and novísima trova. They were primarily devoted
to composing and performing meaningful songs, with poetic lyrics and
occasionally social concerns. They insisted on producing trova-like songs,
despite the demands of the rapidly expanding tourist industry in the
island since the nineties, which focused on the commercialization of
timba, son, and traditional trova.12 These genres made a comeback after
the success of Buena Vista Social Club. In 1990s Havana, Gema y Pavel
frequented the headquarters of a theater group called Teatro Estudio,
12
Trova tradicional refers to a tradition of patriotic and love songs that emerged on the island since
the nineteenth century, influenced by European salon music. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, the existence of a distinct Cuban song or bolero on the island was recognized. Trova tradi-
cional denominates this kind of song basically for listening, interpreted by either a singer with a
guitar, sextets, or septets, and that was shaped by a variety of styles around more traditional genres
like son and guaracha. See (Giro Tomo 4 207–209).
66 E. S. Bravo
invited by Marta Valdés, one of the leading composers from the filing
(feeling) movement.13 Gema y Pavel also collaborated with actors, paint-
ers, and others in ‘multimedia’ happenings held almost nightly in La Casa
del Joven Creador—an old warehouse converted into a recreational stage
(Moore Music and Revolution 164) They rapidly attracted a limited but
enthusiastic audience of students, artists, bohemians, and others who
usually met in these peñas, an important tradition of musical and cultural
gatherings in 1990s Havana.
During the crisis, this generation of singer-songwriters migrated en
masse. In interviews and conversations with some of them in the past
decades, they often mentioned, among their reasons to migrate from the
island, the lack of space and support for the development of their music,
as well as the devastating effects of the 1990s crisis. In an interview with
Alejandro Gutiérrez (Habana Abierta), he expanded on this topic.
Gutiérrez (2009) mentioned that this generation of musicians was look-
ing for an environment where differences in creative needs and expression
could be tolerated. Most of the interviewees also referred to the need for
expanding their geographical and musical horizons; to mitigate the
uncertainties they experienced due to the impact of the economic crisis;
but also, to search for new economic opportunities and access to alterna-
tive flows of information beyond the nation-state.14
In general, the music of this group of creatives was not recorded in
commercial albums while they were living on the island. They were at a
13
Filing is a musical genre that emerged in the 1940s in descargas (jam sessions) in Havana. It was
a new way of interpreting Cuban songs and boleros for both singers and instrumental performers,
who adopted complicated harmonic and tonal modulations typical of American jazz in either the
way they sang or accompanied the songs.
14
I also conducted personal interviews with the following musicians: Descemer Bueno (New York,
2002) & (Miami, 2009); Athanai Castro (Madrid, 2009); Vanito Brown (Madrid, 2009). Gema
Corredera (Madrid, 2009) and (Miami 2013). Julio Fowler (Madrid, 2009). Amaury Gutiérrez
(Miami, 2009). Dafnis Prieto (New York, 2001 & 2008). Elain Morales (Miami, 2009); Yosvany
Terry (New York 2001 & 2009). Pavel Urquiza (Madrid, 2009 & 2014, Washington 2015); Jorge
Gómez (Miami 2009) and Pepe Montes (Miami 2009). Other interviews for this research were
made with musicians Robertico Carcassés, Equis Alfonso, Alain Peréz, Telmary, Yusa, Mr. Haka,
Mariela Suárez (Havana NRG), and Danay Suárez, which have been published in Cubaencuentro
online, Timba.com, and in my blog Cubanidadinbetween. Another round of interviews were made
in 2019–2020 with musicians Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Ivan Melon Lewis, Leslie Cartaya, Carlos Cano,
Glenda del Monte, Julio Fowler, and Michel Peraza, published in two podcasts I created, Miami
Alternativo and Word Culture, in my YouTube channel Alafia Creative Entertainment.
disadvantage in gaining access to the incipient local recording industry

that for the most part was the result of joint ventures with foreign part-
ners and prioritized musical products with a touristic appeal. The alterna-
tive music scene of singer-songwriters did not fit that category and was
excluded from local music recording and incipient related marketing
business on the island in the early 1990s. All the above prompted the
relocation of many of these artists abroad. Madrid became the most
important relocating center for Cuban singers-songwriters outside the
island, and that changed to Miami later.
Madrid
Gema y Pavel: Post-Cuban Trova-World Music Style
Gema y Pavel were among the first migrant singer-songwriters to settle in

Madrid. Once in Spain, they recorded three albums as a duo with the
World music label Nube Negra: Trampas del Tiempo (1993), Cosa de
Broma (1996), and Síntomas de Fe (1999). In addition, Gema y Pavel
produced the albums Habana Oculta (1995), Habana Abierta (1997),
and 24 Horas (1999) with Cuban songwriters they brought to Spain,
resulting in the creation of the music collective Habana Abierta.
As a duo Gema y Pavel had a prolific independent career reflected in
several albums. Artbembé (2003) recorded with Peermusic, is a very solid
art project that includes poems, visual artwork and texts by different
Cuban authors. Recorded between Madrid, New York, and Havana, the
album is composed of two CDs and features several invited musicians
(singers, songwriters, and academically trained) from this generation liv-
ing within and outside the island. Artbembé is perhaps one of the most
important and comprehensive musical artworks of this network, as a tes-
timony to the trajectory of the Transnational Cuban Alternative Music
Scene after almost fifteen years. The latest album produced independently
by Gema y Pavel as a duet was Ofrenda a Borinquen in 2010, a tribute to
the connections between Cuban and Puerto Rican music. After that
album, the singers separated as a duo, they have been devoted to their
independent careers: Gema between Puerto Rico and Miami, and Pavel
68 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.3 Gema Corredera & Yosvany Terry in concert. Yerba Buena Gardens.
Summer Festival. San Francisco, CA. 2023. Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s personal
archives
in Madrid, the Canary Islands, Washington, DC, and Miami. All these
albums gained them a solid and localized reputation in some European
world music circuits and among bohemians and students, and especially
their Cuban cohorts and world music fans across the world.
For Moore, Gema y Pavel’s music was irreverent in a decisively musical

sense. Rather than foregrounding socio-political critique, their composi-
tions instead redefine Cuban culture in more inclusive, hybridized terms
(Music and Revolution 164). Although informed by nueva and novísima
trova, Gema y Pavel proposed a new type of song. Gema y Pavel’s music
weaves in references to trova tradicional and the bolero tradition. They
also incorporated a very creative dialogue with Brazilian harmonies,
Andean sounds, Afro-Cuban rhythms, and jazz improvisations especially
from filing, resulting in sophisticated vocal and musical arrangements.
The song “Bolero filin” from their album Artbembé (2003) is an exam-
ple. The song is a musical tribute to Elena Burque, one of the most
acclaimed filing singers on the island and a source of musical reference for
both. It’s a bolero that talks about the end of love and separation, skill-
fully sung by Gema. Pavel accompanies on the guitar, providing a con-
stant harmonic progression in the most classic filing tradition. The song
also includes a moment of spoken words from La Burque.
Gema y Pavel as a duo and individually transformed Cuban trova and
became an important reference for many songwriters and musicians in
and outside the island. They also cemented the style of systematic col-
laborations with academically trained musicians and jazz musicians that
became commonplace across TCAMS, since they first invited Estado de
Animo, a band formed by academically trained musicians, to perform in
their album Trampas del Tiempo in 1993. They had the creative responsi-
bility in the coordination and mise en oeuvre of what later became Habana
Abierta. Violinist Gladys Silot (2014) rightly points out that the back-
ground for this mode of collaboration of academically trained musicians
accompanying singer-songwriters, can be traced back to previous genera-
tion of songwriters on the island like Silvio Rodríguez, accompanied by
Afro-Cuba; Santiago Feliú by Estado de Animo; and Pablo Milanés and
Carlos Varela by their own respective bands, etc.15
After they split, Gema and Pavel separately had produced several
albums of great quality and musicianship. For these productions, they
15
A previous instance of this modality of collaboration can be found in the work of El Grupo de
Experimentación Sonora (GES), originally created to produce music for films and sponsored by
ICAIC. El Grupo de Experimentación became a unique music laboratory of collaboration and exper-
imentation between academically trained musicians and some of the most important nueva trova
singers and songwriters in the 1970s. See Acosta.
70 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.4 Pavel Urquiza y La Ruta de las Almas-Africa Gallego, Iván Ruiz Machado,
Kiki Ferrer, Mahan Mirarab, Javier Márquez, and Tania Vinokur. Global Cuba Fest
2016. Miami Dade County Auditorium, Miami, FL, 2016. Photo Courtesy of Ever
Chavez, FUNDarte
have continued putting in place a system of collaborations with many

Cuban musicians across the world, either through the Internet, or in
person in the cities they reside in, and across the world. They are not only
among important referents for many TCAMS musicians, but with their
music productions they have significantly contributed to keep this net-
work alive and growing. Other musicians like Alfredo Chacon, Yosvany
Terry, Carlos Puig, are among many TCAMS regulars in many of their
latest albums and concerts, delineating this Cuban Fusion music across
geographies.
Habana Abierta: Alternative Cuban Trova

Ay, mi curandera
Oye, sonríe, que la vida es bella…
Oh, my healer
Hey, smile, life is beautiful…
(Ochoa, Kelvis. “Curandera”)
In addition to the work developed by Gema and Pavel in Spain,

Habana Abierta became another important milestone in TCAMS. They
were the most popular music band within this diasporic network since
the 2000s and are regarded as the “generational voice” of the 1990s, both
inside and outside the island. Their first album was Habana Oculta
(1995). It was recorded by the Spaniard word music label Nube Negra in
Havana and produced in Madrid by Gema y Pavel. Habana Oculta was a
compilation of what singer-songwriters were doing on the island at the
time. After many of them visited Spain for individual presentations,
BMG Ariola requested Gema y Pavel to produce a panoramic project
about the singer-songwriter scene in Havana with the participation of
these musicians.
The lineup for their second album, Habana Abierta (1997), included
Luis Barbería, Jose Luis Medina, Boris Larramendi, Vanito Caballero,
Alejandro Gutiérrez, Kelvis Ochoa, Andy Villalón and Pepe del Valle,
and led to the creation of this music collective and the decision to settle
in Spain. The band initially toured Spain and several cities in Europe and
enjoyed attention from the press and important figures in the Spanish
music scene. That led to the recording of the album 24 horas in 1999, also
with BMG Ariola and the music production again by Gema y Pavel.
According to Gonzalez Portal, Habana Abierta was not successful in
the Spanish market for several reasons, among them, that ultimately the
group did not have name recognition in the mainstream Spanish market
due to the nature of the band, composed by several songwriters with their
own particular and diverse music identities. She also points out that some
of its members, such as Kelvis Ochoa and Boris Larramendi, were more
interested in developing their own independent music careers. However,
as a collective Habana Abierta made several collaborations with Spaniard’s
artists like Ketama, Ana Belen, and Victor Manuel. As an alternative
music collective, with itinerant members and moving in a transnational
fashion, Habana Abierta was invited to record the group album in 2006
72 E. S. Bravo
with EMI and Calle 54, a label owned by Spanish film director Fernando
Trueba, and with the collaboration of Miami-based Cuban American
producer Nat Chediak. In 2011, the band independently produced 1234,
promoted as the first of a four-album project.
Narratives of Cubanness
The documentary Voces de un Trayecto (2009), by filmmaker Alejandra
Aguirre, provides a thoughtful account of the 1990s’ migrant experience
of several Cuban singers and songwritersand other artists in Spain.16 With
images of different neighborhoods of Madrid in the background, these
musicians assess their immigration experience in Spain, which they ini-
tially saw as an opportunity for personal growth and a means to get a
critical perspective about their identities as Cubans outside their “natu-
ral” context. After years of residence abroad, both Gema and Pavel sug-
gest that their idea of a single Cuban national identity is illusory. As a
result, their sense of connection with their homeland and of their identity
as Cubans has become less rooted and more global. In an interview with
Gema, she illustrates this idea of flexibility in her Cuban identity with a
poetic image: “Uno es de todas partes, y las raíces de uno mejor que sean
aéreas, para que no se pudran” (We are from all over, and it’s better to
have airy roots, so they don’t get rotten). For her, as well as for songwriter
Vanito Brown, migration has also been a process of professional and per-
sonal enrichment. However, the challenges they encountered as immi-
grants in Spain were intense and significantly marked their lives and
careers, and their later decisions to move to Miami. Many referred to the
clash between their original values as “New Men” (and women), coming
from a paternalist, ideologically rigid society with an inefficient economic
model, and those of the capitalist world. For Pavel, this cultural clash was
probably the most important challenge they had to overcome. Until then
they assumed that their life as musicians was their only possible destiny
16
The interviewees in Voces de un Trayecto documentary were singer and songwriters Gema
Corredera, Pavel Urquiza and Vanito Caballero (Habana Abierta); and actors Vladimir Cruz (Fresa
y Chocolate), Maria Isabel Díaz (“Chica Almodovar”), and Roberto San Martín (Havana Blues).
or mission—a common experience among artists of this generation. That

perspective translated into an attitude of resistance to either adapt to the
rules of the music market or to explore other professional paths in main-
stream markets. That is probably one of the reasons that explains why this
network of aesthetic creation generally took an alternative path to the
traditional Latin music market for the most part: They wanted to tran-
scend aesthetically with their own art on their own terms, either because
they had a high regard for the aesthetic references, education, and values
they brought with them as Cuban migrants. Or, alternatively, they didn’t
know how to or were not interested in assimilating into the Latino music
industry, which as a norm tends to simplify and commodify the richness
and complexity of the diverse cultural Latin American, Afro-Latin@ and
Latinx references that inform it.
Mapping Music Reception

After some years, living in Spain became an opportunity for these musi-
cians. Cuba and Miami became the main places where they grew a fan
base. The greatest success and recognition experienced by Habana
Abierta happened when they returned to perform in Havana, in 2003
and 2012; and in their Miami performances since 2003. Their albums
were hard to find in local music stores on the island, basically oriented
to the tourist market selling in convertible currency. These musicians
acquired a fan base among students, bohemians, artists, intellectuals,
and nostalgic fans who managed to get copies of their CDs and circu-
late them widely from hand to hand. Fans could also commission some
Cubans traveling abroad on a regular basis to bring back CDs, or they
could make recourse to the underground market that provided access to
music that most of the population could not otherwise afford. Thus,
when Habana Abierta returned to perform in Havana, they already had
an informed fan base and easily packed important music venues
throughout the city like El Teatro Nacional, Casa de las Américas, El
Museo de Bellas Artes, and El Café Cantante. Despite limited coverage
of their return by the official media, especially in 2003, Habana Abierta
gathered 7000–10,000 fans at El Salón Rosado de la Tropical, an
74 E. S. Bravo
underground venue usually dedicated to presenting the most popular

local dance music ensembles, especially Afro-Cuban.17 Their presenta-
tions gathered many of TCAMS musicians, like Roberto Carcasses,
Athanai, David Torrens, Equis Alfonso, Yosvany Terry, Alfredo Chacon,
and Freehole Negro. Cuban filmmakers Jorge Perugorría and Arturo
Soto made a documentary about these events.18
After their success in the island, the Miami Dade College and pro-
ducer Nat Chediak first invited Habana Abierta to perform in Miami at
the former Coconut Grove Playhouse, after Olga Díaz (La Marcha), a
Cuban fan and local cultural promoter, introduced them. Later on,
FUNDarte, a local nonprofit that regularly produces music acts from this
generation of musicians, presented them in Miami to sold-out audiences
of nostalgic diasporic Cuban cohorts, at venues like the Miami Dade
County Auditorium, La Covacha, as the opening act to Willy Chirino at
the American Airlines Arena, and at the Sleepless Night Festival in Miami
Beach. They also made several presentations individually at local clubs
like Hoy como Ayer, the News Lounge, and Havana 1957, and the now
defunct Kimbaracumbara.
Habana Abierta represents a transnational and open-ended cultural
space of post-soviet nostalgic encounters for a fragmented and dispersed
generation of Cubans diasporic subjects across the world, who were
mostly forced to migrate due to abrupt circumstances and unbearable
living conditions brought by the Special Period to Cuba in the 1990s.
Thinking about Habana Abierta’s music impact in the music industry
and beyond Cuban audiences, I concur with Thomas’ observations
regarding the reception of this music, which I think expands on Gonzalez’s
remarks about this topic:
The generation’s eclectic musical style (neither trova nor rock nor salsa)
has made it difficult for them to attract the attention of major record
labels (…) the craze for Cuban music that swept Europe and the United
States in the late 1990s showed a distinct preference for perceived
“authentic” Cuban sounds, preferably those from before 1950s, as exem-
plified by the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. The musicians also
17
See Villa in Suena Cubano.
18
See Habana Abierta (2003).
Fig. 3.5 Habana Abierta-Alejandro Gutiérrez, Pepe del Valle y José Luis Medina.
Las Vistillas, Madrid. 2016. Photo Courtesy of Felix Varela’s personal archives
found that the vernacular quality of their work—their references to

Cuban social reality—went over the heads of non-Cuban listeners, and
that the harmonic and rhythmic intricacy they prized overwhelmed audi-
ences who preferred a cleaner—and more pop-like palette.
(“Cosmopolitan” 116–117)
Like Habana Abierta, other songwriters from this generation living in

Spain—like Athanai Castro, Julio Fowler, Alejandro Frómeta, and Adrián
Morales—at an early stage initially attracted the attention of labels ori-
ented towards the world music circuit and some major music labels. They
were occasionally invited to collaborate with established musicians in the
Hispanic music market. Later, those who have been able to keep their
music careers have managed to create their own labels and produce their
music independently. Others have returned to live and produce mainly in
Miami, Mexico, or in Cuba or live between the island and other world
cities—the case of Equis Alfonso, Raúl Torres, Kelvis Ochoa, Telmarys,
and Luis Barbería, among others.
76 E. S. Bravo
Negotiating Post-Soviet Narratives

In an interview with singer-songwriter and essayist Julio Fowler (2009),
he pointed out that, while living in Cuba during the nineties, TCAMS
songwriters voiced explicitly an increasing discontent with the effects of
the economic crisis. They also resisted and refused to accede to the politi-
cal manipulations of the nationalist project and its cultural institutions,
which provided little to no space for divergent voices.
Polito Ibañez’ song “Cada día” from his album Recuentos (1998),
reflects on his generation’s disenchantment with the rhetoric of the revo-
lutionary nation, in a way like the narratives of disenchantment (desen-
canto) literary authors developed at the time. That disillusionment with
the inconsistencies of the revolution’s rhetoric, its practice, and the harsh
conditions brought by the Special Period in the 1990s led many of his
peers and colleagues to leave the island:
Cada día veo que el cariño se nos va apagando

siento que un gran sueño se nos va apagando
como el hombre mismo se nos va apagando
sin inconvenientes te irás apagando
con todo al alcance,
los demás colgando
con las ambiciones te irás apagando
y todas las ganas se nos van.
Each day I see that love is fading

I feel like a great dream is fading
As if man himself is fading
With nothing to hold you back
you too will begin to fade
With everything within your reach
all else dangling by a thread
Along with your ambitions
you will begin to fade
and we will lose all motivation.
(Ibañez “Cada día”)
Singer-songwriters of the nineties share similar existential conditions

in their narratives: they are the disenchanted and alienated “New Man,”
who experienced firsthand the collapse of the socialist utopia in times of
crisis. They increasingly disconnected from the official discourse, and
their circumstances forced them to adopt a culture of survival. A post-
revolutionary posture prevails in the work of writers and singer-
songwriters from the nineties: writers focused openly on deconstructing
the marginal and on unraveling the hidden worlds of the revolutionary
reality; songwriters disengaged or selectively focused on a bohemian style
and a subtle irreverence as a practice of resistance. These singer-songwriters
took an apparently apolitical posture, less interested in dealing with
Cuban topics in their lyrics, because they were exhausted by the excessive
burden of politics personally experienced in their lives as Cuban nationals
and migrants. They seem more interested in exploring existential con-
cerns related to their personal condition and migrant experiences. They
moved away from the monolithic position of previous generations of
Cuban singers in exile, or with the militant solemnity of some members
of nueva trova on the island. However, when they dealt with more social
and political Cuban concerns, they do it with a sharp, sometimes subtle
and/or unprejudiced attitude.
In an interview with Vanito Brown (2009)—whose smart poetic lyrics
tend to touch on universal topics and occasional social concerns—he
expressed that his primary interest when he writes is the human condi-
tion, without any preconceived ideological or political agenda. However,
he is aware that his intention is not simply to distract audiences. Others,
like Boris Larramendi, express their political views more bluntly in their
lyrics. Larramendi’s song “Asere que volá.” Recorded by Habana Abierta
in their album Boomerang, Asere has been acclaimed as a sort of roadmap
of the concerns of many Cubans from this generation, together with
other Habana Abierta’ hits’ “La Vida es un Divino Guión” (Vanito Brown,
Boomerang) and “Cuando Salí de la Habana” (Kelvis Ochoa, 24 horas).
A mi socio Alberto, lo metieron cana

Por vender una yerbita que no estaba mala
78 E. S. Bravo
Le cayeron unos años pero menos que a Raúl,19

Que por decir lo que piensa le metieron 20, tú,
La cosa esta en candela en la Habana y en todos la’os (lados)
Me acuerdo que yo fumaba y vivía arrebata’o
P’a aguantar el teque, teque20
My buddy Alberto was locked up
For selling some weed that wasn’t that bad
He got a few years, but less than Raúl
Who was sentenced to 20 just for speaking his mind
It’s rough in Habana and everywhere else
I remember I would smoke and lived high
Just to deal with the nonsense
Larramendi provides one of the most critical views among TCAMS

about the Cuban political dilemma after the 1990s crisis. The song com-
bines concerns about the situation of political prisoners on the island, the
lack of political freedom and the difficulties of daily living.
Porque mi gente se sigue yendo,

o se fabrican una balsa o jinetean un viejo
Mi gente sigue sufriendo
la miseria y el capricho del gobernante perpetuo y vigilante,
siempre adelante
Manicheando todo el dinero que mandan los emigrantes
a sus familias
Que por deber,
tienen que llenar la plaza cuando quiere él…
19
Larramendi refers to Raúl Rivero, an awarded Cuban poet who, together with other seventy-five
dissidents, was originally condemned in the island to twenty years in prison during the events
known as “La Primavera Negra” in 2003, due to his opposing views to the Cuban government. A
year and a half later, he was released from prison, thanks to pressures from the international public
opinion. He became an exile in Spain where he worked as a journalist and writer.
20
Teque, teque is a slang expression to refer to the semiotic universe of ideological events of all
kinds, slogans, never-ending political statements, and propaganda that Cubans born and raised
after the revolution living in the island have been exposed to on a systematic basis throughout
their lives.
Because my people continue to flee;

either they build a raft
or they sell (prostitute) themselves to some old (foreign) man
My people continue to suffer
the misery and selfishness of the perpetual and vigilant leader
who is always ahead
Controlling all the money the migrants send to their families,
Whose duty it is to fill the stadium whenever he sees fit
The song chronicles the important changes of the nineties as a gradual

moral deterioration for the Cuban society, and it focuses on the expan-
sion of the marginal as a material and existential condition for many
Cubans after the crisis. Larramendi also reflects on the lack of alternatives
and the evasiveness adopted by young people to deal with the shifting
situation, including an increasing recourse to drugs, prostitution, and the
sudden and massive migration of friends and family.
Pero desde que me fui el stress ya no me deja

Ya eso no me hace feliz
Hay que vivir apura’o, y siempre estar conectado
Correr atrás del dinero, p’a terminar endeuda’o
Pagándote una casita,
y en Miami y en Madrid ya todo estaba inventa‘o
Nadie esperaba por ti ...........................................................
Me lo contó mi mama que cada vez que la llamo me dice
Mijito quédate allá ...........................................................
But ever since I left I can’t handle the stress
That doesn’t make me happy anymore
We’re forced to live such hurried lives and be on top of everything
Always chasing cash, only to end up in debt
Paying for a house, and in Miami and Madrid
there was no work for the average Joe
Nobody was waiting for you
..................................................
Every time I call my mother she tells me:
“Son, you ‘re better off over there.”
80 E. S. Bravo
He also laments the challenges resulting from the migrant experience

and the separation of Cuban families, a fundamental pillar in the national
culture which was highly affected and destroyed by the revolution.
Y nadie sabe nunca lo que va a pasar

En este mundo loco donde fuimos a parar
A mi me duele el alma y quisiera regresar a guarachar en la Habana
Con los de aquí y los de allá
Formar un carnaval para olvidar los disfraces
Perdonarnos las mierdas y que no corra la sangre
Pero no me hagas caso, yo solo soy un payaso (…).
No one ever knows what’s going to happen
In this crazy world we’ve ended up in
It hurts my soul and I’d love to go back and party in Havana with everyone
from here and from there
Have a festival to set aside all the facades
Forgive and forget all the bullshit without any bloodshed But pay me no
mind; I’m just a clown (…).
(Boris Larramendi & Vanito Brown “Asere ¿Qué volá?”)
At the end, the song calls for a peaceful solution to the Cuban dilemma
through the promotion of venues of understanding among Cubans from
all over beyond their differences, the need for tolerance and a sincere
dialogue among all parties involved.
Migration as a geographical but also radical existential displacement
adds other discursive layers to the narratives of these post-socialist song-
writers, who once outside Cuba are concerned not only with the causes
but also with “the symptoms of exile” (Alvarez Borland 255). They
reflect on their lives as migrants and on the local and global challenges
they experience firsthand. An example is Julio Fowler’s song “Huyendo,”
Buscando mi Lugar (2006), which provides a chronicle of a rafter’s life.21
21
Balseros (rafters) is a term used to talk about those Cubans who sail to Miami on makeshift rafts,
those self-constructed, rudimentary, and totally unsafe vessels made out of inner tube tires and
other precarious materials. That was especially the case of many Cubans who massively migrated
from the island during the 1990s crisis, whose images have persisted in media representations of the
time. Although many Cuban migrants during the Special Period used other ways to leave the
island, like air travel, touristic visits, and crossing borders on foot, rafters is the general term to refer
to this massive wave of migration.
He talks about the double frustration of migrants: forced to leave their

homelands in many instances and faced with profound uncertainties in
the receiver countries. Athanai Castro’s song “Trabajar,” Creando Milicia
(2012), talks about the difficulties of making a living and the despair of
searching for jobs in the current global economic condition in places
like Spain. In “No te vayas,” featuring Telmary, Art Bembe (2012) Gema
y Pavel discuss how their experience as migrants has expanded their
sense of identity beyond the frontiers of the Cuban nation: they acknowl-
edge the commonality of challenges faced by minorities as migrants
across the world, separated by discriminatory rules, racialization, and
ideologies.
La emigración, mi amor, la emigración

Ningún país es rico por su gracia
La mitad de los ancestros llegaron de otra casa
Yo no creo que ninguna tierra sea tan pura ni tan santa n’a
Mira ese pelo, mira esa boca, mira esos ojos,
mira esos labios, mira esa piel
Tu pasaporte ya no tiene raza
Amarillos, blancos, negros, rojos, somos todos
Todas las razas
Humanidad, esa es la única verdad
Todo lo demás es vanidad, pura vanidad
Migration my love, migration
No country is rich due only to its grace
Half of our ancestors came from other lands
I don’t believe no land is pure or saint anymore
Look at that hair, look at that mouth, look at those eyes,
Look at those lips, look at that skin
Yellows, whites, blacks and reds we are all,
All races,
Humanity, that’s the only truth
Everything else is vanity, pure vanity.
(Gema & Pavel “No te vayas”)
82 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.6 Kelvis Ochoa & band, and Alfredo Chacón on stage, presented by
VSC. Havana 1957. Brickell,Miami, FL. 2017. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s
personal archives
Cuban Fusion: Timba Style

Madrid not only became an important center for transnational develop-
ments of Cuban singer-songwriters from the 1990s. Spain has been a key
landscape for negotiations of narrative of identities and music production
of many extremely talented creatives formed in the system of arts schools
in Cuba, like Gema 4, Alain Pérez, Ivan Melón Lewis, Carlos Cano,
Alfredo Chacón, Fernando Favier, Ariel Bringes, Reinier Elizardes “El

Negrón,” Yadam Gonzalez, Iván Ruiz Machado, Pepe Rivero, Dayan
Abad García, Javier Gutierrez Massó “Caramelo,” Carlos Puig, Michael
Olivera, Vic Gabriel Navarrete Alce, Kiki Ferrer, Julio Montalvo, and
many others. With time, some of them relocated to other cities in the
US, like Miami, or back to the island. They are constantly touring among
the Latin jazz, jazz, flamenco, and Latino world music circuit of festivals.
These musicians at the same time have their own music collectives, and
they are constantly changing formats and making new collaborative
music projects with their Cuban peers and other musicians. They are also
constantly recording in collaborative projects across the world. They are
ultimately influencing and revolutionizing the music circuits they are
interacting with, acquiring international recognition as band members,
or with their own projects. They have become a transnational network of
first quality world music creation, made by first-generation Latinx and
Afro-Cuban migrants born and raised in the island across geographies.
Ivan Melón Lewis: Cosmopolitan Cuban jazz

Ivan Melon Lewis came from a musical family in Pinar del Rio, Cuba. In
Havana he studied in ENA (National School of the Arts) as did many of
his Cuban peers. In an interview I did for him, published in my bilingual
podcast Cultura de la Palabra/Word Culture, Melón recognized ENA not
only as an art school but as a space that revolutionized the world of his
and many generations of Cuban musicians. He said it was a place where
he could experiment regularly with American and Cuban jazz, new
sounds, and rhythms, through collaborations with his music friends with
similar curiosities, like Tony Pérez, Osmany Paredes, Jorge Gómez, and
Roman Filiú. It was also a space that allowed him to gain access firsthand
to musicians he admired from Cuba, in occasional master classes provided
by Chucho Valdés, to the music of Gonzalo Rubalcaba—considered a
prodigious musician since he was very young—to the music of legendary
Cuban jazzist Emiliano Salvador, and Arsenio Rodríguez’s pianist Lilí
Martínez, as well as to world classist Cuban pianist Jorge Luis Prats.
In the 1990s Havana, Melón played with Parisien’s cabaret orchestra,
Gente Latina, then with Algo Nuevo, Juan Pablo Torre’s band, and toured
84 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.7 Ivan Melón Lewis al piano, Spain. 2023. Foto Courtesy of Ivan Melón
Lewis’ personal archives
Cuba and the world during three years with Isaac Delgado’s band. For
Melón, Isaac Delgado’s band was like a school, a very enriching experi-
ence where he could start experiencing success as a musician and from the
audiences’ great reception. Since then, Melón’s piano tumbaos have a
distinctive stamp in Cuban music, which left an impression in Delgado’s
music as well. His way of performing and arming tumbaos in the base
section, in combination with the ideas of Tony Pérez, Roman Filiú, Alain
Pérez, and other Cuban musicians’ generational peers living in Europe,
the US, and back to the island, is a distinct recognizable language in
Cuban Fusion, heavily informed by timba, Cuban traditional music,
Afro-Cuban music, jazz, rock, pop, and funk, and has been awarded and
it’s praised by music connoisseurs all over as top world quality.
Melon Lewis moved to Spain at the turn of the century, and since then
he has had a successful career as a pianist, jazz player, arranger, composer,
and producer. He had a quartet for a while, and he is constantly switch-
ing to different music formats. He is considered among the best Cuban
pianists of his generation. His collaboration as a pianist, arranger, and
music producer for Afro-Spaniard flamenco singer sensation Concha
Buika was a turning point, musically and personally. With Buika, Melón
not only was exposed to flamenco music firsthand, but he also learned a
lot from this incredible female Afrodiasporic musician, and at the same
time his music left an imprint in Buika and on many of the other musi-
cians he has collaborated with during his European and world music
career. The musical language shared by Melon’s and many of his Cuban
music peers includes a wide spectrum of music genres stirred up to Cuban
music as un ajiaco, Fernando Ortiz’ transculturation style. This time in
music history, Cuban music made by academically trained musicians in
TCAMS, like Melón and his peers since the 1990s, is way more multicul-
tural and universal, with referents and in dialogue across historical time
and geographical spaces, and it’s getting increasing recognition across
the world.
One of his latest music collective projects is the Cuban Swing Express,
a jazz band composed of Cuban musicians living in Europe. According to
Melon’s webpage,22 they made their debut at L’Alhambra Theater in Paris,
in 2014. Although the Cuban Swing Express is a jazz band, their reper-
toire goes beyond traditional jazz, combining compositions by Pérez
Prado, Benny Moré, Ernesto Lecuona, Herbie Hancock, Michael Jackson,
the Rolling Stones, and his own. Melón has been nominated several times
to the Grammys and was awarded as Best Latin Jazz Album in the Latin
Grammys 2021.
Melon shared my concerns regarding the influence of antiquated racist
and elitist practices that underestimate timba, as a danceable and then
marginal (chavacano-street based) music genre. Those arbitrary and
“moral” distinctions between high and low culture sometimes come from
strict ignorance, lack of information, and ultimately from narratives of
racism as a cultural practice embedded within the Cuban imaginary. We
22
See Ivan Melón Lewis web page.
86 E. S. Bravo
both agreed on the need to recognize even more and study deeper the
importance of timba as a watershed in the development and historiogra-
phy of Cuban music, and its relevance for the ongoing developments in
the jazz, Latin jazz, and jazz world cultural scenes.
Alain Pérez—Timba–Cuban Jazz Fusion

Alain Perez strikes as another natural leader within TCAMS, a talented
bassist and multi-intrumentalist, producer, arranger, and music master
from this generation of Cuban musicians. From a music family in Villa
Clara, during his art studies in Cuba, also in la ENA, Pérez became part
of emblematic bands like Irakere, Isaac Delgado and later of Celia Cruz’s
European tours. Since migrating to Spain at the beginning of the 2000s
for fifteen years, and then returning to reside in the island in 2016, Perez
has been perfecting an ongoing fusion and dialogue between the founda-
tions of Cuban music, timba, jazz, and flamenco with funk, pop, R&B,
and other music genres with many of his Cubans colleagues in Spain, like
Melon Lewis, and all over the world, in recording studios, jam sessions,
and concerts. In Spain, they created a circuit of regular presentations for
Cuban musicians, Latin music, and jazz lovers in venues like Café
Populart, Café Berlín, and Café Central.
In Spain, Pérez produced many albums and participated or put together
several collaborations. He was the producer of Habana Abierta’s album
Boomerang (2005); member of Jerry Gonzalez’s jazz ensemble as well as of
PATAX, an electrifying transnational fusion project put together by
Spaniard American Jorge Perez; and during a decade he was touring the
world with flamenco world master Paco de Lucía, among many others.
Listening to Alain Pérez music feels like accessing a living archive of infi-
nite rhythms and sounds. His compositions provide an intelligent sum-
mary of the historiography of Cuban popular music, further enriched by
his experiences traveling around the world. His music is also the result of
Alain’s involvement with the flamenco scene in Spain and his regular
visits to Cuba, where he came back to reside and from where he is regu-
larly touring internationally. His lyrics are certainly poetics in many
Fig. 3.8 Alain Pérez & Julio Montalvo performing, Global Cuba Fest Miami,
FL. 2021. Photo Courtesy of Ever Chávez, FUNDarte
instances, delivering diverse, fun, and plausible stories, about love, rela-
tionships, existential and world concerns.
Perez has been crafting his Cuban sophisticated and complex musical
“melange” throughout the years with his Cuban colleagues across the
world, and lately in the island, with his starting and ending point
grounded in the uniqueness of “tumbaos” (rhythm pattern made with
bass, congas and piano in timba music that creates a groove and a call to
dance). The Cuban Fusion produced by Perez and his Cuban colleagues
leans towards timba, but it doesn’t stop there. It revolutionizes the
“boundaries” of Cuban music, making it way more transcultural and at
the same time paying tribute to its traditions and futuristic, with strong
roots in Afro-Cuban music, traditional Cuban music from Bebo Valdés,
Benny Moré, and Arsenio Rodríguez, and equally informed by the best
of Afro-American, jazz, flamenco, funk, pop, and world music. With an
impressive discography, Pérez has been awarded with the Grammys and
Latin Grammys for his music productions in the categories of Jazz,
Tropical music, and Salsa. In an interview I did for him in 2012
88 E. S. Bravo
published in Cubaencuentro online magazine, Alain talks about the

importance of working with Isaac Delgado’s band in the beginning of his
career in Havana, in a similar fashion to what Melón expressed. The tum-
baos he produced for La Sandunguita (1999) showed how he translates
his vision into music, easily moving from son, timba, and salsa, and ref-
erencing soul, funk, pop, and R&B. La Sandunguita is one of Isaac
Delgado’s all-time hits. About it, he says:
El tumbao del bajo del segundo montuno revolvió a todos, desde los baila-
dores hasta los musicólogos. Son tres golpes desplazados con síncopa, que
está inspirado en los golpes del tambor de la rumba, sin olvidar los diseños
de los metales que también le aportan lo suyo.23
Cuban Fusion made in Madrid by Melón, Pérez, and many other

Cuban musicians like Gema 4, Carlos Cano, Javier “Caramelo” Masó,
Pepe Ruiz, Ariel Bringuez, is not exclusive to this geographical space.
Their migrant condition forced TCAMS musicians in Spain and Europe
to open and mix up their Cubanness and classical musical educational
backgrounds to other references, like flamenco, boleros, Afro-Cuban,
and jazz. Also, their knowledge of Cuban music traditions almost for-
gotten on the island, their unique arts education, and the socioeconomic
circumstances that forced them to become global migrants after the
1990s crisis, made these musicians adopt a narrative and music language
strongly informed by music genres like timba, R&B, classical music,
and jazz, with a strong international appeal. They are also carrying over
in their music language a recuperation, update, and internationalization
of West African music traditions and evolution in the Western
Hemisphere.
Other Cuban musicians living in the island, or between the island and
other geographies, like multitalented singer-songwriters and composers
Daymé Arocena and Brenda Navarrete; multitalented producer, musi-
cian, singer-songwriter, filmmaker, and Fábrica de Arte’s creator and
director X Alfonso; singer-songwriter Afro-Cuban funk sensation
Cimafunk; multitalented trumpetist, producer, and band director
23
See Silot Bravo, “La emoción”.
Fig. 3.9 Omar Sosa & The NDR Big Band and EL Negro Hernández on stage. “Jazz
in Marciac,” Marciac, France, 2011. Photo Courtesy of Hervé Villieu’s personal
archives
Alexander Abreu, from Havana de Primera; talented pianists, composers,

and producers Roberto Fonseca, Harold and Adrián López Nussa, and
Aldo López Gavilán, the vocal Afro-Cuban female group Sexto Sentido
and multitalented producer, pianist, arranger, and composer Robertico
Carcassés and each member of his music collective Interactivo, are among
the protagonists of a similar phenomenon of transnationalization of
Cuban music in the evolution of their music language and identity. What
makes them part of this transnational network of Cuban music produc-
tion is that they share similar music referents, education in many cases,
and music language, with different emphasis either in jazz, timba, funk,
or all combined. Most of these musicians are constantly in interaction
with different world geographies and have collaborated with their
TCAMS peers several occasions. That collaboration has shaped, to a good
extent, their remarkable transnational music career while living in the
island. Some of them bring their spiritual Yoruba, Palo, and/or Santería
90 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.10 Daymé Arocena in concert. Presented by Miami Light Project. The Black
Box. Wynwood, Miami, FL. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s personal archives
backgrounds as practitioners who celebrate and update their ancestral

legacy in their music. Most of them studied in the art school system on
the island. They are examples of other ways by which Cuban musicians
and music are becoming transnational in the twenty-first century, from
the island and in constant connection with the outside world of friends,
travels, and influences.
New York
While living in New York at the turn of the century, I was always looking
for and had the opportunity to witness firsthand album recordings,
countless music festivals, and jazz concerts, where some Cuban musicians
from TCAMS regularly participated. New York is another important
urban center where many of the TCAMS musicians settled since the
nineties, and where they have been developing their professional careers
while crafting diverse and eclectic jazz and fusion music scenes. Many
academically trained Cuban musicians settled in New York from the
1990s on, like Ilmar López Gavilan (Harlem Quartet), Elio Villafranca,
David Virelles, Roman Filiú, Melvis Santa, Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany Terry,
and Yunior Terry. Some have moved to other cities around since the ori-
gins of this manuscript. These musicians spent an average of fifteen years
in the art school system on the island before migrating, like Afro-Cuban
pianist, composer, and educator Adonis Gonzalez, currently in Alabama;
Omar Sosa, Jimmy Branley, Carlitos del Puerto, and Alfredito Rodríguez
in the West Coast.
A rigorous academic training system was established mainly in urban
centers across the island in the 1970s, inspired by former Soviet models
of arts and music education. In the case of music, this system included
conservatories for the elementary level (3rd to 9th grades), specialized
boarding art high schools like la Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA) (National
School of the Arts) and Amadeo Roldán School for intermediate and pro-
fessional levels (10th to 13th grades), and el Instituto Superior de Arte
(ISA) (the High Arts Institute) for a five-year college degree. In many of
these schools, students from different art specializations like visual arts,
ballet, performance, drama, and modern dance regularly interacted.
Many students usually perfected their competence in one instrument:
piano or violin starting in the 3rd grade. Others specialized on guitar,
drums, winds, etc. started in the 5th grade. These schools followed a very
comprehensive and rigorous curriculum focused on classical music,
which includes regular one on one classes of the core instrument, piano
as a second instrument, and group classes of music history, theory, voice,
or band ensemble, pedagogy, harmony, and composition in the
upper levels.
Until the nineties, the study of Cuban music in these system of art
schools within the curriculum was restricted to what was considered clas-
sical music (including liturgical, baroque, classical, romantic, and van-
guard styles) and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cuban music of
composers like José White, Ignacio Cervantes, Ernesto Lecuona, Harold
Gramatches, and Leo Brower, among others. Despite the significance of
92 E. S. Bravo
Cuban popular music, for an important period it was not included in the
curriculum, and often students were forbidden to perform it. That was
due to the prevalence of strong elitist notions mentioned before, which
disregarded popular culture as marginal, another way to create distances
from the Afro-Cuban culture and people, in favor of “symbols of high
culture” that somehow privileged classical music, the soviet curriculum,
and music made historically by white Cubans with few exceptions.
However, while the main goal of this school was to form classical musi-
cians, many students upon graduating devoted their professional lives
later to jazz, fusion, and/or popular music. That was also the case with
several academically trained musicians that migrated to New York since
the nineties, like drummer Dafnis Prieto, saxophonist Yosvany Terry and
Roman Filiú lateron, pianists Manuel Varela, Osmany Paredes, Axel
Tosca, Elio Villafranca and Axel Tosca, bassist Junior Terry, Armando “El
Gola,” Melvis Santa, and pianist David Virelles, among many others.
Most of them have not only become part of the NY Jazz Afro-Cuban,
Latin, and Jazz scenes, but they have also established solid international
careers as jazz and fusion musicians across the world, on their own terms.
Since their studies in la ENA in Havana and right after their gradua-
tion, Prieto and Terry cofounded bands Yemajazz, Columna B, and
Estado de Animo with school buddies Robertico Carcassés, Descemer
Bueno, Elmer Ferrer, and Ahmed Barroso. In those bands, they began
experimenting with fusions between their own academic background and
other music genres with a marked jazz influence. Like his Cuban cohorts
in Madrid and Europe, these musicians were particularly inspired by the
important tradition of fusion of Cuban music and jazz on the island since
the 1970s, pioneered by musicians like Chucho Valdés and his band
Irakere. The origins of this fusion go back to the explosion of Afro-Cuban
jazz in New York in the 1940s, and even earlier with the proliferation of
jazz bands in the 1920s Havana’s nightlife.24
The tradition of Cuban jazz that proliferated after Irakere, which
informed academically trained musicians of the 1990s, was subsequently
developed by other musicians like prominent pianist and composer
Emiliano Salvador; el Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC;
24
See Acosta.
trumpeter, composer, and showman Bobby Carcassés; virtuoso pianist

and composer Gonzalo Rubalcaba; master drummer and composer
Horacio “El Negro” Hernández; cerebral pianist, arranger, and composer
Oriente López and his band Afrocuba; gifted pianist and composer Ernán
Lopez Nussa, and bands like Opus 13 and Cuarto Espacio. Brazilian, Afro-
Cuban, and funk rhythms were prevalent references for the TCAMS
musicians, as well as popular music on the island from bands like Van
Van, NG La Banda, Manolín El Médico de la Salsa, and others.
Through copies and hand-to-hand circulation of recordings brought
by those who travel abroad, these musicians intensively listened to a wide
range of American jazz, from more traditional to experimental.25 Like
many beginning artists, they imitated what they listened to, but progres-
sively incorporated all those influences in the development of their own
music language. Later, they began playing at the yearly international
Havana Jazz Plaza Festival and local music venues. Then they were invited
to presentations in the US and Europe, where many of them decided to
relocate. Progressively, these musicians have contributed to an unprece-
dented path of growth and expansion of Cuban jazz both on the island
and globally. Moreover, these academically trained musicians have influ-
enced the jazz scene in urban enclaves like New York. Like his Cuban
peers in Madrid, New York–based musicians like Dafnis Prieto and
Yosvany Terry were among the protagonists of a renaissance of Cuban
musicianship in the American and world jazz scene since the 1990s, per-
haps even more significant than when Afro-Cuban jazz emerged in
New York in the 1940s.
25
The range of jazz recordings, musical genres, and musicians that informed Cuban jazz musicians
of the nineties includes but is not limited to American modern jazz legends like: John Coltraine,
Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sara Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Jarret,
Branford and Winton Marsalis, Dizzie Gillespie, Weather Report, Jaco Pastorious, John Patitucci,
Jack De Johnette, Chick Corea, Yellow Jacket, Pat Metheny, Marcus Miller, Steve Coleman, Roy
Hargrove, Herbie Hancock, Pacho Alonso, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Los Bonny M, Earth,
Wind & Fire, La Orquesta Aragón, La Orquesta Jorrín, Chucho Valdés, Irakere, Emiliano Salvador,
Opus 13, AfroCuba, Changito, Los Papines, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Juan Pablo Torres, Los
Van van, Issac Delgado, Milton Nascimento, Djavan, Fito Páez, Ermeto Pascual, Gal Costa, Miami
Sound Machine, Gloria Estéfan, Celia Cruz, the Fania All Stars, and Willy Chirino, among
many others.
94 E. S. Bravo
Dafnis Prieto: Intertextuality in Cuban Jazz

Prieto established himself in New York in 1999, after living in Spain for
a while. Since then, he has developed an impressive individual career as
an international jazz drummer, composer, and educator. After settling in
New York, he rapidly became a regular sideman in the jazz club scene, on
recordings and tours with a diversity of ensembles, ranging from avant-
gardists Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman to more Latin jazz musi-
cians like Eddie Palmieri, Chico O’Farril, Michel Camilo, and more
American jazzist like Roy Hargrove. Since 2005, Dafnis started produc-
ing his own albums, featuring his own compositions in different formats
from sextets to trios, collaborating with the likes of saxophonists Yosvany
Terry and Peter Apfelbaum, pianists Luis Perdomo and Manuel Varela,
bassist Charles Flores, trumpeters Brian Lynch and Avishai Cohen, and
keyboardist Jason Lindner, among others. His two first albums: About the
Monks (2005) and Absolut Quintet (2011) were released with Zoho, at the
time a recently established label in New York whose initial orientation
was to produce mainly local jazz artists. By his third album, Taking the
Soul for a Walk (2008), Prieto created Dafnison music, his own indepen-
dent recording label. Under Dafnison music, Prieto has been responsible
for the production of his own albums and of some Cuban colleagues, like
bassist Charles Flores, saxophonist Roman Filiú, and Havana-based
Interactivo band. Prieto’s career has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship
in 2011, Grammy nominations, several commissions, and many other
awards and distinctions.
Dafnis is not only recognized as a very skillful and versatile drummer,
but also as a notable composer, arranger, and educator. In media reviews,
there was an initial tendency to situate him first as a Latin jazz performer
and composer. After the release of nine albums of his own authorship,
more than fifty collaborations as a guest artist, five main music projects,
Prieto’s music has been regarded as visionary and forward-thinking, play-
ful, and rational, emotionally charged and contained at the same time.
Prieto’s compositions open jazz as an infinite space of intertextuality and
dialogue, seemingly effortlessly blurring the lines between several jazz
genres like Afro Cuban, Latin, Cuban, bebop, avant-garde and tradi-
tional, with Cuban popular music and world music as well. In addition,
Fig. 3.11 Dafnis Prieto & Bebo Valdés. Recording “Bebo de Cuba”. Studio, New
York. Photo Courtesy of Dafnis Prieto’s personal archives
Prieto is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at the Frost School

of Music, University of Miami, in Florida.
“Magic Danzonete,” from his album Dafnis Prieto Proverb Trio (2012),
is an example. The first eight bars are presented by a rhythmic and ono-
matopoeic vocal improvisation by singer Koyaki, suggesting that the
audience will be treated to a scat singing-funky groove. Then Prieto joins
in with a drumbeat that creates a subtle atmosphere by alternating soft
beats between the tom shells and a peculiar cymbal. Sixteen bars later—
when the keyboardist Lindner enters with a very electronic and low-
pitched groove and Prieto plays a roll—it is clearly established rhythmically
that the song is an unexpected danzonete.26
26
Danzonete is a Cuban traditional salon European inspired dance form that emerged at the end of
the 1920s in the Matanzas region. It’s based on the Danzón genre but introduced the use of the
voice, rhythm from Son that was a new genre at the time, and a call part to stimulate the dancers.
See (Giró Tomo 2 11–13).
96 E. S. Bravo
Although in this piece there’s a specific intertextual relation to danzo-

nete as a traditional Cuban dance rhythm, danzonete is only one among
the diverse music references Prieto plays with. The resulting piece is
generically fluid and the sound decisively universal. The harmonic and
relaxed interaction among the musicians contributes to a fluid interplay
of funky vocal improvisations, adorned by a range of electronic effects
produced by the keyboards and a freestyle jazz improvisation by Prieto.
In conversations I’ve had with Dafnis throughout the years, he deliber-
ately doesn’t portray himself as a Latin jazz player musician, but rather as
one who updates and opens the frontiers of what is usually regarded as
Latin jazz or even Cuban music. His musical language proves the ulti-
mately universal character of music and of jazz particularly, as a cultural
space of endless dialogue, counterpoint, and fusion among cultures, tra-
ditions, information, and life experiences.
Yosvany Terry: Redefining Afro-Cuban Jazz

Yosvany Terry is another protagonist of this moment of renaissance of
Cuban musicianship in the New York and international jazz scene. Terry
inherited from his family a solid knowledge of Afro-Cuban traditions,
among other influences, which he combined with classical music and
later on with fusions in ensembles like Columna B and Estado de Animo
in the island. He also moved to New York at the end of the twentieth
century, and like Prieto rapidly became a regular sideman in the New York
jazz club scene. Since then, Terry has developed an impressive and versa-
tile career as a saxophonist, performer of Afro-Cuban instruments, com-
poser, and educator. He has made innumerable collaborations in
recordings, presentations, and tours with world-renowned jazzist like
Steve Coleman, Roy Hargrove, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Eddie Palmieri,
Brandford Marsalis, Paquito D’Rivera, Avishai Cohen, Dafnis Prieto,
Horacio “El Negro” Hernández, and Pedrito Martínez, among many oth-
ers. As a leading saxophonist and composer, Terry has translated his ver-
satile work into different formats like quintet and sextet. He released two
albums with the Columna B project, three albums as a soloist:
Metamorphosis (2006) with Ewe Records; Today’s Opinion (2012) with
Chris Cross Jazz, and New Throned King (2014) with 5 Passion, and a
recent collaboration with musician and pianist Baptist Trotignon,

Ancestral Memories (2017). Terry has also received several commissions,
awards, and nominations to the Grammys and Latin Grammys. In his
multifaceted musical language several distinguishing features are evident:
he is a virtuoso tenor and alto jazz saxophonist; a solid composer and
arranger of complex jazz pieces for orchestra, opera, big bands, or smaller
formats; a researcher and performer of Afro-Cuban music and chants that
he easily integrates into his compositions and performances; and a music
producer. Since 2015, Terry is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Jazz
Ensembles in the Department of Music at Harvard, University.
In a review of his album Today’s Opinion, Sublete nicely sums up some
of the main strengths of Terry’s music:
“[He] combines the instrumentation and ground rules of the classic hard-
bop quintet with the rhythmic savvy of Afrocuban music and long-arc
compositional ambition (…)” a music ultimately “(…) physical, cerebral,
and spiritual, with a lot of stories to tell.” (Downbeat Magazine)
Terry’s New Throned King (5 Passion, 2014) is another example of

those claims. The album is the result of sound research that documents
Arará music, a lesser-known Afro-Cuban tradition practiced in regions of
the island like Matanzas and in other Caribbean islands, inherited from
the former West African kingdom of Dahomey.
In Terry’s own words the piece, under the same name, is
(…) an arrangement of chants and drums toques for Agosajón (…) the
Arará equivalent of Babalú… (a much cherished and well-known divinity
from the Yoruba tradition), “(…) envisioning the Pataki (deity’s stories) of
his coronation. (“The story of the New Throned King”)
The piece’s highlights are the lead celebratory and sacred chants by world
renowned Afro-Cuban chanter and drummer Pedrito Martínez. Pedrito
transitions towards a delightful dialogue between different and consecutive
sections of calls and responses with a glowing ensemble chorus. Pedrito’s
polyrhythmic Arará drumming together with the master drumming by
Roman Díaz and Sandy Perez, the added jazz texture of Justin Brown’s
drum set sound, as well as the rhythmic chord progressions by pianist
98 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.12 Yosvany Terry & his band, Yunior Terry & Gema Corredera, Yerba Buena
Summer Festival. San Francisco, CA, 2023. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo per-
sonal archives
Osmany Paredes, flesh out the “long-arc compositional ambition” to which

Sublette refers. Additionally, there is a succession of improvisations by
Terry on alto sax and by Paredes on piano that climax in a celebratory dia-
logue among the sacred vocals, chants, drumbeats, and jazz harmonies.
New Throned King is a comprehensive archeological and musical research
that carefully retrieves and puts in dialogue an ancient archive of Afro-
Cuban tradition with the global jazz soundscape of the twenty-first cen-
tury. The album brilliantly updates the tradition and lineage of cross-cultural
dialogue between bebop and Afro-Cuban rhythms that became so promi-
nent in the 1940s in New York, and subsequently on the island.
Terry is a multifaceted and very accomplished musician and educator
of Cuban jazz, and of the music from the Caribbean and across the
African Diaspora. According to Terry’s website, he has served in institu-
tions like Princeton University, The New School for Jazz and Contemporary
Music, the Brubeck Institute, NYU, Goddard College, Boston University,
Casa de las Américas in Havana, Royal Conservatory of Music in

Winnipeg, Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Columbia University,
the University of Salvador de Bahia, University of Rio de Janeiro, and he
continues to be resident instructor at the Stanford Jazz Workshop.
edrito Martínez: African Diaspora Music

P
Round Trip
New York was not only an essential hub for academically trained musi-
cians that migrated from the island since the 1990s like Dafnis Prieto,
Yosvany Terry, Melvis Santa, Yunior Terry, David Virelles, Ilmar López
Gavilán (Harlem Quartet), but also for multitalented and polyphasic
musicians like singer, rumbero, conguero, drummer, and Yoruba priest
Pedrito Martínez, singer Xiomara Laugart and her son, pianist and pro-
ducer Axel Tosca, among many others. Since Pedrito settled in New York
at the end of the 1990s, he joined the band Yerbabuena as their percus-
sionist and singer. Yerbabuena, put together by Venezuelan American
producer Andrés Levin, was an innovative collective of urban musicians
from all over, including several Cubans like Xiomara Laugart, Descemer
Bueno, El Chino DreadLion, Pedrito Martinez, and Cucu Diamantes,
who quickly became regulars in several NY music venues as well as in
music festivals around the world. They proposed an attractive funky
fusion of urban music with strong Afro-beat, boogaloo, world, and Afro-
Cuban flavors. In 2005, Pedrito formed his own music project with
mostly Cuban and Latino peers, like talented former member pianist and
vocalist Ariacne Trujillo, doing residencies at local NY spaces like
Guantanamera. Since then, Pedrito’s career has been growing exponen-
tially and his band lineup has changed and keeping stronger, with younger
generation of TCAMS musicians like Isaac Delgado Jr., while touring the
US and the world in jazz festivals and making key collaborations with top
musicians like Wynton Marsalis, Paquito D’Rivera, Chucho Valdés,
Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Eddie Palmieri, Dave Matthews, Elton
John, Alfredo Rodríguez, Snarky Puppy, and Sting. Throughout the
years, Martinez has put together or participated in countless music col-
laborative projects with musicians from Cuba and all over the world,
including in the island. The “The Invasion Parade” (2014), a music
100 E. S. Bravo
collaboration between Martinez, renowned pianist, and composer

Alfredo Rodríguez and Afro-Cuban jazz saxophonist Roman Filiú, is an
example. This piece is part of the album with the same name by Rodríguez
and is also part of a saga of successful collaborations put together between
Martínez and Rodríguez in the last years. Recreating the essential Cuban
conga syncopated beat as the percussive base, they create with ease this
jazzy Cuban Fusion, proposing a contagious and danceable upbeat jazz,
immersed in a timba style, and infused with classical phrases in the most
experimental Afro-Cuban fashion.
Internationally recognized, nominated, and awarded by the Grammys
and the Latin Grammys in the Latin Jazz category, Pedrito’s music is liv-
ing evidence of the postcolonial Afro-Cuban, Caribbean, and Afro
Diasporic cultural legacies in movement across global geographies and
historical times. Martinez is constantly crafting, updating, and perfecting
Fig. 3.13 Pedrito Martínez & his band. The Brown University Latin Jazz and Pop
Festival. Brown University, Providence, R.I.2015. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo
personal archives
his African diasporic legacy through a unique stamp, high level of perfor-
mances and music language as a true master. TCAMS musicians like
Martínez, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Melvis Santa, Daymé Arocena, Brenda
Navarrete, Elio Villafranca, David Virelles, Roman Díaz, and Omar Sosa
are revolutionizing their cultural and national identities brought with
them from the island, with their Afro-Cuban ancestry and their interna-
tional experiences as first-generation migrants. They are leaving an impor-
tant mark as weavers of a diverse and eclectic transnational cultural scene
of creativity with a strong ancestral foundation. They are transculturating
their Afro-Cuban musical legacy and identities in the transnational con-
text with an array of music genres like jazz, Brazilian, world, and R&B,
to name some, which already carried over other histories and path of
evolution of music and rhythms from the African diaspora. By doing
that, these musicians are successfully pushing the limits and expanding
the boundaries of Cuban music, jazz, and their Afro-diasporic dimen-
sion, making them more international and universal in an ongoing and
never-ending round trip across the world.
Miami
As the second largest Cuban city after Havana, Miami has become a hub
for Cuban musicians of all kinds. In Cuban Miami’s cultural scenes, there
have been some distinguishable trovador moments or scenes, like around
now deceased multidisciplinary artist Alcides Herrera’s and Los Bloomers
Project, and other ad hoc music collabs. Yet the Cuban’s trova scene was
way more vibrant in Madrid since the nineties, as well as the Cuban jazz
scene in New York. Together with academically trained musicians, singers
and songwriters have created a locally recognizable and itinerant scene of
Cuban Fusion music that circulates across different venues with the sup-
port of local promoters, presenters, and social media. They have also gained
an increasing presence in local TV and Radio stations like Mega TV,
America TV, and online media outlets that proliferated in the last decades.
In Miami, alternative Cuban music is much larger than the trovador tradi-
tion; the fusion produced by these musicians involve dialogue with an
array of genres including but not limited to Caribbean music genres, funk,
pop, grunge, jazz, rock, Brazilian, Argentinian rock, bolero, timba, cumbia,
102 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.14 (From left to right)—Descemer Bueno, Roman Díaz, Eva Silot Bravo,
Pedrito Martínez & Philbert Armenteros. The Brown University Latin Jazz and Pop
Festival. Brown University, Providence, R.I. 2015. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo
personal archives
hip-hop, reggae, and Afro-Cuban rhythms. Miami’s Cuban Fusion is

highly eclectic, compared to the Latino music market, and it happens at a
relatively larger and yet still recognizable scale.
Mapping TCAMS: Miami Style

Frequent conversations with audiences, promoters, producers, managers,
service workers, and artists throughout the years in these different venues
have allowed me to understand them as participatory spaces for listeners
who are also strong dancers. In most of these venues it’s assumed that at
some point the concerts will turn into descargas (jam sessions) where
musicians and their fans will move from venue to venue seeking to stretch
Fig. 3.15 Sol Ruiz & Rey Rodríguez on stage. Global Cuba Fest. 2017, Miami,
FL. Photo by Generación Asere. Courtesy of Ever Chávez, FUNDarte
out the night. The level of musicianship at these jams is remarkable. They
increased their T directly through social media as one of their primary’s
marketing tools. Some of these musicians have been nominated for or
received awards at the Latin Grammys and the Grammys in categories
like Tropical and Latin jazz.27
27
TCAMS musicians in Miami also are producers and multi-instrumentalist performers: Amaury
Gutiérrez, Descemer Bueno, Leslie Cartaya, Mr. Haka, El Chino Dreadlion, Sol Ruiz, Glenda del
E, Lena Burque, Philbert Armenteros (Los Herederos), Picadillo band; pianists Orlando Guanche,
Michelle Fragoso, Pepe Montes, Raúl del Sol and Tony Pérez; bassists Manuel Orza, Nestor del
Prado, Eduard Madariaga, Braulio Fernández & Loisel Machín; drummers Raymer Olaide, Reinier
Guerra, The Pututi Brothers (Alexis, Angel and Armando Arce), Hilario Bell, Raúl and Joel del Sol,
Daniel López; trombonist William Paredes; trumpeter Carlos Puig; flutist Mercedes Abal; guitarists
Ahmed Barroso, Lázaro Rodríguez and Heriberto Rey, among many others. I also include local
bands like Palo! And Spam All Stars within this transnationalized Miami Cuban Fusion. Although
led by North American white male musicians, Cuban musicians from the TCAMS are an impor-
tant part of these bands’ line-up, and their music is highly informed by Afro-Cuban and Afro-
Caribbean, Yoruba, West African rhythms, and Cuban music in general. At the same time, these
fusions, which include house beats and other U.S. and Latin American genres, have enriched Afro-
Cuban Funk and contributed to a local urban underground sound, which in turn influences other
local bands and other TCAMS music productions.
104 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.16 Aymee Nuviola, Yusa, Tony Perez & Manuel Orza. Yusa in Concert.
Miami Dade County Auditorium. Global Cuba Fest. 2018, Miami, FL. Photo
Courtesy of Diana Liza personal archives
The first traceable venue of this kind was Café Nostalgia in Miami
Beach in the late 1990s, owned by cultural promoter Pepe Horta, former
director of the Havana Film Festival. Nostalgia moved to the neighbor-
hood Little Havana, and in 2000 transformed into Hoy como Ayer
owned by Fabio Díaz and his partner. Other clubs on the popular Little
Havana’s Calle 8 that hosted this scene, at least temporarily, were
Kimbaracumbara (also owned by Díaz), La Casa de Tula, PAX, and Ocho
Live. These spaces provided a wider set of interactions with other local
music scenes and attracted musicians from all over.28
Afterwards, the Cuban Fusion scene in Miami is located and moves
throughout different 305 (Miami code) venues and areas, in Brickell’s
Havana 1957 and Midtown’ former News Lounge, and throughout some
venues in Downtown, produced by a creative group of DJs and promot-
ers called Vedado Social Club. Other venues that were part of this circuit
were The Place, D’Neme, and bars-galleries or gallery-bars like Cuba 8,
Habana 305 and Ball and Chain on Calle 8, and occasionally other ven-
ues in the areas of Southwest Miami, like Real Café, in Miami Beach at
the North Band Shell and other hotel-venues, in Hialeah at the Hialeah
Park, in Wynwood at the former Wynwood Yard, and more recently in
Allapattah at the Creative Yard, La Esquina de Abuela, La Tropical, and
at in Doral at the Doral Yard.
During the Obama Administration, the Cuban government removed
“exit permits” as a requirement for Cubans to travel outside, which laid
to rest the restrictions enforced during decades. Consequently, cultural
exchanges between Cuba and the US increased until the Trump
Administration, resulting in a growing showcasing of Cuban musicians
from the island in clubs and theaters throughout Miami, with little or no
protest from the traditional exile community. The changing demograph-
ics among Cuban migrants and the progressive internationalization of
Miami have shaped a different political atmosphere in areas where migra-
tion from the island has burgeoned. Dominant narratives of cubanidad
and the official political discourse of the Cuban government and the tra-
ditional exile community waned in those instances. The new migrants
favor the normalization of relationships with their cohorts on the island.
As a result, over the years Miami’s club scene has had regular presenta-
tions of TCAMS musicians like Roberto Carcassés, and Interactivo,
Telmary, Kelvis Ochoa, Alain Pérez, Luis Barbería, Ivan Melón Lewis,
Alfredito Rodríguez, Pedrito Martínez, Yissy García, Melvis Santa,
Brenda Navarrete, Daymé Arocena, Hayde Milanés, Cimafunk, and
many others. These are nowadays Cuban mobile musicians, artists who
live and produce Cuban music with a strong African legacy in a flowing
28
See Silot Bravo “PAX.”
106 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.17 Tiempo Libre on stage. Habana 305. Little Havana, Miami, FL. Photo
Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal archives
dialogue with world sonorities, and in constant movement across geo-

graphical and Internet spaces.
Like ever before, where Cuban musicians live is not an issue in Miami’s
politics anymore within this community of music creation throughout
the world and the Internet for the most part. Some TCAMS musicians
still live on the island, others have returned, some live between the island
and world cities, others have decided to migrate or been forced to exile.
All of them are in high demand by their Miamian peers and other US and
Fig. 3.18 Interactivo, Robertico Carcassés, Telmary Díaz, Yusa, Brenda Navarrete,
Julito Padrón, and Nestor del Prado, presented by VSC. Downtown, Miami, FL
2016. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal archives
world fans. In these local and transnational concerts, TCAMS bring some
of their accompanying musicians from Havana, but mostly they put their
bands together with local musicians. The local audience that sustains this
music is composed of nostalgic cohorts and those interested in alternative
Afro-Cuban, Latino music, and Afro-diasporic cultural networks and
world music.29
Another space that has contributed to the development of Cuban
Fusion music in Miami is Global Cuba Fest, a yearly festival devoted to
the presentation of performing art projects by TCAMS musicians. This
Later this scene was embraced by recent Cuban migrants who were former regulars at venues in
29
Havana that hosted counterparts of this alternative scene, like Don Cangrejo, El Café Teatro
Bertolt Brecht, El Sauce and FAC (Fábrica de Arte Cubano), among others.
108 E. S. Bravo
festival has been put together by local nonprofit organizations Miami

Light Project and FUNDarte since 2008, with the collaboration of
Rhythm Foundation in some instances. The festival has taken place
throughout Miami Beach, North Miami, and Wynwood, becoming a
forum for the dissemination of TCAMS work for local and international
audiences. The festival has been an important space of encounter,
exchange, and collaboration between these diasporic musicians and their
generational cohorts on the island.
In the 5th edition of the Global Cuba Fest in 2012, Havana-based
band Interactivo performed for the first time to a sold-out house at the
North Band Shell in Miami Beach, an open space by the beach where
events and international music festivals are usually presented by Rhythm
Foundation. The concert became a spontaneous space for an island-
diasporic generational encounter. The night ended in a jam session at a
nearby Miami Beach hotel, accompanied by pictures, toasts, laughter,
and hugs to celebrate the encounter. This is not an isolated case but is
repeated at subsequent editions of the festival and other similar events,
like an encounter between Interactivo, Habana Abierta, and other musi-
cians from the TCAMS like Gema Corredera and David Torrens at a
concert at the Miami Dade County Auditorium in March 2014, and the
stage encounters between Daymé Arocena and Cimafunk in 2019, and of
Pedrito Martínez and Alfredito Rodríguez at the North Bandshell in
Miami Beach in 2022, among many other collaborations.
Another key event for TCAMS was the Brown University Latin Jazz
and Pop Festival, held in October 2015 at Brown University and the city
of Providence, Rhode Island. Organized by CLACS, the Brown University
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the festival was for
5 days, gathered 40 musicians, more than 1000 audience and was held
throughout 8 venues. This festival was organized by Richard Snyder-
Director of the Center for Latin-American and Caribbean Studies at
Brown University at that moment. It was a sort of celebration and
encounter for many TCAMS musicians, including Leslie Cartaya,
Philbert Armenteros, Raymer Olarde, The Pedrito Martínez Group,
William Paredes, Descemer Bueno, Hilario Bell, Roman Díaz, Son
Lokos, and Afro-Cuban funk band Palo! I participated in the academic
panel of this event on Afro-Cuban music together with other scholars
Fig. 3.19 Alfredito Rodríguez on stage. Global Cuba Fest 2022. North Beach
Band Shell. Miami, FL 2022. Photo Courtesy of Ever Chávez, FUNDarte
and practitioners, like musicologist Ned Sublette, LP founder Martin

Cohen, and Arturo Gómez, director of Radio station KUVO/KVJZ
Denver. The participating musicians collaborated in a recording session,
several jam sessions, workshops, and concerts throughout the city.
WPBT2, South Florida PBS’s affiliate, made a documentary about the
festival, “Ivy League Rumba” (2016), directed by Cuban-Americans jour-
nalists and producers Joe Cardona and Ralf Gonzalez.30 Since then, there
is an ongoing proliferation of events and presenters of this alternative
music scene across Miami.
Cuban music in Miami has evolved, diversified, and exploded tremen-
dously since the turn of the twenty-first century. For decades the politici-
zation of Cuban music affairs led to an uncomfortable environment
where Cuban traditional music was the norm, and performances from
Cuban musicians born and raised during the revolution were censured as
political acts. Since the end of the 1990s, the new political and legislative
30
See The Brown University.
110 E. S. Bravo
environment after the demise of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc,
the effects of the Cuban crisis and of the process of globalization created
conditions for TCAMS musicians to flourish. What started as sporadic
exchanges and collaborations among Cuban diasporic musicians in
Miami and across the world, has progressively become the norm. Cuban
music production among singer songwriters and academically trained
musicians outside the geographical frontiers of the island has exploded
and became global in spaces like Miami. The local, Latino, and interna-
tional music industry are starting to recognize this phenomenon, but
there’s still a long way to go.
Eclectic Cuban Fusion

The Cuban transnational music scene in Miami has become an impor-
tant space where alternative narratives of cubanidad are constantly nego-
tiated, through what Bourdieu has identified as a conflict between the
orthodoxy of established traditions and the heretical challenge of new
modes of cultural practice (16–17). Musicians who migrated in the 1990s
have been negotiating Cubanness in their music and identity as transna-
tional subjects, living in-between dominant national imaginaries framed
by the rigid nationalism of both official island and traditional exile dis-
courses, policies, and practices. They are Cuban migrants, now Cuban
Americans that unlike previous cohorts, maintain links and visit the
island, and at the same time carve out their own paths and reinvent them-
selves throughout the world.
Reviewing diasporic texts that reconstruct Cuban historical memory
post 1959, Rojas offers a series of insights, which I find useful to examine
narrative negotiations of Cubanness in lyrics of TCAMS in Miami.
Although, for Rojas, the 1990s Cuban diaspora broke with the Cuban
regime, just as previous cohorts had done, they have a less traumatic,
more contemplative experience of the revolution and its cultural legacy.
They acknowledge pre-revolutionary times in less ideal terms, are critical
of the revolution but at the same time favor national reconciliation,
which sets them apart from previous diasporic waves, especially from tra-
ditional exiles (“Diaspora and Memory” 261).
Fig. 3.20 Danay Suárez, Aldo, El B, and the Nu Deco Ensemble on stage at the
North Beach Band Shell. Miami Beach, FL. 2018. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo
archives
Haka’ song “Ponte p’a la Música,” first recorded by Cubiche and later
released in Mr. Haka’s CD Crónicas de un Escribano (2011), is an example
that confirms Rojas analysis:
Deja la política, deja el perico y deja la retórica

Y ponte pa’ la música, ponte pa’ la música
Son las 11 de la mañana, Chamo
No sé que me anima a levantarme tan temprano
112 E. S. Bravo
No hay na’a pa’ luchar un baro31

Los billes te desayunan
No hay ni pa’ la fuma, el país está malo
Tengo una palmera que llega a Sarasota
Y una depresión que no me quiero ni lavar la boca…
La pincha, pariente, me pagan un descarito, y entre renta, y gasolina… ....
........................................................
Miami está rico, rico
La gente no quiere música, es política y perico.
Forget the politics, forget drugs, and forget the rhetoric

And go to the music, to the music
It’s 11 in the morning, buddy
I don’t know what’s making me wake up this early
There’s no way to make money
Bills are like a slap in the face
Can’t even afford a smoke,
the country’s in bad shape
I‘ve got pointless Cuban pride from here to Sarasota
And I‘m so depressed I don’t even want to brush my teeth …..
I‘m working for my friends,
getting paid pennies under the table
and between rent and gas…
Miami is loaded (with cash)
But people don’t want music,
all they want is politics and drugs.
(Mr. Haka “Crónicas”)
A rap song with explosive vocal improvisations by Haka in dialogue

with timba piano tumbaos and funk rhythms, it provides a very compre-
hensive panorama of Miami’s social landscape from the perspective of
subaltern migrants. The story tells what it’s like to live in Miami for recent
immigrant musicians who struggle to break into the music market. The
song’s critiques range from what these musicians perceive as lack of
opportunity and support for Cuban musicians in the local and main-
stream market, highly visible corruption and mainstream drugs
31
Baro is a term use in Cuban slang to refer to money.
consumption, and the difficulties to find jobs. The song proposes a con-
ciliatory approach to deal with these challenges, calling for the celebra-
tion of music and culture as a form of empowerment for all Cubans.32
This type of song illustrates one of the most prevalent discourses of this
network of musicians, who in several conversations and interviews
insisted on their need to make songs that reflect their own views on social
and existential concerns about their generation’s realities as recent
migrants and about the Cuban dilemma, in a way they think is not
reflected in previous diasporic accounts on Cubanness.
In June 2008, Descemer Bueno, acting as Cubiche’s director, and Mr.
Haka appeared in “A mano limpia,” a TV show devoted to Cuban politics
on Miami’s local channel America TV (Canal 41).33 The program was
another regular local TV program focused on predictable and ongoing
political commentary on Cuban affairs. The host insisted on getting the
invitees’ opinion about a recent performance by locally acclaimed Spanish
singer Dyango, because visiting the island as a famous Hispanic musician
was still viewed as “politically incorrect” for some in Miami’s media. The
program turned into a debate with older Cuban diasporic artists that
could have gotten heated, due to the assumed difference of opinions
across generations of Cubans migrants, but that was not the case. The
older artist lamented the lack of freedom of her generation’s musicians to
perform on the island. Bueno explicitly indicated her to share her con-
cerns on Cuba. He advocated for moving beyond the politics that affect
Cuban culture, and the normalization of travel exchanges without restric-
tions for Cuban artists in both directions. In interviews and in some of
their lyrics, this generation of musicians seems less interested in defining
their identity in strictly political and nationalistic terms like the tradi-
tional exiles did. As a result, in some cases they feel disconnected to dia-
sporic narratives of cubanidad that do not reflect their own experiences as
transnational migrants with an Afro-diasporic strong cultural legacy.
However, that changed during the international campaign #patriayvida
after the #july11 protests in 2011, which created solidarity with the
Cuban protesters in the island across the whole Cuban diaspora, except
32
See also Silot Bravo “Mr. Haka.”
33
See “Cubiche en Miami.”
114 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.21 Pavel Urquiza in concert, with Yusa performing on stage at El Tucán.
Downtown Miami, by Habana en Miami. FL. 2017. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot
Bravo archives
for the ones still “under the influence” of the international Cuban official
state propaganda networks or for those who refuse to deal with Cuban
politics at all.
Discursively, lyrics from these musicians seem to have in general a “low
profile” regarding the traditional politicization of Cuban issues in the
diaspora. Instead, they embrace depoliticized and open notions of cuban-
idad as a de-territorialized space of tolerance, reconciliation, and mobility
across borders for all Cubans, beyond geographical and political dis-
tances. Their lyrics are not concerned directly in most cases with Cuban
politics as in previous diasporic groups; instead, they reflect critically on
their migrant condition as well as on local and global challenges. Those
musicians who returned to live on the island, or who regularly used to
travel back and forth before the covid pandemic, gained greater mobility
and certain leverage over their lives and work as diasporic Cuban subjects.
Unlike most of the earlier diaspora, for the TCAMS musicians residing
in Miami and other places, Cuba became a place where for a while some
of these musicians managed to connect with an important fan base,
recorded promotional materials, collaborated with recognized musicians,
etc. This provided them with more leeway in progressively advancing
their careers back in the island, as in the case of Descemer Bueno, Alain
Pérez, Telmary, Luis Barbería, and Kelvis Ochoa, from the US, Canada,
and Europe. These musicians have created spaces of encounter among
Cubans outside of traditional politics, as advocated in many Habana
Abierta’s songs. However, they are not exempt from the vicissitudes of
government control and censorship over cultural matters on the island,
which leads them to negotiate a delicate balance between their careers
and their personal life or become critical to the Cuban government in
open ways, the case of Robertico Carcassés, Interactivo band’s director, or
to move back outside the island. Despite these constraints, musicians
from the TCAMS are opening spaces for themselves and others within
and beyond their generational cohort, through their inclusive and “low
profile” attitudes in terms of Cuban politics. In practical terms, they are
sorting out the political obstacles that had separated Cubans from both
shores for half a century.
According to an old exile who helped organize a protest in Miami
against songwriter Pablo Milanés in 2011, the Cuban community doesn’t
get irritated by younger Cuban musicians from the island playing in
Miami because “no one knows who they are” as opposed to the high-
profile Cuban artists that still send tempers rising in the Cuban exile
community (Gratereaux). On the other hand, younger Cuban Americans
like Pedro Vidal, president of the Cuban Soul Foundation—a cultural
nonprofit that used to promote in the US the art of newer generations of
Cuban hip-hop from the island like Escuadrón Patriota, Los Aldeanos,
Silvito El Libre, and Omni Zona Franca, among others—thinks that
younger Cuban Americans want to learn more about Cuban artists, and
are more open-minded about these artists performing in the United
States (Idem).
The latest wave of governmental repression in the island since 2021,
together with important shortages of food and medicines, the crisis and
lack of efficient government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, led to
116 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 3.22 Michael Gil playing. Miami, FL. Photo by & Courtesy of Humberto
Ochoa’s personal archives
the most significant post-revolutionary social uprising on July 11th,

2021. This situation brought moments of unity among Cubans across
geographies with the population in the island, and significantly politi-
cized the Cuban narratives within and outside the island, including
within TCAMS. Following social media campaigns by both the estab-
lished and emerging Cuban civil society like dissidents, scholars, artists,
influencers, online magazines, blogs, activists, and artivists across the
world and throughout the Internet, is a way to get inform about “the real
face of Cuban socialism,” as a failed postcolonial, socialist, white patriar-
chal establishment afraid of their own people, putting in jail for decades
black and white Cubans without due process, just for protesting the
increasingly unbearable living conditions, state inefficiencies, and increas-
ing repression within the island, especially after the covid pandemic.
An example of the shifting circumstances was the Latin Grammy
awarded song Patria y Vida. Released in February 2021, Patria y Vida was
the result of a collective transnational effort responding to the island’s
crisis by a group of mostly Afro-Cubans male artists, many of them living
outside the island, like Alexander Delgado and Randy Malcom of Gente
de Zona reggaetón duo; Yotuel Romero, founding member of Orishas,
the world recognized pioneer Cuban hip-hop band since the 1900s; hit
maker, singer-songwriter, and producer Descemer Bueno; and bassist and

producer Yadam González. Hip-hop artists Maykel Osboro (Castillo)
and Eliécer “el Funky” Márquez participated in this song from the island
and had suffered repression and jail time consequently. Patria y Vida
became a national anthem in the island’s protests, and it was quickly
embraced by Cubans from all over, including TCAMS, as the alternative
direct response to Patria o Muerte, a slogan invented by former dictator
president Fidel Castro in his interminable statements and used by the
government for decades. Patria y Vida was a direct response from the
Cuban people to the decadence of the official nationalist narrative encom-
passing in Patria y Muerte, entailing an oppressive, authoritarian, hypo-
critical, and hopeless form of patriotism for most Cubans in the island.
By subverting that phrase with Patria y Vida, Cuban artists from both
shores made viral updated coordinates for imagining alternative and soli-
dary narratives of Cubanness, crystallizing the increasing hopes and calls
for a free Cuba within the island and across the globe. Discursively,
TCAMS has become a narrative space where, as O’Reilly points out,
there are possibilities for formulating more fluid, discrepant, and critical
discursive practices at the border of competing discourses on Cuban
national identity in the transnational context (Cuba 187).
4
TCAMS and the Music Industry
Abstract The chapter engages in case studies of TCAMS musicians, like

Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Yusa, and Descemer Bueno, to advance some reflec-
tions on the “location” of Cuban Fusion music in the Latino, world and
jazz music markets. This chapter proposes and opens up a discussion on
Cuban Fusion as a narrative and cultural category of representation, to
think about the implications of the transnationalization of Cuban music
since the 1990s. The chapter aims to highlight the need to update and
diversify the polarized binary framework of perspectives produced by
dominant narratives of Cubanidad within and outside the island, to
approach the study and reflections on Cuban music as a transnational
enterprise since the turn of the century.
Keywords Cuban Jazz • Afro-Cuban diaspora music • Cuban music

renaissance
In places like Miami, TACM musicians initially faced important chal-

lenges as migrants. Cuban music made in the island was almost subver-
sive or nonexistent until the 2000s, thanks to a cycle of Cuban and US
political bilateral regulations and backward traditions. According to
120 E. S. Bravo
Cantor Navas, a local ordinance enacted in 1996 prohibited any entity

that does business with Cuba or does business with a third party that does
business with Cuba, to be included in a state contract with Miami. That
“Cuban Affidavit” essentially prohibited performances by Cuban artists.
However, this regulation disagreed with US policy, which did allow con-
certs by Cuban musicians at the time within its cultural exchange pro-
gram. According to Cantor Navas, it was not only until the 2000 that the
ordinance ended, when a federal judge declared that it was a violation of
the first amendment of the United States, which guarantees freedom of
expression.1
For Levin, during the time of that ordinance Miami was consumed by
political debate over freedom of speech, political repression, and cultural
exchange when dealing with Cuban musical matters. In a text about the
history of Miami Light Project at the nonprofit’s website, Levin indicates
how Miami Light Project was for a time prevented from presenting
Cuban musicians from the island by the Miami-Dade’s Cuba ordinance.
In Levin’s words, the Cuban ordinance specifically prevented any local
organization receiving county arts grants from working with Cuban art-
ists, or even anyone who had worked with someone from Cuba. To revert
this Cuban ordinance cultural promoters like Boone had to join other
organizations and cultural promoters, including Van Van promoter
Debbie Ohanian and Gable Stage leader Joe Adler, as the lead plaintiff in
an ACLU lawsuit against it.
When they migrate, most TCAMS musicians didn’t leave any music
market behind already established, as socialist Cuba and its musicians
were not part of any music market after the revolution, due to the inef-
ficient and controlling socialist cultural establishment and the historical
context of bilateral relationships between Cuba and the US.
TCAMS musicians have been temporarily embraced by world music,
jazz, and/or Latino music labels. When it originated in the 1980s, world
music was mostly devoted to catering to non-Western music—such as
folk and the so-called ethnic music, which basically talks about the music
of most of the world’s population, which until then hadn’t been much
explored by mainstream music markets. World music was presented to
1
See Cantor Navas “It’s not my fault.”
4 TCAMS and the Music Industry 121
Fig. 4.1 Glenda del E singing and performing piano. Glenda performing at Mar-
i-Jazz Festival. Valencia, Spain. 2022. Photo by Lili del Sol. Courtesy of Glenda del
E’s personal archives
the Western world under a single denomination, in many cases through

producers acting as mediators that “adapted” music from Africa, Asia,
and Latin America to “the Western ear.” In the current Internet-based
global music market, where there is increasing immediate access to music
from all over the world through social networks and music streaming
websites, world music has become a more encompassing and diluted cat-
egory. For example, Buena Vista Social Club became a global success at
the end of the 1990s, not through the Latino but through the world
music industry. BVSC rekindled an interest in the US and worldwide in
traditional Cuban music and led to the impression that Cuban music
made after 1959 lacked relevance.
In that context, some TCAMS musicians initially attracted the atten-
tion of labels oriented to the world music circuit in the 1990s. However,
most of them have created their own labels and self-produced their music,
especially in Miami. In this changing context, self-production and
122 E. S. Bravo
promotion became the norm. TCAMS musicians basically distribute

their music through social networks and music streaming websites like
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Rhapsody, ReverbNation, Spotify,
SoundCloud, and iTunes. In Cuba, people get access to their recordings
through informal markets and person-to-person exchanges.
The informational gap on music made in the island after 1959 until
the explosion of reggaetón has led to an insufficient labeling and scholarly
perspectives about the music industry that does not reflect the evolution
of Cuban music over the last 60 years. That has also contributed to a
stereotyped representation of sounds and narratives that until recently
projected lo cubano in the Latin music market dating back to more than
50 years ago. Reggaetón’s popularity as a key commercial genre in the last
decades has revived the Latino music industry, changing “the rules of the
game” for Cuban music production within and outside the island. With
some exceptions, musicians from TCAMS in Miami and other cities in
this alternative music circuit do not replicate what are thought to be “suc-
cessful” patterns of Cuban music outside the island, like the Buena Vista
Social Club sound or reggaetón, to gain access to the Latin and main-
stream music markets. Instead, they have progressively established their
own local music scenes in places like Miami, Madrid, and New York.
They have also connected spontaneously among themselves traveling and
throughout the Internet, and many are succeeding across the globe. In
the music market, TCAMS musicians gravitate towards the Alternative
Latino, Afro-Cuban Jazz, Jazz, Latin Jazz, Tropical & Latino Music
Scenes. They are progressively opening up their own spaces for them, and
for the music legacy of the African diaspora from which they are, reflected
in the progressive increased recognition of some of these musicians in
conventional music circuits like the Grammys and Latin Grammys.2
Musicians like Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Yusa, Leslie Cartaya, and Descemer
Bueno illustrate different paths or trajectories adopted by many other
2
Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Horacio “El Negro” Hernández, Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany Terry, Elio
Villafranca, Omar Sosa, Pedrito Martinez, Alfredo Rodriguez, Manuel Varela, Lulo Vázques, Elain
Morales, Leslie Cartaya, Palo!, Son Lokos, Lena Burke, Telmarys, Descemer Bueno, Alain Pérez,
Tiempo Libre, Yusa, Glenda del E., Daniela Padrón, Roman Filiú, Ivan Melón Lewis, Cimafunk,
and Alex Cuba are among the growing number of musicians from TCAMS that have either been
nominated and awarded with the Grammys, Latin Grammys, and other awards.
TCAMs musicians in the music industry. They represent only fourth

among the multiple ways among TCAMS musician, with their unique
former socialist, Afro-Caribbean, classical, and migrant backgrounds and
diverse realities across the globe: Global Cuban creatives.
Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Global Cuban Jazz

Gonzalo Rubalcaba is perhaps among the most influential and inspira-
tional for TCAMS academically trained musicians. His career has signifi-
cantly contributed to the development of jazz in all forms in an intelligent
dialogue with Cuban music. He is a manifestation of what Cuban jazz
has become. He attributes great importance to a constant perfection of
his musicianship. Throughout the years, Rubalcaba portrays an indefati-
gable search for his own identity as a musician beyond generic frontiers
and market trends. Rubalcaba’s origins are from a family of musicians,
where he was exposed to all forms of traditional Cuban music, and he
also consistently listened to jazz icons. The sounds of the Cuban streets
where he was born and raised, and where Afro-Cuban music traditions
emerged and developed, made a strong mark on him, which later trans-
muted into his music in a unique and sophisticated manner. Rubalcaba
was also formed at the system of art schools in Cuba, where he graduated
as pianist, percussionist, and composer. After meeting and collaborating
with jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie in the 1980s in Havana, and later with
Charlie Haden, his music career propelled internationally.
In Florida, Rubalcaba’s first presentation in the 1990s at the Gusman
Theater in Miami was sabotaged by Cuban exile extremists, as part of the
cultural war against Cuban music and musicians from the island that
prevailed for a while. After a successful international career throughout
the years, and throughout the progressive normalization of Cuban music
affairs in Miami, he has been more visible in the local music scene.
Rubalcaba has a vast discography of more than twenty albums,3 which
includes several collaborations with world jazz icons and musicians from
all over, including several from TCAMS. Rubalcaba’s music language is
3
See Rubalcaba, Gonzalo. “Discography.”
124 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 4.2 Gonzalo Rubalcaba on piano and keyboards. Volcán in concert—Horacio

“El Negro” Hernández, José Armando Gola & Giovanni Hidalgo. Global Cuba Fest.
Miami Dade County Auditorium. Miami, FL. 2015. Photo Courtesy of Ever Chávez,
FUNDarte
formed by a strong cultural identity, heavily informed by the legacy of the

African diaspora in the Caribbean and more specifically Cuba. At the
same time, it is universal, portraying a constant need to interact with
other cultures. His music is unprejudiced, as it finds no boundaries across
music genres. His Cuban jazz is virtuoso, rhythmic, full of chants, all
types of referents, and highly sophisticated, in an ongoing dialogue
between jazz, classical, Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, and other music of the
world.4 Rubalcaba has established himself since the 1990s in the Jazz and
Latin Jazz circuit across the world and in the US. He has been nominated
and has won more Grammys and Latin Grammys awards than any other
TCAMS musicians by far, in the categories of Jazz & Latin Jazz. Lately,
he has alternated that world exposure with more local presentations, col-
laborating with other Cuban Americans like John Secada, and with Aymé
4
See Silot Bravo “Gonzalo Rubalcaba.”
Nuviola, known as “La Sonera del Mundo,” from which they received a
Latin Grammy under the Traditional Tropical music category.
usa: World Cuban Fusion

Y
from the Twentieth Century
Yusa is one of the key female voices-musicians within TCAMS with a
more global career. She studied classical music in “Amadeo Roldán,”
another part of the arts school system in Cuba, becoming a solid and
talented multi-instrumentalist of tres, guitar, piano, and bass. In the
1990s Havana, she became a regular in urban venues and jazz clubs in
Havana, as soloist, or as part of a song group “Sonera Son,” an all-female
jazz quintet “Quasi Jazz,” and later on as a singer songwriter with
Domingo Candelario, a troubadour duet. She is also a singer, composer,
and arranger who has published five albums so far, recorded between
Europe, Havana, Japan, Brazil, and Argentina. At the end of the 1990s,
she recorded her first solo album Yusa (2002) with Tumi Music, a UK
world music label, starting her international career. This album was a
collaborative project where she joined forces with other TCAMS musi-
cians and producers like Pavel Urquiza and Robertico Carcassés. Since
2001, she is one of the founder members of Interactivo, the most impor-
tant music collective for alternative music and Cuban Fusion in the
island led by Carcassés, where she progressively gained a large fan base
and became one of the main music leaders of her generation and subse-
quent musicians.
Yusa has been awarded for her music productions in the island with at
least three Cubadisco awards. In 2005, the album Lenine in Cité received
two Latin Grammys, for Best Brazilian contemporary music and Best
Brazilian song, after the Brazilian musician Lenine invited her to record
this album as a trio, live at Cité de la Musique, Paris. She also received
nominations as “Best alternative guitarist” by Bath International Award,
from the UK. Yusa has been among the top ten in the European World
Music Chart and was nominated in 2002 by WOMEX in the World
Music Awards BBC Radio 3 in two categories: best album and best
126 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 4.3 Yusa in concert, with Manuel Orza, Ivette Falcón, Horacio “El
Negro”Hernández, Tony Pérez, and Jennifer Hernández. Global Cuba Fest. Miami
Dade County Auditorium. Miami, FL. 2020. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza’s per-
sonal archives
beginner American artist. Since 2005, she made yearly presentations in

Japan for a while under the labels Blue Note, Yamaha Music & Visuals,
and Omagatoki, and she toured Europe with “Latin Voices” from London
BBC, together with world music icons Lila Downs and Susana Baca.
With Tumi Music she published in 2004 a DVD of jazz music, Live at
Ronnie Scott (2004) and three other albums: Yusa (2002), Breathe (2005);
and Haiku (2008), with Brazilian producer Ale Siqueira. Breathe was
another collaborative project where TCAMS musicians participated, like
producer Descemer Bueno, and singer-songwriters Kelvis Ochoa and
Haydée Milanés, together with Lenine. She started traveling to Argentina
in 2008, after creating her own label Yusa Records, where she resided
until 2016. In Argentina, she encountered a powerful and growing loving
audience who gave her a great reception and made her rapidly feel at
home. Her Argentinian path resulted in two albums, Vivo (2010), after a
series of concerts at the renowned jazz venue Cafe Vinilo, in Buenos
Aires; and Libro de Cabecera en tardes de café (2012). In Argentina, she

also participated in several music projects, which are documented in great
audiovisuals. Since 2016 Yusa moved to the US, rapidly becoming a key
figure as a soloist performer and producer among TCAMS in Miami, col-
laborating with Cuban and non-Cuban musicians like Aymée Nuviola,
Mr. Haka, Boris Larramendi, Hilario Bell, Manuel Orza, Nu Deco
Ensemble, and Pavel Urquiza, among many others. Then she started
touring the US with different music formats, until she recently estab-
lished in New Orleans. From there she has toured with the emblematic
jazz band Preservation Hall, performing in local jazz venues and partici-
pating in several jazz festivals.5
Yusa is one of the most important female and versatile voices and a sort
of an ambassador of Cuban Fusion music throughout the world since the
1990s. She shares her passion for production, composition, and singing
with a sophisticated and rampant approach to performing the bass. On
stage, she unfolds virtuosic skills playing any instrument, and a conta-
gious and powerful naturality and humbleness when singing. Initially, it
is easy to distinguish in her music the influence of traditional Cuban
trova, filing, nueva, and novissíma trova. But that’s only her starting point.
Beyond being an important heiress of all those music movements, Yusa is
one of the main protagonists of the seamless fusion and experimentation
experienced by Cuban music with all types of music genres—like jazz,
funk, pop, Argentinian rock, and Brazilian music—in particular in the
last three decades. From son, jazz, trova, world music, fusion, and jazz,
her music holds a personal vision that transcends conventional ways to
understand music genres and geographical conventions in the global
soundscape. She is among the female pioneer voices of this generation of
global Cuban musicians of the twenty-first century.
5
See Silot Bravo “Hay que saltar”.
128 E. S. Bravo
escemer Bueno: Alternative Afro-Cuban

D
and Afro-Latino Music
Descemer Bueno is perhaps one of the most interesting exceptions to the
trend of distance from the Latin and mainstream music market followed
by some TCAMS musicians. Bueno was a pioneer in adopting a transna-
tional mode of life and music making among this network. Skillfully
navigating all sorts of political, migratory, and bureaucratic obstacles,
Bueno managed to live, work, and tour the world first from Havana, then
Spain, New York, and Miami. Together with Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Alain
Pérez, Ivan “Melón” Lewis, Pedrito Martínez, Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany
Terry, Pavel Urquiza, Gema Corredera, Robertico Carcassés, Descemer
Bueno, and Yusa are among the initial pioneers and main music produc-
ers of TCAMS music legacy across time and geographies, registered in
Fig. 4.4 Descemer Bueno & Magilée Alvarez in the set of the video “Mueve”.
Miami, FL. 2005. Photo Courtesy of Ernesto Fundora’s personal archives
several recordings over the last twenty years. To a large extent they helped
craft, promote, and influence the music language of several singer-
songwriters and musicians in this network.6
Trained in classical music, Descemer’s inclination towards jazz, fusion,
and songwriting took shape first as a bass player, vocal, arranger, and
composer in Estado de Animo and Columna B bands in 1990s Havana.
Once in the US, Bueno’s transcultural fusion of Cuban (traditional and
more contemporary) music registers in a flawless and appealing dialogue
with Afro, Caribbean, jazz, hip-hop, and funk styles, materialized in the
successful debut album President Alien (2003) by New York–based band
Yerbabuena, and in his own project Sieterayo (2005), produced in Miami
by Universal Latino. During this period, Bueno’s career as a music pro-
ducer took off, taking charge of several award-winning music projects for
films and albums by his Cuban cohorts in cities across three continents,
including the island. One of his most remarkable and less distributed
productions of this period is his album Sé Feliz, recorded and released in
Havana in 2008 by Egrem. The album features an astounding compila-
tion of original boleros, all composed by Bueno. Instrumentally arranged
in the most minimalist and sublime tradition of the genre, the songs are
masterfully performed by legendary singer Fernando Alvarez.
From Bueno’s more alternative Miami incursions at the time, his brief
project Cubiche was musically one of his most interesting and less known.
In this collective, Descemer convened several of the best artists from
TCAMS living in Miami.7 Since its inception in 2008, Cubiche left an
6
Rubalcaba, Pérez, Melón Lewis, Prieto & Terry have collaborated on the production and perfor-
mance of many TCAMS musicians across the world. Their music language is a living influence for
many TCAMS musicians and others worldwide. Urquiza, Bueno, Carcassés, Gema, and Yusa have
produced and/or collaborated on TCAMS albums from musicians like Gema and Pavel, Habana
Abierta, Telmarys, Kelvis Ochoa, Haydée Milanés, Boris Larramendi, Gema Corredera, Interactivo,
Francis del Río, William Vivanco, Interactivo, among others.
7
Cubiche was an ad hoc collective led by Bueno who put together an eclectic group of Cuban
migrant musicians living in Miami since the 1990s, who at the same time were trying to launch
their independent careers. They were: Mr. Haka, an underground Cuban MC; versatile jazz pianist
Michelle Fragoso; percussionist, dancer, rumbero, and singer Philbert Armenteros, director of
Afro-Cuban group “Los Herederos”; Leslie Cartaya, Grammy awarded, soloist, composer, arranger,
and former Palo!’s leading singer; El Chino DreadLion, dancer, reggae singer, and former member
of Yerbabuena band; Elaín Morales, talented singer,-songwriter, bolerist and timba musician; Jorge
Almarales, a veteran rock guitarist, and Hilario Bell, a solid Latin jazz percussionist. Many other
musicians from TCAMS collaborated with Cubiche.
130 E. S. Bravo
important mark on the local underground music scene. They took root
in local venues like Hoy Como Ayer, Kimbaracubara, La Casa de Tula,
and Los Viernes Culturales de la Calle 8, and dissipated later on. As a
band concept, Cubiche was a laboratory of music creation and collabora-
tions, like Interactivo or Habana Abierta. They prioritized a format of
open collaborations where musicians from diverse backgrounds with
their own independent careers constantly interacted, giving each other
feedback that enriched their collective and individual musical endeavors.
This modus operandis generated further individual or group projects.
Although initially Cubiche’s project attracted local attention, that didn’t
translate into a record deal, and its members decided to continue with
their own independent careers. The result of this project was documented
in an EPK directed by Cuban filmmaker Ernesto Díaz,8 and on demo for
an album of nine songs still to be published. Cubiche’s music has been
characterized as the “New Miami’s stage funky sound.” It’s a continuation
of Descemer’s music language in Yerbabuena and Siete Rayo, enriched
with the contributions of each member: a heavily funky and urban fusion
of traveling Cuban music with flavors from Havana, New York, Puerto
Rico, Colombia, Jamaica, and Miami. Cubiche’s music represents a good
example of TCAMS sound legacy. Its music made in Miami by Cubans
with a global appeal, in dialogue with reggae, timba, cumbia, Hispanic
and Anglo rock, pop, and Brazilian rhythms and harmonies.7
As a producer and singer songwriter, Descemer Bueno was the first
TCAMS musician who established a significant mainstream presence in
the Latin and mainstream international pop music market with the global
success of his song “Bailando” in 2014, after Hispanic pop icon Enrique
Iglesias launched it featuring Bueno and island reggaetón duo Gente de
Zona. The hit rapidly situated Bueno in the Billboard charts and nomina-
tions, giving him substantial recognition as a national and international
icon first in the island, in social media channels like YouTube with around
1000 million views, as well as in international music venues either as an
opening act with his own band members from the island, as well as in
stage collaboration with Iglesias and many other Cuban, Latin, and
Hispanic artists. His commercial hits gained Bueno a large success in the
8
See Diaz, E (2008, March 31) and Silot Bravo “Cubiche.”
Latino music market, filling up large venues in Miami and Europe in col-
laboration with other TCAMS musicians and making unnumbered col-
laborations and productions with other Latin and Cuban musicians. In
2021, Bueno participated as coproducer and performer in the song Patria
y Vida, in collaboration with Yotuel Romero, Beatriz Luengo, Gente de
Zona, Luis Manuel Alcantara and Maykel Osorbo, El Funky.9 That
allowed Bueno to obtain another Latin Grammy, this time for song of the
year, and more international and social media exposure, as well as being
the subject of censorship by the island’s cultural authorities and media
apparatus.
L eslie Cartaya: Cuban Latin Fusion,

Miami Style
Leslie is among those female academically trained TCAMS musicians
whose music endeavors have evolved and gained momentum due to her
migration path. Since moving to Miami, until being nominated three
times to the Latin Grammys, Leslie was the lead singer of Palo! for a
decade, a renowned Afro-Cuban Funk fusion music local band put
together with mostly Cuban musicians by Steven Roitstein—former music
producer for Celia Cruz, Willy Chirino and Ricardo Montaner, educator,
arranger, and composer. Palo!’s Afro-Cuban Funk fusion was considered
by the New York Post “The Cuban Music for the New Generation,” and it
has been nominated for both the Grammys and the Latin Grammys.
Leslie composed all the eighteen songs of her first solo double album
No Pares (2013) and produced them in her own studio. In the first album,
traditional Cuban music sounds and salsa balada references are prevalent.
The second one is more electronic, leaning towards house and experi-
mental music. It showcases several remixes featuring special guests like
DJ Oscar G. and Lazaro Casanova; Afro-Cuban percussionist, priest,
singer, and dancer Philbert Armenteros; rapper Mr. Haka; popular Afro-
Cuban comedian, actor, musician, and TV presenter Alexis Valdés; bass
player and music producer Edgar Magdariaga; music producers Héctor
9
See Romero, Yotuel et al.
132 E. S. Bravo
Ortiz, Landy Mosqueda, Angel Arce; trombonist William Paredes; sax

player Rodolfo “Fofi”; bass player Armando Gola; pianist, music pro-
ducer, and composer Michelle Fragoso; Venezuelan American saxophon-
ist Ed Calle, drummer Reinier Guerra; violinist Yoel Pérez, and guitarist
Ahmed Barroso.
With No Pares, which Leslie considers as Cuban-American music, she
quickly reached among the ten first hits in ReverbNation Miami Latin
Chart, and soon after she was nominated as best new artist in the Latin
Grammys. The unique cultural diversity of Miami allows Leslie as many
of TCAMS musicians to be exposed to an array of Latin-American,
Latino, Caribbean, Afro-Cuban, and other multicultural influences and
soundscapes that made Miami a unique Caribbean city. Becoming part
of the Miami music scene granted Leslie the possibility to collaborate
with Cuban, Latino, and World Music artists that also call or used to call
the Floridian city and the US home, like Luis Enrique, Marisela Verena,
Larry Harlow, Ed Calle, Steve Roitstein, Jorge Luis Piloto, Elain, El
Chino Dreadlion, Pavel Núñez, Descemer Bueno, and former Cubiche,
Son Lokos and Landi Mosquera and Joaquin “El Kid” Diaz.10
At the Brown University Jazz and Pop Festival, Cartaya participated in
the recording of “Agua p’a los Santos” (2021), a song produced by Palo!,
featuring Afro-Cuban musicians Descemer Bueno, Roman Diaz, Pedrito
Martinez, Philbert Armenteros, and Raymer Olalde. A homage to Orula,
the venerated Orisha from the Yoruba pantheon, the song is an Afro-
Cuban Funk, mixed with jazz, salsa, and Yoruba chants, celebrating the
rich Afro-Cuban pantheon and traditions that make Cuban music and
culture so spiritual and special. Another key music collaborative project
from TCAMS musicians in Miami was the recording and video Leslie
Cartaya featuring Celia Cruz All Stars (2018).11 Celia Cruz All Stars is a
top salsa jazz music collective-orchestra, formed by mostly TCAMS
musicians, which celebrates the legacy of Celia Cruz in Cuban music and
across the world. For this project Leslie sang “Baila” a classic hit from the
legendary Queen of Salsa Celia Cruz, accompanying herself with the
Celia Cruz All Stars and Los Herederos, a local music and dance
10
See Silot Bravo “Leslie Cartaya.”
11
See Leslie Cartaya featuring Celia Cruz All Stars.
collective that preserve and modernize Afro-Cuban music traditions

inherited by the African Diaspora in Cuba, the US, and the Caribbean,
with a high level of musicianship and spirituality. The result of this proj-
ect was another example of Cuban Fusion made in Miami, a mixture of
Cuban rumba and guaracha, infused by salsa and all sorts of Afro-
American and Latino styles of music.
Leslie sang with Palo! band in Tempo Latino Festival in France, Europe
for an audience of 30,000 people, sharing stage with Alexander Abreu,
music director of internationally recognized Cuban band Habana de
Primera. She was an open act for Marc Anthony, regularly collaborates
with commercial Latino TV outlets, and keeps on collaborating in new
projects with other TCAMS musicians. Leslie was the music director of
an all-female band, “Sexta Clave,” a TCAMS music collective which was
for a while the sideband for the TV show “Don Francisco te invita” by
Telemundo, a popular media outlet among Latin-American and Latino
audiences.
The music trajectories of Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Descemer Bueno, Yusa,
and Leslie Cartaya discussed in this chapter are just some examples which
illustrate the range and diversity of musicians and music encompassed by
TCAMS in the music industry. Rubalcaba has conquered the jazz world.
Bueno became an icon in the Latino music industry. Yusa set foot in the
world music scene. Cartaya is marking her way in the Latino music mar-
ket. Cuban diasporic musicians since the 1990s are the protagonists of a
cultural renaissance across the world. They are making Cuban music a
global enterprise, expanding the symbolic frontiers of Cuban national
and cultural narratives. They are pushing up the limits of any music genre
they know or interact with, through constant collaborations and open-
ended fusions. The unprejudiced disposition of these Cuban musicians to
worship and experiment with jazz, timba, funk, rock, R&B, Brazilian,
hip-hop, Caribbean, and all types of music does not recognize aesthetic
or label frontiers. Their music is a transcultural pathway representing the
evolution of the African diaspora legacy in Cuba, the Caribbean, the US,
and Europe at the turn of the century. There’s an increasing number of
TCAMS musicians making their way into the music industry locally and
internationally at the turn of the century. Still, there’s a long way to go to
account for the impact of this creative explosion of Cuban musicianship
across the world.
5
Conclusions: Cuban Fusion Music Across
Borders
Abstract The Conclusions recount the main arguments presented

throughout the manuscript, like the transformative impact of the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989 on Cuban society, leading to a deconstruction of
revolutionary narratives and the emergence of alternative and transna-
tional imaginaries in Cuban music. The chapter delves into the
Transnational Cuban Alternative Music Scene (TCAMS), a network of
Cuban musicians globally dispersed since the 1990s. The author further
discusses the concept of Cuban Fusion as a fluid, trans-territorial music
language that defies traditional genre boundaries. It emphasizes how
TCAMS musicians, informed by diverse influences, create a post-
revolutionary and dystopian musical landscape that transcends national
politics. The chapter concludes by acknowledging the need to document
and study alternative voices in Cuban music beyond Cold War para-
digms, celebrating the richness and diversity of the Cuban creative
diaspora.
Keywords Transnational network of Cuban music production •

Transnationalization of Cuban culture • Cuban creative diaspora
136 E. S. Bravo
The fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe in 1989 marked a vital moment of
rupture for Cuban society. As a result, the deconstruction of the promises
of the revolutionary nation and the narratives of the “New Man” in the
arts gained momentum in the island. Alternative and transnational imag-
inaries emerged in the cultural production of Cuban music across the
world, because of a massive diasporic network created by Cuban singer-
songwriters and academically trained musicians. These musicians pro-
posed alternative, dystopian, and transnational approaches to imagine,
represent, and listen to Cubanness in a post-Soviet and global context,
transcending the two dominant historical national imaginaries: the offi-
cial discourse on the island and narratives of the traditional exiles.
Fig. 5.1 Telmary & Habana Sana in concert, Raíces Series, presented by John
Santos. Freight & Salvage. Berkeley, CA. 2022. Photo Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s
personal archives
5 Conclusions: Cuban Fusion Music Across Borders 137
In the music field, the 1990s’ massive wave of migration to the US,
Europe, and Latin America marked an important transnational moment
for Cuban music, with the most significant relocation of Cuban singer-
songwriters to cities like Madrid, New York, and Miami, like Gema
Corredera, Pavel Urquiza, Telmary, Yusa, Descemer Bueno, Habana
Abierta & Haydée Milanés; and mostly academically trained musicians
like Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany Terry, Tony Pérez, Alain
Pérez, Ivan “Melón” Lewis, Omar Sosa, Pedrito Martínez, Melvis Santa,
Ariacne Trujillo, Aymée Nuviola, Leslie Cartaya, Lena Burke, and Glenda
del Monte. Those and many others have formed what I call the
Transnational Cuban Alternative Music Scene (TCAMS), a network of
recordings, collaborations, and production of Cuban music across differ-
ent world cities like Miami, New York, and Madrid. Located in mainly
local and international non-mainstream music circuits, this transnational
network emerged to reap the advantages these musicians could enjoy as
migrants in a globalized context, such as access to greater mobility and to
technological developments (Thomas, “Cosmopolitan” 110), instant
socialization, and marketing opportunities provided by social networks.
TCAMS encompasses networks of Cuban music production across
borders, which merits to be studied independently: singers, singer-
songwriters, self-made and academically trained musicians. What they
have in common is that they all opened the aesthetic boundaries of Cuban
diasporic music production beyond the dramatic nostalgia for the home-
land or traditional commercial stereotypes of Cuban music that still pre-
vailed internationally. An eclectic and intentional fusion with world
sonorities is their main musical method of music creation and resulting
language, where the archive of Cuban traditional songs and popular
Cuban music is open to a contrapuntal dialogue with African diasporic
and world sonorities. This fusion doesn’t fit easily into traditionally rec-
ognized Cuban music genres in international mainstream markets.
The music of the duo Gema y Pavel, Habana Abierta, and Yusa are
examples of these claims. Their prolific careers as musicians and produc-
ers became an important reference for many Cuban musicians inside and
outside the island. Although informed by nueva and novísima trova, they
proposed a new type of Cuban song. They recreated the tradition of filing
boleros in a very creative counterpoint with Brazilian harmonies, Andean
138 E. S. Bravo
sounds, Afro-Cuban rhythms, jazz improvisations, and flamenco, result-

ing in sophisticated vocal and musical arrangements.
The music of nineties Cuban jazz musicians residing in New York,
Miami, and Europe like Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Dafnis Prieto, Yosvany
Terry, Pedrito Martínez, Ivan Melón Lewis, and Ramón Valle is another
example of the diverse aesthetic coordinates of innovation that TCAMS
has pushed forward. They are among the protagonists of a renaissance of
Cuban musicianship in the American and international jazz scene, poten-
tially more significant than when Afro-Cuban jazz emerged in New York
in the 1940s. They have established their individual careers and at the
same time are influencing their local and international jazz scenes on
their own terms. They are opening jazz as an infinite space of intertextual-
ity and dialogue with their background and knowledge of traditional,
Afro-Cuban, and Cuban popular music, together with music from all
over. They share with the singer-songwriters diasporic cohort of the nine-
ties an aesthetic interest in establishing intercultural dialogues and push-
ing forward generic boundaries with their music. They blur the lines
between jazz and Cuban music as cosmopolitan cultural endeavors.
Discursively, the lyrics of diasporic singers-songwriters from the nine-
ties like Gema y Pavel, Telmary, Yusa, Habana Abierta, Descemer Bueno,
and Mr. Haka clearly demarcated from the still prevalent traditional and
stereotypical Cuban Cold War binary narratives. They have extended
symbolic bridges of communication among Cubans from all over across
the diaspora with the power of their music and their lyrics. They assume
an apparent depoliticized, middle ground, or distant position in relation
to dominant and ideologically charged imaginaries about Cubanness
projected by the island’s official discourse and the traditional exiles. They
are less interested in dealing with traditional Cuban topics as the center
of their concerns, either because they were alienated by the excessive bur-
den of politics, they have personally experienced both within and outside
the island due to their Cuban origins, or because they seem more inter-
ested in exploring their current existential concerns regarding their
migrant experiences and the global condition.
However, when they deal with more social and political Cuban con-
cerns, they do so with a sharp, sometimes subtle and/or unprejudiced
attitude as occurs, for example, in Habana Abierta’s song, “Asere que
Volá” from the album Boomerang (2003). The song chronicles the signifi-
cant moral deterioration experienced by Cuban society resulting from the
1990s crisis and reflects on the expansion of the marginal as a material
and existential condition for many Cubans after the crisis. It reflects upon
the lack of alternatives and on the evasiveness adopted by young people
to deal with the critical shifting situation, which include an increasing
recourse to drugs, prostitution, and the massive migration of friends and
dispersion of Cuban families.
As a result of the 1990s crisis, Cuban cultural production in the music
field since then is fragmentary and dispersed. Cuban music has become a
transnational cultural product, a phenomenon that has progressively
expanded to other cultural fields, and which merits further study. A sig-
nificant number of musicians from that period relocated and are produc-
ing music they regard as Cuban across the world, beyond the traditional
“territorial” location of lo cubano. Some others have come back to reside
Fig. 5.2 Cimafunk in concert. Global Cuba Fest. North Beach Band Shell. Miami
Beach, FL. 2019. Photo by Elvis Suarez, Glassworks Multimedia. Courtesy of Ever
Chavez, FUNDarte
140 E. S. Bravo
in the island, they toured internationally, and are constantly collaborat-

ing and producing across the Internet.
TCAMS is a space of transnational cultural production of Cuban
music across international borders, resulting from increased access to
technology, mobility, and communication after the end of the Cold War
and the emergence of the process of globalization. It’s a transnational
network of continual interactions, collaborations, and identity negotia-
tions among Cuban singers, singer-songwriters and academically trained
Cuban musicians living outside the island since the 1990s crisis. TCAMS
is inspired by Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, which allows
one to imagine the power of narratives of national identities to create
communities of belonging, this time across borders. It’s also informed by
and expands on Borges Triana’s Cuban Alternative Music, putting an
emphasis on the transnational context in which Cuban Alternative Music
is being created, and highlighting the collaborations among singers,
singer-songwriters, and academically trained musicians. TCAMS has
been the result of many observations and firsthand interactions in con-
certs and recording sessions, life and professional experiences, conversa-
tions with many of these artists throughout the years, mainly in Cuba,
New York, Madrid, and Miami.
The narratives of the diasporic alternative music network of singer-
songwriters embody the deconstruction of the “New Man” into a disen-
chanted, apolitical, and pragmatic subject. This post-Soviet subject
experienced firsthand and became the protagonist of the collapse of the
socialist utopia in the island and practice in times of crisis and became
increasingly disconnected from the official discourse. The new circum-
stances forced this subject to adopt a culture of survival or to reinvent
themselves as migrants. As a result, in these musician narratives there’s a
post-revolutionary and dystopian posture that mitigates the centrality of
the nation. In their lyrics, diasporic singers-songwriters of the nineties
selectively engaged with Cuban topics and are more open to explore other
issues beyond national politics. Instead, they uphold a bohemian posture
as a subtly irreverent space of resistance to the predicaments that arise
from dominant narratives of Cubanness within and outside the island, or
the mainstream music markets.
Like never before, there’s a massive wave of Cuban artists born and
raised during the revolution who are living and producing Cuban culture
throughout the world. Despite that dispersion, the cultural production
by 1990s and subsequent creators shares certain common generational
characteristics in terms of background, education, and life experiences
that translate into what I call Cuban Fusion, a Cuban global music lan-
guage, with a strong foundation in the African diaspora trajectories in
Cuba, the Caribbean, Latin America, the US, and Europe, produced
across world geographies. The distinct process of transnationalization of
Cuban society and culture that has been taking place since the 1990 crisis
demands opening up traditional forms of inquiry in Cuban studies
within and outside the island.
Many other Cuban diasporic musicians who migrated since the 1990s
to the world and who perfectly fit an exam through the lens of TCAMS
are beyond the scope of time devoted to the writing of this manuscript.
This manuscript is an invitation to other Cuban, Latinx, Afro Diasporic,
world music and art lovers, scholars, students, artists, intellectuals, teach-
ers, archivists, artivists, librarians, curators, journalists, and researchers to
open their framework of inquiry when thinking, documenting, and writ-
ing about Cuban music and narratives of identity beyond Cold War para-
digms. It’s about time that the richness and diversity of voices across the
Cuban and Afro-Cuban creative diaspora across geographies be examined
in detail, documented, studied, and further celebrated.
The process of increased transnationalization of Cuban culture since
the 1990s suggests the need to document and open new inquiries on
alternative voices, actors, and narratives of cubanidad, beyond the tradi-
tional postcolonial contexts of knowledge, art, and cultural production.
Other actors like Afrodescendents, dissidents, street and independent art-
ists and journalists, diasporic, female, nonbinary, and LGBTQ voices
have become the main agents of cultural change in Cuban issues since the
1990s within and outside the island, and deserve more scholarly, institu-
tional, journalistic, and commercial attention.
Although for several decades Cuban migrant musicians were excluded
from reaching their natural audience by the island’s political, institu-
tional, and cultural establishments, their diasporic careers and the shift-
ing bilateral and national political contexts are giving TCAMS musicians
142 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 5.3 Krudas Cubensi, Afro-Cuban Queer Hip-Hop. Alameda, Oakland, C.A. 2023.
Photo by Greg Landau. Courtesy of Las Kruda’s personal archives
increasing recognition among island audiences and cultural institutions

like Cubadisco (music awards), Los Premios Luca (video awards), and
others. Many have been nominated and/or awarded by the Grammys,
Latin Grammys, and other award systems for their music productions
made outside Cuba. They are among the first post-revolutionary Cuban
diasporic musicians who are massively opening spaces for themselves on
Cuban cultural accounts within and/or beyond the official realm.
Different terms have been progressively adopted to describe the music
made by TCAM throughout different cities: conga-funk, bolero-feeling,
timba-rock, timba-funk, bolero-hop, rockasón, cha-cha-chá-blues, pro-
gressive feeling, Cuban alternative music, contemporary Cuban music,
world Cuban music, Miami bohéme, Cuban jazz, global Cuban music,
timba jazz. These terms have been collectively constructed throughout
the years by these musicians in some of their lyrics, in interaction with
their audiences in live presentations, in interviews and conversations, in
online videos that circulate over the Internet either posted by fans or for
promotional purposes, in social media comments and debates, and in

documentaries. Presenters and producers, journalists and commentators
have also been part of this semiotic construction about the music made
by TCAMS through their marketing materials.
What I think all these different labels try to grasp is the open-ended
reach combinations and dialogues that shape the music made in
TCAMS. I propose Cuban Fusion as another open-ended and temporary
term to think and talk about music made across this transnational net-
work of music production and identity negotiations, as a transcultural
Cuban music product that is located globally and that encompasses
Cuban singer-songwriters and academically trained musicians that
migrated since the 1990s to the world. Cuban Fusion is spatially and
geographically crafted throughout different world cities where musicians
from TCAMS reside and interact. Cuban Fusion is post-revolutionary
Cuban music made across geographies, which portrays a combination of
different types of music genres and combinations: jazz, Cuban jazz, jazz
with timba, trova, Brazilian, with references to R&B, pop, rock, rock in
Spanish, reggae, hip-hop, and sometimes reggaetón, that transcends
generic borders. In the different cities studied, singer-songwriters from
TCAMS for the most part haven’t crossed over to mainstream markets
but are located in more bohemian and alternative local music scenes.
They distributed their music throughout local circuits that in general
support live music “far from exclusionary velvet ropes” according to
Andrew Yeomanson, Spam All Stars’ director.1 Cuban Fusion music made
by singer-songwriters is for the most part underground or alternative and
relies on improvisation and collaboration. It’s sustained by a fluid conver-
sation among TCAMS musicians across the globe in recordings, online
and on stage. Jazzists from TCAMS and academically trained musicians
have reached out further and are more recognized in the international
music market than singer-songwriters. At the same time, a high level of
musicianship is a common feature of this network throughout all the dif-
ferent urban centers where TCAMS has been shaped.
Cuban Fusion is an evolution of eclectic references from all kinds of
musical referents that shaped these generation of musicians, from Beny
1
See Miami Boheme.
144 E. S. Bravo
More, Perez Prado, Celia Cruz, La Lupe, Elena Burque, Irakere, Chucho
Valdes, Los Van Van, The Beatles, Pablo Milanés & Silvio Rodríguez, Fito
Páez, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Djavan, Gal Costa, Milton
Nascimento, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Miles David, Paco de Lucía,
Camarón, Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Paquito de Rivera, Albita
Rodríguez, Gloria Stefan, and Willy Chirino. Cuban Fusion is also
informed by the generational and individual subjectivities, education,
references, frustrations, illusions, and aesthetics of this significant group
of post-revolutionary diasporic singers, singer-songwriters, and academi-
cally trained musicians who suddenly and massively became migrants
and dispersed throughout the world. Cuban Fusion music is a cultural
product resulting from a context of crisis and profound societal change.
Throughout the years it has evolved into trans-territorial cultural prod-
ucts made by traveling subjects that have surpassed geographic, ideologi-
cal, and political barriers, establishing as an organic and fluid network of
music creativity, collaboration, and interaction.
Fig. 5.4 Brenda Navarrete & Yelsi Heredia performing on stage with El Gola.
Global Cuba Fest. Miami, FL. 2020. Photo by Generación Asere. Courtesy of Ever
Chavez, FUNDarte
In the case of singers-songwriters, I see Cuban Fusion as a natural evo-

lution from previous song movements like nueva and novíssima trova,
influenced by the new conditions of massive migration and firsthand
encounter with the outside world since the 1990s. Since then, TCAMS
singer-songwriters have opened the style of songs made by Cuban nueva
and novíssima trova, to an ongoing dialogue with all types of local music
influences and word sonorities, including Hispanic rock, funk, hip hop,
timba, jazz, and Brazilian music. TCAMS academically trained and self-
made musicians were subject to a similar process of opening up their
references, in this case classical, jazz, and from the streets, which formed
them in the island, to their new transnational lives as migrants since the
1990s. Therefore, jazz became their main music language, in an ongoing
exploration with their Cuban cultural referents that include Afro-Cuban
sacred music and traditional genres like cha cha cha, son, guaracha, and
mambo, together with classical referents they studied well. Cuban Fusion
for jazz musicians is also strongly informed with the explosion of timba
since the 1990s, making it their main music language in some cases.
Cuban jazzists from TCAMS are also in an ongoing dialogue with other
world music genres from the African diaspora who have a strong presence
in Cuban culture, like hip-hop, R&B, and in particular funk, which is a
strong marker in their music. It’s Cuban music with a strong jazz and pop
base, in a permanent dialogue with an array of other world music genres.
Therefore, Cuban Fusion is a very porous music space across world geog-
raphies, which is in constant evolution since the 1990s. It manifests in
different music genres, as could be appreciated in the playlist included at
the end of this manuscript, and it’s opening “the margins” of Cuban and
other music genres as we know them by the ongoing fusion and dialogue
with other cultural referents it encompasses. Cuban Fusion is global
music from the twenty-first century, where the distinctions of national
imaginaries and music genres are constantly challenged.
Cuban Fusion from TCAMS has bridged spaces of communication
and understanding among different generations of Cubans and cultural
communities. At the same time, it’s enriching and diversifying the urban
cultural soundscapes of the different cities it encompasses across the
world. Cuban Fusion music is a significant cultural narrative, represent-
ing the transnational and global character adopted by Cuban music and
146 E. S. Bravo
Fig. 5.5 La Dame Blanche. The New Parish. Downton Oakland, C.A. 2023. Photo
Courtesy of Eva Silot Bravo’s personal archives
culture at the turn of the century that is yet to be fully acknowledged

both inside and outside the island.
Other Cuban musicians living in the island, or between the island and
other geographies, like singers, singer-songwriters, composers, multi-
instrumentalists, and producers Brenda Navarrete, Equis Alfonso, Sexto
Sentido, Aldo López Gavilán, Harold Lopez Nusa, Alexander Abreu,
from Havana de Primera, and Robertico Carcassés from Interactivo, are
among the protagonists of a similar phenomenon of transnationalization

of Cuban music in the evolution of their music language and identity.
They are examples of other ways by which Cuban musicians and music
are becoming transnational in the twenty-first century, in this case from
the island, by being in regular connection with the outside world of
TCAMS friends, travels, and collaborations. Recently, there has been an
international wave of a new generation of talented and successful trans-
national Cuban musicians across the world that are highly influenced and
in collaboration with TCAMS musicians, like Daymé Arocena, Melvis
Santa, Cimafunk, Haydée Milanés, Yilian Cañizares, Ibeyi, Alfredito
Rodríguez, and La Dame Blanche.
The song “Patria y Vida” (2021) was a turning point for Cuban society
as a whole and therefore for TCAMS musicians. Produced by a collective
of mostly Afro-Cuban musicians from within and outside the island, it
Fig. 5.6 Ibeyi live at North Band Shell. North Beach Band Shell. North Miami
Beach, FL. 2016. Photo Courtesy of Diana Liza’s personal archives
148 E. S. Bravo
rapidly became a national anthem for the civic uprising of Cubans on

July 11, 2021, in the island, and with the support of their diasporic
cohorts from all over. The song together with hashtags #patriayvida
#july11 #soscuba #cubaesdetodos became virtual and real spaces of
encounter for Cubans in support of the street protests and civic unrest in
the island. The epic character of the song, made by some national music
icons like Yotuel Romero, Descemer Bueno and Gente de Zona, in col-
laboration with their friends in diaspora, and hip-hop artists and artivists
in the island, like Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and Maikel Osorbo
Castillo Perez, made it viral. With “Patria y Vida,” Cubans found a space
of communion and hope during the pandemic crisis of 2021. The song
proposes more encompassing and open-minded coordinates to imagine
freedom and independence for Cuba, as a common transnational space
across geographies, cultures, and generations. At the moment of writing
this book, both participants from the island, artivists Luis Manuel Otero
Alcantara and Maykel Castillo Perez, are still in Cuban jails for their open
dissent with the Cuban government oppression towards free art and
expression. The Latino music industry endorsed the song, by awarding it
with a Latin Grammy in the category best song of the year in 2021.
References
Acosta, Leonardo. 2003. Cubano Be Cubano Bop. One Hundred Years of Jazz in
Cuba. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institute. Print.
Anderson, Benedict. 1994. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Print.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
London: University of Minnesota Press. Print.
Bauman, Zigmunt. 2005. Etica postmoderna. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Print.
Barnet, Miguel.
Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. 2007. Music and Nation. In Cuba. Idea of a Nation
Displaced, SUNY Series in Latin-American and Iberian Thought & Culture,
ed. Andrea O’Reilly. New York: State University of New York Press. Print.
Bhabha, Hommy. 1990a. The Third Space. Interview of J. Rutherford with
Hommy Bhabha. In Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed.
J. Rutherford, 207–221. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Print.
———. 1990b. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge. Print.
———. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Print.
Boomerang. 2005. Dir. Carlos Carca. Calle 54 Records. Film.
Bordieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Print.
E. S. Bravo, Cuban Fusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53692-2
150 References
Borges Triana, Joaquín. 2007. Concierto Cubano. La vida es un divino guión.

Barcelona: Linkgua. Print.
———. 2009. La luz, bróder, la luz: canción cubana contemporánea. La Habana:
Ediciones La Memoria, Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau. Print.
———. 2012. Músicos de Cuba y del mundo. Nadie se va del todo. Cuba:
Ediciones Concierto Cubano. Print.
Brown, Vanito. 2006. La vida es un divino guión. Boomerang. CD.
———. 2009. Personal Interview. Madrid.
Bueno, Descemer, Enrique Iglesias, and Gente de Zona. 2003. Personal
Interviews. New York. Miami, 2009.
———. 2005. Sieterayo. Universal Latino Music. CD.
———. 2008. Sé Feliz. Egrem. CD.
———. 2014. Bailando. Sex and Love. Enrique Iglesias. Universal Republic
Records. CD.
Burkhalter, Thomas. 2013. Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational
Platforms in Beirut. New York: Routledge. Print.
Cámara, Madeline, and Damian J. Fernandez, eds. 2000. Cuba, the Elusive
Nation: Interpretations of National Identity. Gainsville: University Press of
Florida. Print.
Cantor-Nava, Judy. 1999, October 7. Van-Van Plays On. Miami New Times.
Web. 10 Dec 2007.
———. 2014, December 17. What the U.S.-Cuba Breakthrough Could Mean
for Music. Billboard. Web. 3 Feb 2015.
———. 2019, October 7. It’s Not My Fault. The Anguish and Triumphs of
Cuban Music in Miami in the 1990s. OnCuba. Web. 1 Oct. 2022.
Carpentier, Alejo. 2001. Music in Cuba. Minneapolis and London: University of
Minessota Press. Print.
Castro, Fidel. 1961. Palabras a los Intelectuales. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de
Cultura. Print.
Castro, Max. 2000. The Trouble with Collusion. In Cuba, the Elusive Nation:
Interpretations of National Identity, ed. Maideline Cámara and Damian
J. Fernandez, 292–310. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Print.
Castro, Athanai. 2009. Personal Interview, Madrid.
———. 2012. Trabajar. Creando Milicia. Athanai Music. CD.
Cepeda, Maria Elena. 2003. Mucho Loco for Ricky Martin: Or The Politics of
Chronology, Crossover, and Language Within the Latin(o) Boom. In Global
Pop. Local Language, ed. Harris M. Berger and Michael Thomas Carroll,
113–130. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Print.
References 151
Chaguaceda, Armando, and Coco Fusco. 2021, August 7. Cubans Want Much
More Than an End to the Cuban Embargo. New York Times. Web. 21
August 2021.
Clifford, James. 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology. 9 (3): 302–338. Print.
Cofiño, Manuel. 1971. La última mujer y el próximo combate. La Habana: Casa
de las Américas. Print.
Corredera, Gema. Personal Interviews. Madrid 2009; Miami 2013.
Criterios. La política cultural del período revolucionario: memoria y reflexión.
Criterios. (enero 2007–enero 2009). Web.
Cruz, Manuel, et al. 2022, October 17. 11 De Julio Archivos. El Estornudo.
Web. 24 Oct. 2022.
Cuban Research Institute. Cuba-U.S. Transition Polls. Miami, Florida
International University: 2008–2014. Web. 3 July 2008.
“Cubiche en Miami. Entrevista a Descemer Bueno y Mr. Haka en A Mano
Limpia del canal local 41, América TV.” Youtube video, 4:56, posted by
“Teatromag.” 12 June 2008. Web. 20 July 2010.
Cubiche EPK. 2008. Dir. Ernesto García. Miami. Film.
David Torrens. 2001. Ni de aquí ni de allá. Ni de Aquí Ni de Allá. EMI Latin. CD.
De la Nuez, Iván. 1998. La balsa perpetua. Soledad y conexiones de la cultura
cubana. Barcelona: Casiopea. Print.
Del Risco, Enrique. 2022. Nuestra Hambre en la Habana. Memorias del Período
Especial en la Cuba de los 90. Barcelona: Plataforma Editorial.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone
Press. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press. Print.
Diaz, Ernesto. 2008, March 31. Cubiche. YouTube. October 17, 2022.
Díaz-Ayala, Cristóbal. 1999. Cuando salí de la Habana.1898–1997: cien años de
música cubana por el mundo. Puerto Rico: Fundación Musicalia. Print.
Duany, Jorge. 1997, October 15. From the Cuban Ajiaco to the Cuban-
American Hyphen: Changing Discourses of National Identity on the Island
and in the Diaspora. Cuban Studies Association Occasional Papers. Paper 16.
2.8. 1–31. Print.
———. 2000. Reconstructing Cubanness: Changing Discourses of National
Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora During the Twentieth Century. In
Cuba, the Elusive Nation. Interpretations of National Identity, ed. Damián
J. Fernández and Madeline Cámara. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida. Print.
152 References
El Caso Padilla. 2022. Dir. Pavel Giroud, Ventú Productions.

Enrique Iglesias – Bailando (Español) Ft. Descemer Bueno, Gente De Zona. 2014,
April 11. Dir. Alejandro Perez. Perf. Descemer Bueno, Enrique Iglesias &
Gente De Zona. EnriqueIglesiasVevo. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
Ewy, Rachel A. 2010, May. Resolver. Resolver. University of Miami. Web. 16
April 2014.
Feldman, Stephen M. 2000. American Legal Though: From Premodernism to
Postmodernism. An Intellectual Voyage. New York: Oxford University
Press. Print.
Fernandez, Damian J., ed. 2005. Cuba Transnational. Gainsville: University
Press of Florida. Print.
Ferrer, Ada. 2011. Cuba Insurgente: Raza, nación y revolución. Havana: Editorial
de Ciencias Sociales. Print.
———. 2022. Cuba: An American History. New York: Scribner. Print.
Fornet, Ambrosio. 2007, January 30. El quinquenio gris, revisitando el término.
Criterios. 1–22. Web. 3 March 2011.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Print.
Fowler, Julio. 2006. Huyendo. Buscando mi lugar. Peermusic. CD.
———. 2007, November 4. Boomerang: Entre mitos y flautas. Contigo en la
Distancia. Web. 17 December 2009.
———. 2009. Interview. Madrid, Spain.
Frith, Simon. 2005. Music and Identity. In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed.
Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage Publications. Print.
Froeliche, Patrick. 2005. ¡Somos Cubanos! Timba Cubana and the Construction
of National Identity in Cuban Popular Music. TRANS 9. Web. 7 August 2010.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York and
Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan International. Print.
———. 2012. Hearing the Change: Reggaeton and Emergent Values in
Contemporary Cuba. Latin American Music Review 33 (2): 227–260. Print.
Fusco, Coco. 2015. Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. London:
Tate Publishing. Print.
Gámez Torres, Nora. 2013. ‘Rap Is war’: Los Aldeanos and the Politics of Music
Subversion in Contemporary Cuba. TRANS-Revista Transcultural de Música/
Transcultural Music Review 17. Web. 10 March 2015.
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press. Print.
Gema y Pavel. 1996. Cosa de Broma. Nubenegra. CD.
———. 1998. Trampas del Tiempo. Nubenegra. CD.
References 153
———. 1999. Síntomas de Fe. Nubenegra. CD.

———. 2003. ArtBembé. El Europeo. CD.
———. 2010. Ofrenda a Borinquen. Imolé Records. CD.
———. 2012a. Bolero filin. Artbembé. El Europeo. CD.
———. 2012b. No te vayas. Artbembé. El Europeo. CD.
Geoffrey, Baker. 2009. The Politics of Dancing: Reggaetón and Rap in Havana,
Cuba. In Reggaetón, ed. R. Rivera, D. Pacini Hernandez, and W. Marshall.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Print.
———. 2011. Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in
Havana (Refiguring American Music). Durham, NC: Duke University
Press. Print.
Giro, Radamés. 2007. Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Música en Cuba, Tomo 2
and Tomo 4. La Habana: Letras Cubanas. Print.
Glick Schiller, Nina. 1999. Ransmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old
and Something New in the U.S. Immigrant Experience. In The Handbook of
International Migration, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Asinitz, and Josh De
Wind, 94–119. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Print.
Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, eds. 1992.
Towards a Transnacional Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethinicity, and
Nationalism Reconsidered, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645.
New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Print.
Gratereaux, Alexandra. 2013, March 13. No Protests Against Cuban Artists at
Global Cuban Fest. Fox News Latino. Web. 11 April 2013.
Grenier, Guillermo J., and Lisandro Pérez. 2003. The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in
the United States. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Print.
Guerra, Lilian. 2012. Visions of Power in Cuba. Revolution, Redemption, and
Resistance, 1959–1971. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press. Print.
———. 2021, May 27. The Return of Cuba’s Security State. The New York
Times. Web. 15 June 2021.
Guevara, Ernesto. 1970. El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba. Obras (1957–1967).
La Habana: Casa de las Américas, Vol. 2, 367–384. Print.
Guevara, Gema. 2003. La Cuba de Ayer/ La Cuba de Hoy. The Politics of Music
and Diaspora. In Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridity
in Latin/o America, ed. Frances Aparicio and Cándida F. Jáquez, 33–46. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
Gutiérrez, Alejandro. 2009a. Personal Interview. Madrid.
Gutiérrez, Amaury. 2009b. Personal Interview. Miami.
154 References
Habana Abierta. 1995. Habana Oculta. Nubenegra. CD.

———. 1997. Habana Abierta. BMG Ariola. CD.
———. 1999. 24 Horas. BMG Ariola. CD.
———. 2005. Boomerang. EMI Latin. CD.
———. 2011. 1234. HABANAABIERTA. CD.
Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Identity, Community,
Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London:
Lawrence. Print.
Hall, Stuart, and Paul du Gay, eds. 2003. Cuestiones de Identidad. Buenos Aires:
Amorrortu Editores. Print.
Hernández-Reguant, Ariana. 2012. World Music Producers and the Cuban
Frontier. In Music and Globalization Critical Encounters, ed. Bob White,
111–134. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Print.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Print.
Ibañez, Polito. 1998. Cada día. Recuentos. Unicornio. CD.
IPUMS Online Data Analysis System. n.d. IPUMS USA. Minnesota Population
Center. University of Minnesota. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Larramendi, Boris. 2006. Asere que Volá. Boomerang. EMI Latino.
Levin, Jordan. n.d. Miami Light Project: Telling & Propelling Miami’s Story.
Miami Light Project Website. Web. 7 October 2020.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2005. Hypermodern Times. Cambridge: Grasset and
Jasquelle. Print.
Live from New Orleans the Jazz Foundation of America Presents: Yusa. 2022,
May 12. Jazz Foundation of America. Web. 22 Oct. 2022.
López Cano, Rubén. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Manchester: Manchester University Press. Print.
———. 2014. Music and Post-Communist Subjectivities in Cuba. In Music
and Youth Culture in Latin America, Identity Construction Processes from
New York to Buenos Aires, ed. Pablo Vila, 132–156. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Print.
Manduley López, Humberto. 2013. Hierba mala: Una historia del rock en Cuba.
La Habana: NialaNai Ediciones. Print.
Mesa-Lago, Carmelo, and Jorge F. Pérez-López, eds. 2005. Cuban’s Aborted
Reform: Socio-economic Effects, International Comparisons, and Transition
Policies. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Print.
References 155
“Miami Alternativo. Leslie Cartaya”. 2019, December 2. Podcast. Alafia Creative

Entertainment & Artisnator. YouTube. 2 September 2022.
Miami Boheme. 2014. Dir. Joe Cardona and Ralf Gonzalez. Rollin Pin
Music. Film.
Mignolo, Walter. 2012. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thiking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Print.
Moore, Robin. 1997. Nationalizing Blackness. Afrocubanismo and Artistic
Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh
Press. Print.
———. 2006. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba.
Berkeley: University of California Press. Print.
Morales, Elain. 2009. Personal Interview, Miami.
Mr. Haka. 2009a. Crónicas de un Escribano. AudioMix Productions. CD.
———. 2009b. Ponte p’a la música. Crónicas de un Escribano. AudioMix
Productions. CD.
Nemoianu, Virgil. 2010. Postmodernism & Cultural Identities: Conflicts and
Coexistence. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Print.
O’Reilly, Andrea, ed. 2001. Remembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora. Austin:
University of Texas Press. Print.
———, ed. 2007. Cuba: Idea of a Nation Displaced. New York: State University
of New York Press. Print.
Ochoa, Kelvis. 1999. Cuando salí de la Habana. 24 horas. BMG Ariola. CD.
Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.
Ortiz, Fernando. 1963. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar: advertencia
de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su trans-
culturación. Las Villas: Universidad central de Las Villas. Print.
———. 1996. Los factores humanos de la cubanidad. In Fernando Ortiz y la
cubanidad, 1–43. Habana: Editorial Unión. Print.
Pacini-Hernández, Deborah. 2003. Amalgamating Musics. Popular Music and
Cultural Hybridity in the Americas. In Musical Migrations: Transnationalism
and Cultural Hybridity in Latin/o America, ed. Frances R. Aparicio and
Cándida F. Jáquez, 13–33. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Print.
PALO! ‘Agua Pa’ Los Santos’ • W/ Descemer Bueno and Pedrito Martinez •
Música Cubana Salsa Jazz Funk. 27 May 2017. YouTube, 22 October 2022.
Pérez, Louis A. 1999. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Print.
Portes, Alejandro, and Josh DeWind. 2008. Rethinking Migration. New
Theoretical and Empirical Perspective. New York: Berghahn Books. Print.
156 References
Portes, Alejandro, and Alex Stepick. 1993. City on the Edge. The Transformation
of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print.
Portuondo, Pajón, Gladys Leandra. 2007, October 18. La transculturación en
Fernando Ortiz: imagen, concepto y contexto. Cubanuestra Digital. Web. 7
December 2010.
Prieto, Abel. 1994, April. “Cultura, cubanidad, cubanía,” ponencia de Abel
Prieto como presidente de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba en la
conferencia “La nación y la emigración.” La Jiribilla. Web. 7 April 2009.
Prieto, Dafnis. 2001; 2008. Personal Interviews, New York.
———. 2005. About the Monks. Zoho. CD.
———. 2008. Taking the Soul for a Walk. Dafnison Music. CD.
———. 2011. Absolut Quintet. Zoho. CD.
———. 2012a. Dafnis Prieto Proverb Trio. Dafnison Music. CD.
———. 2012b. Magic Danzonete. Dafnis Prieto Proverb Trio. Dafnison
Music. CD.
Rojas, Rafael. 1998. Una isla sin fin. Contribución a la crítica del nacionalismo
cubano. Miami: Ediciones Universal. Print.
———. 2001. Un banquete canónico. México DF: Fondo de Cultura
Económica. Print.
Romero, Yotuel, et al. 2021, February 16. Patria Y Vida. Chancleta Records.
Spotify. 17 October 2022.
Sierra Madero, Abel. Academias para producir machos en Cuba. Letras Libres.
Enero 2016. Web. 7 March 2016.
Silot Bravo, Eva, Gladys N. Personal Interviews. 7 January 2009; 17
December 2014.
———. 2011a, June 30. Cubiche: Una nueva era en la música cubana.
Cubaencuentro. Web. 12 Dec 2012.
———. 2011b, September 7. ¿La timba vive? Entrevista a Mariela Suárez
(Havana NRG). Cubaencuentro. Web. 10 September 2011.
———. 2011c, June 21. Me interesa llevar a Cuba a los rincones del planeta.
Entrevista a Telmary. Cubaencuentro. Web. 23 June 2011.
———. 2011d, November 24. Mr. Haka. Crónicas de un escribano “under-
ground” en Miami. Cubaencuentro. Web. 12 December 2012.
———. 2012a, March 28. Entrevista a Robertico Carcassés. Cubaencuentro.
Web. 4 April 2012.
———. 2012b, August 31. Entrevista a X Alfonso. Cubaencuentro. Web. 3
Sept 2012.
References 157
———. 2012c, June 5. Hay que saltar la palabra y limpiar el polvo del camino.
Entrevista a Yusa. Cubaencuentro. Web. 7 June 2013.
———. 2012d, April 24. La emoción como alimento del alma. Entrevista a
Alain Pérez. Cubaencuentro.
———. 2012e, February 13. ¿Se habaniza Miami? Cubaencuentro. Web. 12
December 2012.
———. 2013a, October 20. Danay Suárez: Pioneering Cuban Hip-Hop.
Timba.com. Web. 23 October 2013.
———. 2013b, September 27. Leslie Cartaya No Quiere Parar. Cuba Encuentro.
Web. 22 October 2022.
———. 2013c, September 29. PAX. Where They Cook Alternative Cuban
Music “Made in Miami”. Timba.com. Web. 10 October 2014.
———. 2019, August 22. Meet Eva Silot Bravo, from Alafia Creative
Entertainment, in Wynwood Art District. VoyageMia. Web. 7 Septiembre 2019.
———. 2020a, July 10. Gonzalo Rubalcaba: Musician, Composer & Producer.
Word Culture-CulturadelaPalabra Podcast, Alafia Creative Entertainment.
YouTube. 11 October 2022.
———. 2020b, August 7. “Ivan Melón Lewis-Musician, Composer & Producer”
Episode 17. WordCulture Podcast. Alafia Creative Entertainment. YouTube.
11 September 2022.
———. 2020c, August 8. Meet Eva Silot Bravo: Arts Education Consultant
and Enterpreneur. Shoutout Miami. Web. 15 August, 2020.
Storhoff, Timothy. 2014. Beyond the Blockade: An Ethnomusicological Study of the
Policies and Aspirations for U.S.-Cuban Musical Interaction. Diss. Florida State
University. Print.
Sublette, Ned. 2004, June 24. The Missing Cuban Musicians. Cuba Research
and Analysis Group. 1–18. Web. 7 February 2013.
Terry, Yosvany. 2001; 2009. Personal Interviews. New York.
———. 2006. Metamorphosis. Ewe Records. CD.
———. 2012. Today’s Opinion. Chris Cross Jazz. CD.
———. 2014a. New Throned King. 5 Passion. CD.
———. 2014b. New Throned King. New Throned King. 5 Passion. CD.
———. 2014c, June 10. The Story of The New Throned King as Told by Yosvany
Terry. Yosvany Terry.
———. 2017. Ancestral Memories, with Baptiste Trotigon. Sony Music France.
———. Designsite, www.yosvanyterry.com/. Accessed 11 November 2023.
Thomas, Jean Jacques. 1995. The Ephemeral Era: Gilles Lipovetsky. SubStance
24. 1/2, Issue 76/77. University of Wisconsin Press. 109–125. Print.
158 References
Thomas, Susan. 2005. In Cosmopolitan, Transnational, International: Locating

Cuban Music, ed. Cuba Transnational and Damián Fernandez, 104–120.
Gainsville: University of Florida Press. Print.
———. 2006. Did Nobody Pass the Girls the Guitar? Queer Appropriations in
Contemporary Cuban Popular Song. Journal of Popular Music 18 (2):
124–143. Print.
———. 2010. Musical Cartographies of the Transnational City: Mapping
Havana in Song. Latin American Music Review 31 (2): 210–240. Print.
Urquiza, Pavel. Personal Interviews. Madrid, 2009; Miami, 2014.
Villa, Jorge. n.d. Habana Abierta. http://suenacubano.com/habana-abierta/.
Suena Cubano. Web. 17 April 2016.
Warner, Michael. 2002. Public and Counterpublics. Public Culture 14 (1):
49–90. Print.
Yerbabuena. 2003. President Alien. Razor & Tie. CD.
Yúdice, George. 2002. Contrapunteo estadounidense/latinoamericano de los
estudios culturales. Estudios y otras prácticas intelectuales latinoamericanas en
cultura y poder, CLACSO: 339–352. Print.
Playlist
This playlist has been curated by me on Spotify since 2018 to 2022. It
encompasses more than 200 songs—approximately, fifteen hours of
music. It provides a soundscape of what Cuban Fusion and the
Transnational Cuban Alternative Music means for me, in terms of the
geographical and aesthetic range of musicianship and music language.
Most of the musicians included in this playlist are Cuban migrants since
the 1990s (TCAMS) and subsequent generations of Cuban musicians
who resulted from the evolution of TCAMS, from singer-songwriters to
academically trained musicians and others that relocated and have been
producing Cuban music across the world in Miami, New York, Madrid,
and other world cities.
The playlist highlights many of the collaborative projects made among
these musicians throughout the world as one of their distinctive features.
It also includes several Cuban musicians who after being migrants for a
References 159
while returned to live in the island, or who primarily reside in Cuba, or

who are living between the island and the world, but whose commonali-
ties in origins, education, living experiences, and references made them
an organic part of TCAMS aesthetics and music language. Some bands
led by non-Cuban musicians are also included, either because their lineup
is mostly made by Cuban diasporic musicians, or because their music
language dialogues with, owns from or contributes to TCAMS music
aesthetics.
The playlist illustrates the open-ended character of TCAMS music lan-
guage, moving across trova songs, boleros, Afro-Cuban music, jazz,
timba, funk, rock, Brazilian, classical, and other music genres. Cuban
Fusion is a reflexive pause to illustrate the important process of transna-
tionalization of Cuban music and culture that has been happening par-
ticularly since the 1990s on, where Cuban music has become a worldwide
cultural enterprise and a space of encounter for Cubans from all over,
across geographical, narratives, markets, and ideological distances.
Cuban Fusion
Playlist curated by Dr. Eva Silot Bravo-Blog Cubanidadinbetween-Alafia

Creative Entertainment-Miami Alternativo & Cultura de la Palabra-
Word Culture-Youtube Podcasts.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/77neehuIegap1GwJCUizps
Abreu, Alexander & Habana de Primera. 2013. Pasaporte, Pafata

Productions. CD.
Adonis y Osain del Monte. 2017a. La Negra. P’al Monte, Egrem. CD.
———. 2017b. P’al Monte. P’al Monte, Egrem. CD.
Afrosideral & Kumar Sublevao-Beats. 2019. Filho do Mar, El Olimpo de los
Orishas, Wonderwheel Recordings. CD.
Afrosideral & Shaman’s Dream. 2021. Eleguá, Orisha Trilogy, Shaman’s Dream
Records. CD.
Afrosideral, Kumar Sublevao-Beats & Sexto Sentido. 2019. Eshu Odara (DJ
Jigüe Remix), El Olimpo de los Orishas, Wonderwheel Recordings. CD.
160 References
Alfonso, X. 2005. Habana. Civilización. Timba Records. CD.

———. 2007a. Conga Gospel. Revoluxion, X Alfonso. CD.
———. 2007b. Domino. Revoluxion, X Alfonso. CD.
———. 2011a. Cambiará. Reverse, X Alfonso. CD.
———. 2011b. Reverse. Reverse. X Alfonso. CD.
Arocena, Daymé. 2017a. Eleggua. Cubafonía, Brownswood Recordings. CD.
———. 2017b. La Rumba me llamo yo. Cubafonía, Brownswood
Recordings. CD.
Athanai. 2012a. Trabajar, Creando Milicia, Athanai Music. CD.
———. 2012b. Séptimo Cielo, Creando Milicia, Athanai Music. CD.
Barbería, Luis Alberto. 1995a. Conga. Habana Oculta. Nubenegra. CD.
———. 1995b. Guaguancó para Daniela, Habana Oculta, Nubenegra. CD.
Brown, Vanito. 2014. Chévere. Norte, Sur, Este y Aquel, Bis Music. CD.
Brown, Vanito, Kelvis Ochoa, and Nestor del Prado Trio. 2016. Bolero Inaudito,
Bolero Inaudito (feat. Nestor del Padro Trio), Vanito Brown. CD.
Brown, Vanito, Descemer Bueno, Jon Secada, Gema Corredera, Roberto
Carcasses, X Alfonso, Athanai, Aymée Nuviola, Be Angel, David Torrens,
Cimafunk, and David Blanco. 2020. La Habana, La Habana a Todo Color,
Vanito Brown.
Bueno, Descemer. 2005. “Mueve” Siete Rayo. National Own. CD.
———. 2012. Un Bolero que te Salve La Vida, 7 Days in Havana: OST,
Metropolis Movie Music. CD.
Bueno, Descemer, and Maykel Barzaga Jr. 2012. Tus luces sobre mí. Bueno,
Capito Latin. CD.
Bueno, Descemer, and Gema Corredera. 2012. Ciego Amor, Bueno, Capitol
Latin. CD.
Bueno, Descemer, and Kelvis Ochoa. 2007. Quédate. Amor y Música, Descemer
Bueno. CD.
———. 2014. 7 Días, 7 Days in Havana: Original Motion Picture, BFD. CD.
Cano Escribá, Carlos, Hernán Milla, Veleta Roja, Ivan Ruiz Machado, Yuvisney
Aguilar & Paquito D’ Rivera. 2017. A Night in Tunisia. Por la Rivera de
Paquito, Veleta Roja Editions. CD.
Cartaya, Leslie. 2012a. La Candela. No Pares, No Pares Records. CD.
———. 2012b. No Pares, No Pares, No Pares Records. CD.
———. 2012c. Si yo pudiera (feat. Philbert Armenteros). No Pares, No Pares
Records. CD.
Cartaya, Leslie & Celia Cruz All Stars. 2018. Baila! (feat. Celia Cruz All Stars),
Llévame Contigo, No Pares Records. CD.
References 161
Chacón, Alfredo. 2015. Mi Barrio, Cezanne Producciones. CD.

Chacón, Alfredo, and Brian Lynch. 2018. Harry Up. Caliente Corner, Cezanne
Producciones. CD.
Cimafunk. 2017a. Alabao. Terapia, Cimafunk. CD.
———. 2017b. Me Voy. Terapia, Cimafunk. CD.
———. 2017c. Paciente. Terapia, Cimafunk, 2017. CD.
———. 2017d. Ponte P’a Lo Tuyo. Terapia, Cimafunk. CD.
Corredera, Gema. 2013a. Derramando Luz. Derramando Luz, GC Music. CD.
———. 2013b. En el mapa de tu cuerpo. Derramando Luz, GC Music. CD.
Corredera, Gema, and Martirio. 2015. No es Preciso, Feeling Marta, GC
Music. CD.
Del Río, Telmary Diaz, and Roberto Carcasses. 1905. Los Revolucionarios,
Interactuar es una Fuerza, Bis Music. CD.
Del Valle, Pepe. 1995. Con Tanta Presión, Habana Oculta, Nubenegra. CD.
Díaz, Telmary. 2004. Rumba p’a Ofrendarle. La Rumba soy yo. Con sentimiento
manana. Vol. II, Bis Music. CD.
Diaz, Telmary, and El Ruzzo de Orishas. 2018. Cógela como Arde Remix (fea-
turing El Ruzzo de Orishas). Fuerza Arará’, Telmary y Habanasana. CD.
El NegroHernández, Horacio. 2002. We Got the Fu*k, El Negro & Robby at the
Third World War. CD.
———. 2007. “Mr” Italuba II, Cacao Musica. CD.
Favier, Fernando. 2018. Soleá del Círculo de Fuego. Bulerias of My Town,
Cezanne Producciones. CD.
Favier, Fernando, Pedro Ojesto, and José Miguel Garzón. 2011. Miguel “de la
Tolea”. Yepa (Bulerías), Nikela, Karonte. CD.
Ferre, Elmer. 2002. Yerbabuena. Metrópoli. Unicornio. CD.
Ferrer, Elmer. 2002. E-mail. Metrópoli. Unicornio. CD.
Fonseca, Roberto. 2019. 7 Rayos, Yo, Concord Jazz. CD.
Fonseca, Roberto, and Gema 4. 2019. La Llamada, Yesun, Mack Avenue
Records. CD.
Fowler, Julio. 2009. Bienvenida La Locura. Utopías, Factoría Autor. CD.
Fowler, Julio, and Amaury Gutiérrez. 2006. Tantos Palos. Buscando Mi Lugar,
Factoría Autor. CD.
Fragoso, Michelle. 2012a. Samurai. Entre Cuerdas (feat. Gola), Riverside
Entertainment. CD.
———. 2012b. Seis Lindas Cubanas. Entre Cuerdas (feat. Gola), Riverside
Entertainment. CD.
162 References
———. 2017. Rompimiento. Rompimiento, Casa Discográfica Producciones

Colibrí. CD.
Gema 4. 1994a. La Gloria Eres Tú, Grandes Boleros a Capella, Picap. CD.
———. 1994b. Piel Canela, Grandes Boleros a Capella, Picap. CD.
———. 2013. Se Te Olvida (La Mentira), For a New Dream, Whatabout Jazz, CD.
Gema y Pavel. 2008. Ella. Desnudos Vol.I, Gema y Pavel. CD.
Gola, José Armando. 2014a. Electrik Choro. Gola Elektrik, 5Passion. CD.
———. 2014b. Out of Africa. Gola Elektrik, 5Passion. CD.
Gómez, Jorge, and Tiempo Libre. 2009. Tu Conga Bach (Conga) Inspired by
the C Minor Fuge, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. Bach in Havana. CD.
Gómez, Jorge, Joshua Bell, and Tiempo Libre. 2009. Para Tí. At Home with
Friends, Sony Classical. CD.
Gonzalez, Adonis. 2012. Gitanerías, Adiós a Cuba, Rey Rodriguez
Productions. CD.
González, Adonis. 2012a. Thomas Altmann & Bassam Abdul Salam. “Danza de
los Ñáñigos”. Adiós a Cuba, Rey Rodríguez Production. CD.
———. 2012b. Adiós a Cuba. Adiós a Cuba, Rey Rodriguez Production. CD.
Dayramir Gonzalez, Pedrito Martinez & Gonzalo Rubalcaba. 2018. Iyesa con
Miel. The Grand Councourse, Hippos in Tanks. CD.
Habana Abierta. 2005a. ¿Asere, Qué Volá?, Boomerang, Parlophone Spain. CD.
———. 2005b. Boca Abajo, Boomerang, Parlophone Spain, 2005. CD.
———. 2005c. Chocolate con Churro, Boomerang, Parlophone Spain. CD.
———. 2005d. La Novia de Supermán, Boomerang, Parlophone Spain. CD.
———. 2011. Madrugada Sin Fin (Popopilón), 1234, More Diskitos. CD.
———. 2018a. Rockasón, Habana Abierta, Representaciones Musicales. CD.
———. 2018b. Rockotocompás, Habana Abierta, Representaciones
Musicales. CD.
———. 2018c. Santiago, Habana Abierta, Representaciones Musicales. CD.
———. 2018d. Tú me amas, Habana Abierta, Representaciones Musicales. CD.
Harlem Quartet. 2007. Take The A Train. Take the A Train. White Pine
Music. CD.
Harlem Quartet, Michael Abels, and Chicago Sinfonietta. 2013. Delights and
Dances. Delights and Dances, Cedille. CD.
Harold López Nussa Trio, and Adrian López-Nussa. 2011. Guarija. El País de las
Maravillas, World Village France. CD.
Harold Lopez Nussa Trio, and David Sánchez. 2011. E’cha. El país de las
Maravillas. World Village. CD.
Ibeyi. 2015a. Mama Says, Ibeyi, XL Recordings. CD.
References 163
———. 2015b. Oya. Ibeyi, XL Recordings. CD.

———. 2015c. Riber, Ibeyi, XL Recordings. CD.
Interactivo. 2005a. Café. Goza Pepillo, Bis Music. CD.
———. 2005b. “P’a que enamore” (Azucenas y Girasoles). Goza Pepillo, Bis
Music. CD.
———. 2005c. Si no llego a mañana (que no cierre el club). Goza Pepillo, Bis
Music. CD.
———. 2014a. Que lindo es el amor, Que lindo es el amor, Dafnison Music. CD.
———. 2014b. Baila con mi rumba. Que lindo es el amor, Dafnison Music. CD.
———. 2014c. Te Fuiste, Que lindo es el amor, Dafnison Music. CD.
Larramendi, Boris. 2017. Libre. Libre, 662750 Records DK. CD.
———. 2018. La Conga Nunca Falla. Samurai, 662750 Records DK. CD.
Laugart, Xiomara. 1996. Hoy Mi Habana. La Habana Entera, Bis Music. CD.
———. 2007. Ni un Ya no Estás. Voces de la Nueva Trova, Bis Music. CD.
López Gavilán Junco, Aldo. 1999. Tren a ciudad gótica. En el Ocaso de la
Hormiga y El Elefante, Unicornio. CD.
———. 2005. Maracujá. Talking to the Universe, Unicornio. CD.
López Nussa, Harold. 2007. Olvido. Canciones, Producciones Colibrí. CD.
Martínez, Pedrito. 2013. Conciencia. The Pedrito Martinez Group, Motema
Music. CD.
———. 2014. Que a Mí Me vió Nacer, Rumba de la Isla (Pedrito Canta a
Camarón de la Isla), Calle 54 Records. CD.
Martínez, Pedrito, and Steve Gadd. 2013. La Luna. The Pedrito Martinez Group,
Motema Music. CD.
Melón Lewis, Ivan. 2015. Ayer y Hoy. Ayer y Hoy, Cezanne Producciones. CD.
Melón Lewis, Ivan, and The Cuban Swing Express. 2017a. (I Cant’ Get No)
Satisfaction, Iván Melon Lewis & The Cuban Swing Express, Cezanne
Producciones. CD.
———. 2017b. Ayer y Hoy. Ivan Melon Lewis & the Cuban Swing Express,
Cezanne Producciones. CD.
Milanés, Haydée. 2004. La música, Haydée, EMI México. CD.
———. 2014a. Si Vuelves. Palabras, Bis Music. CD.
———. 2014b. Tú Dominas. Palabras, Bis Music. CD.
———. 2014c. Tú no Sospechas. Palabras, Bis Music. CD.
Navarrete, Brenda. 2017a. Mulata linda. Mi Mundo, Alma Records. CD.
———. 2017b. Rumbero como yo. Mi Mundo, Alma Records. CD.
Nuviola Aymée, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and Cimafunk. 2020. Azúcar P’a tu Café,
Azúcar P’a tu Café (feat. Cimafunk), Top Stop Music.
164 References
Nuviola, Aymée, Chucho Valdés & Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. 2019. Ese
Atrevimiento, A Journey Through Cuban Music, Top Stop Music. CD.
Ochoa, Kelvis. 2007. Ojos Negros. Amor y Música, Descemer Bueno. CD.
———. 2014a. Curandera. Curanderas. InerCat Music Group. CD.
———. 2014b. Estrecho. Curanderas, InerCat Music Group. CD.
———. 2014c. Roberta. Curanderas. InerCat Music Group. CD.
———. 2014d. Una de Mambo, Curanderas, InnerCat Music Group. CD.
Ochoa, Kelvis, and Descemer Bueno. 2007. La Fantasía (feat. Polito Ibañez).
Amor y Música, Descemer Bueno. CD.
———. 2012. Siete Días. Bueno, Capitol Latin. CD.
Ochoa, Kelvis, and Cuatro Gatos. 1995a. “Gulliver”, Habana Oculta,
Nubenegra. CD.
———. 1995b. Para Dar a Luz, Habana Oculta, Nubenegra. CD.
Orishas. 2000a. “537 C.U.B.A.”, A Lo Cubano, Suerte Publishing. CD.
———. 2000b. Canto para Elewa y Shango, A Lo Cubano, Suerte Publishing. CD.
———. 2000c. Represent, A Lo Cubano, Suerte Publishing. CD.
———. 2007. El Kilo, Antidiótico, Suerte Publishing. CD.
Palo!. 2009a. Tabaco y Ron p’a mi Santa. This is AfroCuban Funk. Rollin Pin
Music. CD.
———. 2009b. Oro. This is AfroCuban Funk. Rollin Pin Music. CD.
Paz, Raúl. 2010. Havanization. Havanization, Naïve. CD.
Peraza Rodríguez, Michel. 2009a. Ni más ni menos. Sin perder la paz, Habana
Estudio. CD.
———. 2009b. Sin perder la paz. Sin perder la paz, Habana Estudio. CD.
Pérez, Alain. 2014a. Celosa No. Hablando con Juana. AYVA MUSIC/PATAKIN
MUSIC. CD.
———. 2014b. Hablando con Juana. Hablando con Juana. AYVA MUSIC/
PATAKIN MUSIC. CD.
———. 2020a. Dar y Recibir. El cuento de la buena pipa. Egrem. CD.
———. 2020b. Sin Luz y sin Agua. El cuento de la buena pipa. Egrem. CD.
Picadillo. 2014. Veneno, Las Cosas de la Vida, Doremix Records. CD.
Prieto, Dafnis. 2004. Conga en Tí. About the Monks. ZOHO. CD.
———. 2008. Taking the Soul for a Walk. Taking the Soul for a Walk, Dafnison
Music. CD.
———. 2009. Si o Si. Si o Si Quartet Live at Jazz Standard NYC. Dafnison
Music. CD.
Prieto, Dafnis, Koyaki, and Jason Lindner. 2012. The Magic Danzonete. Dafnis
Prieto Proverb Trio, Dafnison Music. CD.
References 165
Rodríguez, Alfredo. 2018. Bésame Mucho. The Little Dream, Mack Avenue
Records. CD.
Rodríguez, Alfredo, and Ibeyi. 2016. Yemaya. Tocororo, Mack Avenue. CD.
Rodriguez, Alfredo, and Pedrito Martínez. 2014. The Invasion Parade, The
Invasion Parade, Mack Avenue Records. CD.
———. 2019a. Africa, Duologue, Mack Avenue Records. CD.
———. 2019b. Mariposa, Duologue, Mack Avenue Records. CD.
———. 2019c. Thriller, Duologue, Mack Avenue Records. CD.
———. 2019d. Yo Volveré, Duologue, Mack Avenue Records. CD.
Rodriguez, Alfredo, Esperanza Spalding, and Pedrito Martínez. 2014. Snails in
the Creek (Caracoles En el Riachuelo), The Invasion Parade, Mack Avenue
Records, The Invasion Parade, Mack Avenue Records. CD.
Romero, Yotuel, Descemer Bueno, Yadam Gonzalez, Beatriz Luengo, Gente de
Zona, Maykel Castillo Perez, and Eliexer Marquez Duany. 2022, October
17. Patria Y Vida, Chancleta Records, 16 Febraury 2021. Spotify.
Rubalcaba, Gonzalo. 2011a. Alafia. XXI Century, 5Passion. CD.
———. 2011b. Oshun. XXI Century, 5Passion. CD.
———. 2015. Blue in Green, Charlie, 5Passion. CD.
Rubalcaba, Gonzalo, Charlie Haden, and Jack DeJohnette. 1991. Giant Steps,
Blue Note Records. CD.
Rubalcaba, Gonzalo, Dennis Chambers, and Brian Bromberg. 1999. Caravan,
Inner Voyage, Blue Note Records. CD.
Ruiz, Sol. 2017. Time Machine. Reasonable Diva. Sol Ruiz. CD.
Santa, Melvis. 2011a. Inmensidad. Santa Habana, Bis Music. CD.
———. 2011b. Santa Habana. Santa Habana, Bis Music. CD.
Sexto Sentido. 2016. Canto a Eleggua, Sexto Records.
———. 2018. Yemaya en Sol Menor, Sexto Records.
Sol+The Tribu. 2019a. Achicharrao. Miami 3050, Bright Futuro Récords. CD.
———. 2019b. La Barbara. Miami 3050, Bright Futuro Récords. CD.
Sonlokos. 2015a. Fundamento. Locos por el Son, No Pares Records. CD.
———. 2015b. Se te va la guagua. Locos por el Son, No Pares Records. CD.
Sosa, Omar. 2017a. Moro Yeye. Transparent Water, Otá Records. CD.
———. 2017b. Oni Yalorde. Transparent Water, Otá Records. CD.
Spam All-Stars. 2008. Charanga E-350. Introducing Spam All-Stars. Introducing
Records. CD.
Suarez, Danay. 2014. Yo Aprendí. Polvo de la Humedad, UMLE-LATINO. CD.
Suarez, Danay, and Interactivo. 2014. Wake Up. Polvo de la Humedad,
UMLE-LATINO. CD.
166 References
Superávit. 1995. En La Distancia, Habana Oculta, Nubenegra. CD.

Telmary. 2013. El Poder de los Ancestros. Libre, L’Essentiel de Cuba. CD.
Telmary Feat. Descemer Bueno. 2006. Rezo (Intro). A Diario, Bis Music. CD.
Terry, Yosvany. 2014a. New Throned King. New Throned King, 5Passion. CD.
———. 2014b. Ojún Degara. New Throned King, 5Passion. CD.
———. 2014c. Reuniendo La Nación, New Throned King, 5Passion. CD.
The Spam All Stars. La Fiesta de los Feos, Fuacata Live, Spamusica. CD.
The Spam Allstars. 2004. La Vida Continúa. Contra los Robóticos Mutantes,
Spamusica. CD.
Timbalive. 2010. Como Miami No Hay N’a’. From Miami a la Habana, Latin
Power Enterprises. CD.
Timbalive, Isaac Delgado, Mayito Rivera, Pedrito Calvo, Ivan Melon. 2010.
“Lewis”, Manolín El Médico de la Salsa, Alexander Abreu & Gonzalo
Rubalcaba. “De Miami a la Habana”, From Miami a la Habana, Latin Power
Enterprises. CD.
Torrens, David. 2014a. Aunque siempre sin dinero. Mi poquita fe, Caribe
Productions. CD.
———. 2014b. El Bufón y el Trágico. Mi poquita fé, Caribe Productions. CD.
———. 2014c. Sentimientos Ajenos, Mi poquita fe, Caribe Productions. CD.
Urquiza, Pavel. 2022. Diosa de Cobre. Momento, Yinyanilé. CD.
Urquiza, Pavel, and Haydée Milanés. 2022. Regreso a la Tierra, Regreso a la
Tierra, Cezanne Producciones. CD.
Valera, Manuel, and New Cuban Express. 2013. La Gloria Eres Tú. Expectativas,
Mavo Records. CD.
Valle, Ramón. 2005a. La Comparsa. Memorias-Piano Works IV, ACT Music. CD.
———. 2005b. Levitando, Memorias-Piano Works IV, ACT Music. CD.
———. 2016. Omar Rodríguez Calvo & Ernesto Simpson. “Hallelujah”, Take
Off, In +Out Records. CD.
Valle, Ramón, Dafnis Prieto, Antonio Guillen & Félix Betancourt. 1996.
Levitando. Levitando, AYVA Musica. CD.
Villafranca, Elio. 2008. The Source in Between. The Source in Between, Elio
Villafranca Quartet. CD.
Villafranca, Elio, and The Jazz Syncopators. 2014a. “Last Train to Paris (Live)”,
“The Caribbean Tinge (Live)”. Caribbean Tinge Live from Dizzy’s Club,
Motema Music. CD.
———. 2014b. The Caribbean Tinge (Live). Caribbean Tinge Live from Dizzy’s
Club, Motema Music. CD.
Villalón, Andy. 1995. La Cara de Mi Suerte, Habana Oculta, Nubenegra. CD.
References 167
Virelles, David, Roman Díaz, and Nosotros Ensemble. 2017. Fitití Yongo.
Gnosis, ECM Records. CD.
Vivanco, William. 2002. Cimarrón. Lo Tengo T’o Pensa’o, Bis Music. CD.
———. 2013. Pilón. La Isla Milagrosa, DEP_Egrem. CD.
Vivanco, William, and Roberto Aaron. 2009. El Mundo Está Cambia’o, El
Mundo Está Cambia’o, Planète Aurora. CD.
Vivanco, William, and Telmary Díaz. 1905. P’a que Enamore. Interactuar es una
Fuerza, Bis Music. CD.
Volcán, Maridalia Hernández, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, José Armando Gola, Horacio
Hernández, and Giovanni Hidalgo. 2013. Corsaria (feat. Maridalia
Hernández, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Jose Armando Gola, Horacio Hernández &
Giovanni Hidalgo). Volcan, 5Passion. CD.
Yerbabuena. 2003a. (Guajira I Love U 2 Much). President Alien, Razor
& Tie. CD.
———. 2003b. Electric Bogaloo. President Alien, Razor & Tie. CD.
Yerbabuena, Daymé Arocena, Jon Batiste, Alain Pérez, Pedrito Martinez, and
Ron Blake. 2022. The Man with the Hat & the Tan (ManHatTan), The Man
with the Hat & the Tan (ManHatTan), Tribe Caribe.
Yusa. 2008. “Walking Heads” Haiku. Tumi Records. CD.
Yusa & Juan Carlos Marín. 2008. “Conga Pasajera” Haiku. Tumi Records, CD.
Index1
A Afro-Cuban Funk, 88, 103n27,

Academically trained musicians, viii, 131, 132
6, 45, 52, 54, 57, 58, 60n8, Afro Cuban instruments, 96
69, 69n15, 85, 92, 93, 99, Afrocubanism, 21
101, 110, 123, 136, 137, 140, Afro-Cuban Jazz, vii, 38, 92, 93,
143, 144, 158 122, 138
Across borders, 17, 18, 37, 54, 114, Afrocuban music, 97
137, 140 Afro-Cuban musical legacy, 101
Across geographies, 70, 83, 116, Afrocuban rhythms, 29n9, 69, 98,
141, 143, 148 102, 138
Across the world, 7, 40, 61, 62, 68, Afrocuban traditions, 96, 98
70, 74, 81, 83, 85, 87, 92, Afrodiasporic, 85
101, 110, 116, 124, 129n6, Albums, 10, 41, 60, 66, 67, 69, 73,
132, 133, 136, 139, 145, 86, 94, 96, 123, 125, 126,
147, 158 129, 129n6
African diaspora, viii, 19, 98, 101, Alfonso, Equis, 47, 66n14,
122, 124, 133, 141, 145 74, 75, 146
African legacy, 20, 105 Alternative art expressions, 63
Afro-beat, 99 Alternative Cuban Music, 45
Afro-Caribbean, 103n27, 123 Alternative cultures, 29
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
E. S. Bravo, Cuban Fusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53692-2
170 Index
Alternative music, 5, 6, 52, 54, 58, Brazilian, 45n15, 64, 69, 93, 101,
61–67, 71, 109, 122, 125, 124, 125, 127, 130, 133, 137,
140, 142 143, 145
Alternative voices, 33, 141 Bridges of communication, 138
Amadeo Roldán School, 91 Brower, Leo, 91
American musicians, 37, 38 Brown University Latin Jazz and Pop
An imagined community, 8 Festival, 100, 102, 108
Apolitical, 77, 140 Brown, Vanito, 60n8, 66n14,
Apolitical posture, 77 72, 77, 80
Armenteros, Philbert, 60n8, 102, Buena Vista Social Club, vii, 7, 41,
103n27, 108, 129n7, 131, 132 59, 65, 74, 121, 122
Arocena, Daymé, 88, 90, 105, 147 Buika, Concha, 85
Artbembé, 67, 69
Arts schools, 82
Audiences, 41, 54, 61, 63n10, 65, 74, C
75, 77, 84, 102, 108, 133, 142 Caballero, Vanito, 71, 72n16
“Authentic” Cuban sounds, 74 Café Nostalgia, 104
Authenticity, 10, 32, 62 Calls and responses, 97
Awards, 41, 94, 97, 103, 122n2, Cañizares, Yilian, 147
124, 125, 142 Carcassés, Bobby, 93
Carcasses, Roberto, 74, 105
Caribbean Studies, 108
B Cartaya, Leslie, 60n8, 66n14,
Ball and Chain, 105 103n27, 108, 122, 122n2,
Barbería, Luis, 60n8, 71, 75 129n7, 131–133, 132n10,
Barroso, Ahmed, 43n14, 60n8, 92, 132n11, 137
103n27, 132 Castro, Athanai, 66n14, 75, 81
Beatles, 144 CDs, 67, 73
Bebop, 38, 94, 98 Celia Cruz, vii, 40, 86, 93n25, 131,
Belonging, 8–10, 14, 15, 19, 33, 140 132, 132n11, 144
Bilateral sanctions, 34 Celia Cruz All Star, 132
Blanche, La Dame, 146, 147 Censorship, 5n1, 8, 23–25, 29, 31,
BMG Ariola, 71 58, 64, 115, 131
Bohemian, 64, 66, 68, 73, 77, 140, 143 Challenges, 2, 11, 17, 18, 46, 72, 80,
Bohemian style, 77 113, 114, 119
Boogaloo, 99 Changing demographics, 105
Boomerang, 65, 71, 77, 86, 139 Chirino, Willy, vii, 42, 43, 74,
Both shores, 3, 57, 115, 117 93n25, 131, 144
Index 171
Cimafunk, 88, 105, 108, 139, 147 Cuban affairs, 3, 32, 34, 113
Classical music, 10, 88, 91, 96, Cuban-American music, 132
125, 129 Cuban Americans, 32, 34, 44, 110,
Cold war, vii, 2, 7, 22, 138, 141 115, 124
Collaborations, viii, 4, 7, 41, 42, 49, Cuban artists, 3, 4, 26, 41, 49, 52,
52, 54, 69–72, 69n15, 83, 85, 53, 55, 57, 57n3, 113, 115,
86, 89, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 117, 120, 141
108, 110, 123, 130, 133, 137, Cuban arts, 2, 3
140, 143, 144, 147, 148 Cuban concerns, 77, 138
Collapse, 15, 77, 140 Cuban cultural accounts, 142
Columna B, 92, 96, 129 Cuban cultural production, viii, 5, 6,
Community, 10, 19–22, 31, 32, 34, 17, 54, 139
35, 42, 47, 57, 61, 105, 106, Cuban culture, vii, viii, 2–4, 6, 11,
115, 140 20, 22, 32, 39, 54, 69, 92,
Concerts, 10, 42, 44, 52, 55, 60, 70, 113, 141, 145
86, 90, 102, 107, 109, 120, Cuban diaspora, vii, 8, 11, 28, 29,
126, 140 31, 33, 35, 39, 110, 113
Corredera, Gema, 60n8, 66n14, 68, Cuban diasporic artists, 113
72n16, 98, 108, 128, Cuban diasporic music, vii, 58, 137
129n6, 137 Cuban diasporic musicians, 2, 58,
Costa, Gal, 64, 93n25, 144 110, 133, 141, 142, 159
Counterpoint, 20, 38, 96, 137 Cuban diasporic subjects, 74
Creative explosion, 133 Cuban dilemma, 80, 113
Creative fields, 31 Cuban establishment, 39
Critical, viii, 3, 5, 8, 10, 21, 25, 28, Cuban exile, 9, 42, 115, 123
28n8, 32, 35, 36, 63, 72, 78, Cuban expatriates, 53
110, 115, 117, 139 Cuban families, 80, 139
Critical positions, 63 Cuban Fusion, vii, 6, 7, 54, 70,
Critique, 23, 29, 63, 69 82–84, 87, 88, 100, 101,
Cuba, xiii, 3, 4, 5n1, 8, 10, 11, 17, 103n27, 105, 107, 110–117,
19–24, 24n4, 25n6, 26, 29–32, 125–127, 133, 141, 143, 145,
34, 34n11, 36–39, 40n13, 158, 159
41–44, 45n15, 47, 49, 54, 55, Cuban government, 23, 25, 27, 28,
57, 58, 60n8, 61–67, 71, 73–76, 31, 34n11, 44, 47, 78n19,
80, 82–84, 86, 87, 95, 99, 105, 115, 148
103–105, 107–109, 115, 117, Cubanidad, viii, 4–10, 19–22, 28,
120, 122–126, 122n2, 133, 30–32, 35, 53, 105, 110, 113,
139–142, 144, 148, 159 114, 141, 159
172 Index
Cubanidad in between, 5, 6, 11, 61, Cuban singers, viii, 4–6, 52, 54, 67,
66n14, 159 72, 77, 140
Cuban identities, 6, 26, 37, 72 Cuban social reality, 75
Cuban imaginary, 6, 20, 21, 53, 85 Cuban society, 27, 79
Cuban institutions, 11, 42 Cuban state, 42
Cuban issues, viii, 43, 59, 114, 141 Cuban studies, viii, 4, 59, 141
Cuban migrant musicians, 43, 58, Cuban Swing Express, 85
129n7, 141 Cuban topics, 77, 138, 140
Cuban migrants, 31, 33–35, 39, 49, Cuban trova, 69, 127
56, 58, 73, 80n21, 83, 105, Cuba-U.S. cultural exchange, 55
107n29, 110, 113, 158 Cubiche, 111, 113, 113n33, 129,
Cuban migration, 2, 5–6, 32–34, 57 129n7, 130n8, 132
Cuban millennials, 30 Cultura de la Palabra/Word
Cuban music, vii, viii, 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, Culture, 83
36–49, 52, 54, 59, 61, 62, 74, Cultural agency, 28
84–89, 91, 92, 96, 101, Cultural and academic exchanges, 42
103n27, 105, 108, 109, 119, Cultural bureaucracy, 24, 26
121–123, 127, 130–133, Cultural change, 18, 141
136–143, 145, 147, 158, 159 Cultural communities, 145
Cuban music genres, 39, 52, 137 Cultural events, 26
Cuban musicians, 7, 10, 37–42, Cultural exchange, 2, 40n13, 42, 44,
43n14, 45, 47, 48, 52, 55, 57, 55, 105, 120
58, 70, 83–86, 88, 90, 101, Cultural explosion, 2
103n27, 105, 106, 109, 112, Cultural hybrid, 9, 19, 21
115, 120, 127, 131–133, 137, Cultural industries, 22
140, 146, 158 Cultural institutions, 3, 26, 63, 76, 142
Cuban musicianship, 93, 96, 133, 138 Cultural legacy, 19, 35, 110, 113
Cuban nation, 6, 8, 10, 21–23, Cultural movements, 63
33, 37, 81 Cultural policies, 8, 9, 25, 39, 49
Cubanness, viii, 5–9, 19, 36, 53, Cultural politics, viii, 23, 30, 58
72–73, 110, 113, 117, 136, Cultural practice, 11, 14, 17,
138, 140 29, 85, 110
Cuban people, 30, 53, 117 Cultural product, 36, 139, 144
Cuban politics, 113–115 Cultural production, vii, 4, 8–10,
Cuban recordings, 40 17, 19, 24n3, 25, 49, 136, 141
Cuban regime, 35, 110 Cultural space, 9, 16, 19, 20, 74, 96
Cuban revolution, 8, 9, 22, 27, 39 Cultural studies, viii, 8, 9
Cuban rumba, 133 Culture of survival, 77, 140
Index 173
D Diverse backgrounds, 130

Dafnison music, 94 Diversity, 17, 22, 32, 35, 94, 132,
Danceable rhythms, 65 133, 141
David, Miles, 144 Djavan, 64, 93n25, 144
De-construction, 4 D’Neme, 105
Delgado, Isaac, 41, 84, 86, 88, 99 Dominant narratives, viii, 5,
Depoliticized, 7, 53, 114, 138 7, 8, 140
Descargas, 66n13, 102 Dominant national imaginaries, 110
Descemer Bueno, 55n2, 60n8, Dominant national subject, 5
66n14, 92, 99, 102, 103n27, D’Rivera, Paquito, 43, 43n14,
108, 113, 115, 117, 122, 96, 99, 144
122n2, 126, 128–133, 137, Dystopian, 5, 29n10, 136, 140
138, 148
Dialogue, 4, 20, 36, 69, 80, 85, 86,
94, 96, 97, 101, 106, 112, E
123, 124, 129, 130, 137, Eclectic, 29n9, 74, 91, 101, 102,
138, 145 129n7, 137, 143
Diasporic cohorts, 54, 138, 148 Eclectic jazz, 91
Diasporic generations, 36 Economic crisis, 4, 27, 29n10,
Diasporic practices, 54 57n3, 66, 76
Diasporic waves, 110 Economic reforms, 28, 45
Díaz, Olga, 74 Education, 8, 26, 27, 32, 73, 88, 89,
Díaz, Roman, 97, 101, 102 91, 141, 144, 159
Diplomatic relations, 34, 47 Electronic effects, 96
Disconnected, 77, 113, 140 El Grupo de Experimentación Sonora
Discontent, 29, 76 del ICAIC, 92
Discourses, 7, 9, 19, 21, 34, 36, 45, Elitism, 14, 64
53, 58, 61, 110, 113, 117 Elitist notions, 92
Discursive practices, 10, 11, 17, 23, Elmer Ferrer, 92
33, 36, 54, 60, 117 “El Negro” Hernandez,
Discursive strategy, 57 Horacio, 93, 96
Disenchanted, 77, 140 El Salón Rosado de la Tropical, 73
Dispersed, 74, 139, 144 Embargo, 32, 44, 47
Dissidents, 17, 30, 33, 47, 78n19, Embargo regulations, 44
116, 141 Emergent cultural identities, 16
Dissident subjects, 11 Emiliano Salvador, 83, 92, 93n25
Dissident voices, 23 Empowerment, 21, 26, 113
Divergent voices, 76 ENA, 83, 86, 91, 92
174 Index
Encounter, 15, 18, 21, 108, 115, Funky vocal improvisations, 96

145, 148, 159 Fusion, 6, 21, 42, 86, 91, 92, 96,
Estado de Animo, 69, 92, 96, 129 99, 101, 127, 129–131,
Europe, 4, 15, 25, 27, 28, 40, 57, 137, 145
63, 71, 74, 84, 85, 88, 92, 93,
115, 125, 126, 131, 133,
136–138, 141 G
Evasiveness, 79, 139 García, Yissy, 105
Exile ideology, 32, 35 Gavilán, Aldo López, 89, 146
Existential concerns, 77, 113, 138 Gema 4, 60n8, 82, 88
Existential conditions, 77 Gema y Pavel, 65–69, 71, 81,
137, 138
Generational cohorts, 108, 115
F Generic boundaries, 138
Fábrica de Arte, 88 Gente de Zona, 49, 116, 130, 148
Facebook, 122 Geographical spaces, 14, 85
Fall of the Berlin Wall, 136 Gil, Michael, 116
Fan base, 49, 73, 115, 125 Gillespie, Dizzy, 123
Feliú, Santiago, 28n8, 62, 69 Glenda del E, 60n8, 103n27, 121
Filing, 38, 66, 69, 127, 137 Glenda del Monte, 66n14, 137
Filiú, Roman, 60n8, 83, 84, 91, 100 Global context, 6, 7, 136
First generation migrants, 46 Global enterprise, 133
Firsthand interactions, 140 Global geographies, 100
Flamenco, 83, 85–88, 138 Globalized capitalist market, 54
Flores, Charles, 94 Globalized context, 137
Fluid conversation, 143 Global soundscape, 127
Fowler, Julio, 59n5, 60n8, 66n14, Gola, Armando, 124, 132
75, 76, 80 González, Yadam, 46, 60n8, 117
Fragmentary, 139 Grammys, 85, 87, 97, 100, 103,
Fragoso, Michelle, 103n27, 122, 122n2, 131, 142
129n7, 132 Greater interconnectivity, 15
Freedom, 26, 30, 31, 113, 120, 148 Groove, 87, 95
Freedom of expression, 26, 31, 120 Guerra, Reinier, 60n8, 103n27, 132
Frómeta, Alejandro, 75 Gutiérrez, Alejandro, 60n8, 66, 71
FUNDarte, 71, 74, 87, 103, 108,
109, 124, 139, 144
Funk, 29n9, 64, 84, 86, 87, 89, 93, H
101, 108, 112, 127, 129, 133, Habana Abierta, 59, 59n7, 60n8,
142, 145, 159 65–67, 69–75, 72n16, 74n18,
Index 175
77, 86, 108, 115, 129n6, 130, Interactions, 10, 15, 16, 21, 36, 38,
137, 138 55, 60, 105, 140
Habana Oculta, 67, 71 Interactivo, 89, 94, 105, 107, 108,
Hardships, 64 115, 125, 129n6, 130, 146
Havana, xiii, 2, 11, 24, 25, 47, 52, Intercultural dialogues, 138
54, 55, 55n2, 58, 59, 63n10, Interdisciplinary framework, 9
65, 66n13, 66n14, 67, 71, International career, 123, 125
72n16, 73, 74, 80, 82, 83, 88, Internet, 3, 30, 70, 106, 116,
89, 92–94, 99, 101, 104–108, 122, 140
107n29, 123, 125, Intertextuality, 65, 94–96, 138
128–130, 146 Interviews, 10, 60, 66, 66n14,
Hierarchy, 16, 32 113, 142
Historiography, 54, 86 Irakere, 86, 92, 93n25, 144
Homeland, 33, 35, 36, 72, 137 Irreverence, 77
Hoy como Ayer, 74, 104 Island, vii, viii, 2–4, 6–10, 19, 22,
Human interactions, 15, 16 24, 25, 28, 29n9, 29n10,
Human mobility, 15 30–32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40–42,
Human rights, 47 40n12, 44, 45, 45n15, 47–49,
Hybridity, 4, 15, 36 52–60, 60n8, 62, 63, 65–67,
65n12, 69, 71, 73–78, 78n19,
78n20, 80n21, 83, 84, 86–88,
I 91–93, 96–99, 101, 105, 106,
Ibañez, Polito, 76 108, 110, 113–116, 119, 120,
Ibeyi, 147 122, 123, 125, 129, 130,
Identity, viii, 3, 6, 8–11, 14–17, 19, 136–138, 140, 141,
22, 28, 32, 36, 54, 58, 72, 81, 145–147, 159
89, 110, 113, 117, 123, 124, Ivy League Rumba, 109
140, 143, 147
Ideologies, 81
Illegal immigration, 33 J
Ilmar López Gavilan (Harlem Jackson, Michael, 85, 93n25, 144
Quartet), 91 Jam sessions, 66n13, 86, 102, 109
Immigration experience, 72 Jazz, 2–5, 7, 29n9, 37–40, 40n12,
“In-between” spaces, 5, 10 57, 60, 60n8, 66n13, 69,
Instagram, 122 83–90, 92–99, 93n25, 101,
Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), 91 103, 120, 123–127, 129,
Intellectual agency, 25 129n7, 132, 133, 138, 142,
Intellectual production, 23 143, 145, 159
176 Index
Jazz band, 85, 127 Los Muñequitos de Matanzas,

Jazz club scene, 94, 96 93n25, 144
Jazz festivals, 99, 127 Low profile, 59, 114
Jazz harmonies, 98 Lucía, Paco de, 86, 144
Jazz scene, 38, 60n8, 93, 96, Lyrics, 7, 10, 29, 29n9, 42, 45n15,
101, 138 57, 60, 63, 65, 77, 86, 110,
July 11th, 31, 53, 116, 148 113, 114, 138, 140, 142
L M
La Esquina de Abuela, 105 MacArthur Fellowship, 94
La novisima trova, 62 Madrid, 3, 7, 11, 45, 54, 55n2, 58,
La Peña de 13 y 8, 64 60, 60n8, 66n14, 67–69, 71,
Larramendi, Boris, 60n8, 71, 77, 80, 72, 75, 79, 82, 88, 92, 93,
127, 129n6 101, 122, 137, 140, 158
Latin America, 57, 121, 137, 141 Mainstream, vii, 3, 52, 59, 61, 62,
Latin American, 25, 62, 73, 71, 73, 112, 120, 122, 128,
103n27, 108 130, 137, 140, 143
Latin Grammys, 42, 85, 87, 97, 100, Manuel Orza, 60n8, 103n27, 104,
103, 122, 122n2, 124, 125, 126, 127
131, 132, 142 Marginal, 77, 79, 139
Latin Jazz, 38, 85, 86, 94, 96, 100, Martínez, Pedrito, 60n8, 96,
102, 108, 122, 124, 129n7 97, 99–102, 105, 108,
Latin music industry, 40 137, 138
Latin music market, 38, 122 Masó, Javier Caramelo, 60n8, 88
Latino music industry, 122, 133 Massive migration, 34, 45, 58, 79,
Latino Music Scenes, 122 139, 145
Laugart, Xiomara, 28n8, MCA, 45, 57, 58, 62
60n8, 62, 99 Medina, Jose Luis, 71
Lena, 60n8, 122n2, 137 Melón Lewis, Ivan, 128, 137
Limited visibility, 59 Miami, vii, viii, xiii, 1, 2, 5, 7, 11, 34,
Little Havana, 104 40–46, 40n12, 48, 52, 54,
Local circuits, 143 54n1, 55n2, 56, 57, 60, 60n8,
Local musicians, 56, 107 61n9, 66n14, 67, 71–75, 79,
López, Oriente, 93 80n21, 82, 83, 87, 90, 93n25,
Lopez Nusa, Harold, 146 95, 101–116, 103n27, 113n33,
Lopez Nussa, Ernán, 93 119–124, 126–129, 129n7,
Los Herederos, 103n27, 129n7, 132 131–133, 137–140, 142,
143n1, 144, 147, 158, 159
Index 177
Miami Dade County Auditorium, Music market, 2, 46, 73, 75, 102, 112,
48, 71, 74, 104, 108, 124, 126 120–122, 128, 130, 133, 143
Miami Light Project, 90, 108, 120 Music producers, 128, 131
Miami music scene, 132 Music production, viii, 2, 6, 7, 52,
Miami Sound, vii, 42, 93n25 54, 58, 60, 71, 82, 89, 110,
Middle ground, 7, 138 122, 137, 143
Migrant communities, 33 Music scenes, 39, 58–61, 64, 91,
Migrant condition, 88, 114 105, 122, 143
Migrant experiences, 77, 138 Music streaming websites, 121, 122
Milanés, Haydée, 105, 126,
137, 147
Milanés, Pablo, 57n4, 69, 115 N
Mobility, 18, 52, 114, 137, 140 Narrative construction, 21
Modernity, 10, 14–16, 19 Narratives, vii, viii, 2, 4–6, 8–11,
Montalvo, Julio, 60n8, 83, 87 14–17, 15n1, 19, 21, 22, 28–31,
Moral deterioration, 79, 139 29n9, 33, 35, 39, 41, 43, 47, 53,
Moré, Benny, 85, 87 58, 59, 64, 76–82, 85, 105, 110,
Mr. Haka, 55n2, 60n8, 66n14, 113, 116, 117, 122, 133, 136,
103n27, 111–113, 113n32, 138, 140, 141, 159
127, 129n7, 131, 138 Narratives of identity, viii, 6, 29, 141
Musical language, 52, 61, 85, 96, 97 Narrative space, 14, 17, 117
Music collaborative project, 132 Nascimento, Milton, 93n25, 144
Music collective, 67, 71, 85, 89, 125, National borders, 52
132, 133 National boundaries, 18
Music creation, 83, 106, 130, 137 National culture, 20, 21, 58, 80
Music festivals, 11, 61, 90, 99, 108 National identity, 19
Music genres, 37, 64, 85, 86, 88, 92, National imaginaries, 18, 136, 145
101, 124, 127, 143, 145, 159 Nationalism, viii, 6, 8, 11, 14–17, 15n1,
Musicianship, 69, 103, 123, 133, 19, 21, 22, 31, 36, 43, 47, 110
143, 158 Nationalist discourse, 23, 53
Music industry, 7, 41, 52, 54, 60, National myths, 14
73, 74, 110, 121, 122, National project, 26, 39, 76
133, 148 National reconciliation, 35, 110
Music labels, 75, 120 National subject, 5n1, 17, 24
Music language, 7, 88, 89, 93, 101, Nation-states, 8, 11, 15, 17, 18,
123, 129, 129n6, 130, 141, 22–26, 54, 62, 64, 66
145, 147, 158, 159 Navarrete, Brenda, 88, 105, 107,
Music-making, 57 144, 146
178 Index
Negotiations, 47, 59, 82, 110, 140, 143 Official historiography, 39

Network of musicians, 113 Official realm, 25, 26, 142
New generation, 28, 62, 147 Official revolutionary discourse, 22
New inquiries, 141 Ongoing exploration, 145
“New Man”, 5, 5n1, 8, 24, 136, 140 Ongoing negotiations, 8
“New Miami’s stage funky Open-ended fusions, 133
sound, 130 Opposition, 19, 23, 30, 31, 35, 47
New Orleans, 37, 127 Oppression, 30, 31, 48, 148
New Throned King, 96–98 Orishas, 46, 116
New type of Cuban song, 137
New York, xiii, 2, 3, 7, 11, 38, 42, 45,
52, 54, 55n2, 60, 60n8, 66n14, P
67, 90–96, 98, 99, 101, 122, Páez, Fito, 93n25, 144
128–131, 137, 138, 140, 158 Paredes, Osmany, 60n8, 83, 92, 98
NG La Banda, 93 Patria y Vida, 60, 116, 131, 147
1990s, viii, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 29, 29n9, Patriotism, 22, 31–36, 43, 117
34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 52, 53, People-to-people, 55
55, 58, 60, 63, 66, 70, 72, 74, Pérez, Alain, 60n8, 82, 84, 86–90,
76, 78, 82, 83, 85, 88, 91–93, 105, 115, 137
99, 109, 110, 121, 123, 125, Perez, Tony, 83, 104
127, 129n7, 133, 137, Person-to-person exchanges, 122
139–141, 143, 145, 158, 159 Plural cultural spaces, 5
1990s crisis, viii, 5, 29, 34, 55, 66, Poetic narrative, 62
78, 88, 139, 140 Political acts, 44, 109
North Band Shell, 105, 108, 147 Political confrontation, 19
Nostalgic cohorts, 107 Political disenchantment, 35
Nostalgic fans, 73 Political freedom, 78
Nube Negra, 67, 71 Political manipulations, 63n10, 76
Nueva trova, 45, 45n15, 57, 57n4, Political persecution, 48
60, 62, 63, 65, 69n15, 77 Political power, 24
Nuviola, Aymée, 127, 137 Political prisoners, 30, 47, 78
Politicized, 116
Popular Cuban music, 137
O Popular music, 36, 38, 39, 41, 59,
Ochoa, Kelvis, 71 64, 65, 71, 86, 92–94, 138
Official cultural establishment, 62 Postcolonial, viii, 4, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16,
Official discourse, 5, 8, 23, 28, 33, 27, 100, 116, 141
57, 63, 64, 77, 136, 138, 140 Postmodern condition, 16
Index 179
Post-modern sensibility, 11 Romero, Yotuel, 116, 131, 148

Post national, viii, 4, 6, 8, 10, 53, 57 Rubalcaba, Gonzalo, 40n12, 66n14,
Post-national imaginary, 52 83, 93, 96, 101, 122–125,
Post socialist, viii, 4, 10, 63, 80 124n4, 128, 133, 137, 138
Post-revolutionary, 77, 116, Ruiz, Pepe, 88
140, 142–144
Power relationships, 9, 21
Prieto, Dafnis, 60n8, 66n14, 91–96, S
99, 122n2, 137, 138 Sacred chants, 97
Protest songs, 45n15, 62 Salsa, 87, 93, 132
Public performances, 30 Santa, Melvis, 91, 92, 99, 101, 105,
137, 147
Scholars, viii, 4, 10, 28, 35, 108,
R 116, 141
Recent migrants, 2, 11, 113 Sé Feliz, 129
Reception, 54, 73–75, 84, 126 Self-made musicians, 145
Reconciliation, 28, 114 Self-produced, 121
Recording industry, 67 Semiotic construction, 143
Recordings, 10, 41, 90, 93, 93n25, Sentido, Sexto, 89, 146
94, 96, 122, 129, 137, 143 Silences, viii, 14, 39, 44
Recording sessions, 60, 140 Singers, 3, 42, 45, 58, 60n8, 62, 64,
Relocation, 45, 57, 67, 137 65, 66n13, 67, 69, 69n15,
Remittances, 44, 47 101, 137, 138, 140, 144–146
Renaissance, 28, 29, 93, 96, Social concerns, 65, 77
133, 138 Social construction, 5n1, 14
Repertoire, 62, 65, 85 Social landscape, 18, 112
Repression, 14, 25, 31, 35, 53, 115, Socialism, 27, 28, 35, 63, 116
117, 120 Socialist bureaucrats, 64
Restrictions, 40, 40n13, 41, 44, Social media, 2, 16, 30, 32, 101,
47–49, 105, 113 103, 116, 130, 143
Revolutionary nation, 5, 8, 76, 136 Social movements, 31
Rhythm Foundation, 108 Social networks, 121, 122, 137
Rigorous curriculum, 91 Social relationships, 18
Rodriguez, Albita, 43, 144 Socio-economic context, 64
Rodríguez, Alfredo, 91, 99, 105, Socio-economic disparities, 63
108, 109, 147 Son, 1, 29n9, 37, 38, 65, 65n12, 88,
Rodríguez, Arsenio, vii, 59n5, 87 99, 127, 145
Rodríguez, Silvio, 57n4, 69 Song movements, 45, 57, 63, 145
180 Index
Songs, 7, 45n15, 57, 62, 65, 65n12, Thelonious Monk, 93n25, 144
66n13, 113, 115, 129–131, Timba, 7, 29, 41, 59, 60, 63, 65,
137, 145, 158, 159 84–89, 100, 101, 112, 129n7,
Songwriters, viii, 3–6, 45, 52, 54, 130, 133, 142, 143, 145, 159
55n2, 57–59, 60n8, 62–67, Tolerance, 80, 114
69, 71, 72, 69n15, 72n16, Torrens, David, 53, 74, 108
75–77, 80, 82, 88, 101, 110, Tosca, Axel, 92, 99
126, 129, 136–138, 140, Tourism, 27, 29, 41, 44, 55, 63
143–146, 158 Tourist industry, 29n9, 65
Songwriting, 129 Traditional exile, 32–35, 40, 42,
Sosa, Omar, 89, 91, 101, 122n2, 137 47, 53, 105
Sound legacy, 130 Traditional exile community, 34, 40,
Soundscapes, 132, 145 42, 47, 105
“Sovietization”, 35 Traditional politics, 53, 115
Spain, 43, 55, 60n8, 67, 71–73, 75, Traditional trova, 65
78n19, 81, 82, 84–86, 88, 94, Transcultural pathway, 133
121, 128 Transculturation, 20, 21, 85
Special Period, 27, 27n7, 74, Transnational context, 6, 10, 36, 43,
76, 80n21 101, 117, 140
State control, 45 Transnational creatives, 61
Stefan, Gloria, 144 Transnational Cuban Alternative
Symptoms of exile, 80 Music Scene, vii, 6, 67, 137
Transnational cultural
production, 140
T Transnational experience, 37, 45
Taking the Soul for a Walk, 94 Transnational imaginaries, 136
TCAMS, 6, 7, 52–54, 58, 60–63, Transnationalism, viii, 6, 10, 17, 18,
60n8, 65, 69, 71, 74, 76, 78, 85, 18n2, 36–49
86, 88–90, 93, 99, 101–110, Transnationalization, viii, 5, 7, 59,
103n27, 115–117, 120–123, 89, 141, 147, 159
122n2, 125, 126, 128–133, Transnational music scene,
129n6, 129n7, 137, 138, 140, 5, 54, 110
141, 143, 145, 147, 158, 159 Transnational network, viii, 4–6, 17,
Telmary, 66n14, 81, 105, 107, 18, 29, 31, 49, 83, 89, 137,
115, 136–138 140, 143
Terry, Yosvany, 66n14, 68, 70, 74, Trans-territoriality, 4, 54
91–94, 96–99, 122n2, 128, Travel ban, 42
137, 138 Triana, Borges, 45, 57, 58, 140
Index 181
Tropical music, 87, 125 Vedado Social Club, 105

Trova tradicional, 69 Venues, 2, 11, 25, 39–41, 47, 54,
Trujillo, Ariacne, 99, 137 57, 61, 73, 74, 80, 86, 93, 99,
Tumbaos, 84, 87, 112 101, 102, 105, 107n29, 108,
Tumi Music, 125, 126 125, 127, 130
Turning point, 9, 26, 85, 147 Villafranca, Elio, 91, 92,
21st century, vii, 5, 6, 9, 90, 98, 109, 101, 122n2
127, 145, 147 Virelles, David, 91, 92, 99, 101
Virtual communities, 17
Voces de un Trayecto, 72, 72n16
U
Uncertainties, 46, 48, 66, 81
Underground, 29, 30, 45, 57, 73, W
103n27, 129n7, 130, 143 West African music, 88
United States, 21, 23, 34n11, 38, 40, Western music, 61, 120
47, 55, 57, 74, 115, 120, 137 World cities, 45, 58, 75, 106, 137,
Unknown, 40, 60 143, 158
Unprejudiced, 77, 124, 133, 138 World exposure, 124
Urban music, 99 World music, 41, 42, 59, 67, 68, 75,
Urquiza, Pavel, 60n8, 66n14, 71, 83, 85, 87, 94, 107, 120, 121,
72n16, 114, 125, 127, 128, 137 125–127, 133, 141, 145
U.S. academia, 2 World music market, 42, 59
U.S. bilateral policy, 32
U.S.-Cuba relationship, 39
U.S. embargo, 27, 40, 47 X
U.S. market, 48 X Alfonso, 48, 88
Utopia, 9, 16, 19, 26, 28, 77, 140
Y
V Yerbabuena, 47, 99, 129, 129n7, 130
Valdés, Bebo, vii, 87, 95 YouTube, 66n14, 122, 130
Valdés, Chucho, 83, 93n25, 99 Yusa, 66n14, 104, 107, 114, 122,
Van Van, 40n12, 47, 93, 120, 144 122n2, 125–128, 129n6, 133,
Varela, Carlos, 28n8, 47, 62, 137, 138
63n10, 69 Yusa Records, 126

Cuban Fusion

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cuban Fusion

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cuban Fusion

The Transnational Cuban

Eva Silot Bravo

“An invaluable study of Cuban music making in diaspora. Based on extensive

“Cuban Fusion is an urgently needed corrective to the long-held, narrow view

ISBN 978-3-031-53691-5 ISBN 978-3-031-53692-2 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com

Paper in this product is recyclable.

first-generation migrant, single mother, cultural promoter and curator,

Oakland, CA, USA Eva Silot Bravo

To Elegguá, Yemayá, my saints, ancestors, and spirits.

3 Cubanidad “in-between”: The Transnational Cuban

Negotiating Post-Soviet Narratives 76

5 Conclusions: Cuban Fusion Music Across Borders135

County Auditorium, Miami, FL, 2016. Photo Courtesy of

Abstract The Introduction recounts the author’s motivation to study

Keywords Cubanidad • Transnationalism • Post-Soviet generation

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 1

defected from a fascinating and personally challenging job as a Cuban

I knew that Cuban migrant artists transitioned from a moment when

“in-between” spaces, which I call Cubanidad in-between, that deconstruct

migration at the end of the twentieth century. It also proposes future

an array of generational local and global music references beyond genre

theoretical approaches grounded in sociology, anthropology, migrant

“identificatory” myth has become an obstacle to the performance of plu-

important aesthetic and generational shifts in the 1990s as a period of

the “Manuel Saumell” conservatory of music in Havana, Cuba, in the

Abstract This chapter provides a historical contextualization of the pro-

Keywords Cuban cultural politics • Cuban diasporic imaginaries •

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 13

 ationalism Revisited at the Turn

negotiation across the globe. Virtual communities became relevant actors

creation of hybrid identities that challenge the image of the nation as a

Cuba as an Imagined National Community

Constitution. However, the demagogic moral emphasis of this utopian

transculturation is a useful conceptual framework to think about the rela-

Cultural Politics of the Nation-State

This top-down political process led to the adoption of a highly ideologi-

a documentary about Cuban nightlife by filmmakers Saba Cabrera and

censorship, and several documented acts of discrimination, silencing, and

geography as ultimately determinant. Cuba is conceived as a coherent

 he “Special Period”: The Deconstruction

Around 80% of the revolutionary Cuban economy was subsidized by

Cuban government adopted a strategy of survival to perpetuate itself in

Afro Cuban religious practices and art expressions, despite ambivalent

increased surveillance of dissidents, providing the Ministry of Culture

 he Transnational Space: Por un “patriotismo

expresses a sense of homeland as a fixed place of attachment and has

unauthorized migrants captured by the US Coast Guard before reaching

Studying intellectual and artistic expressions of the Cuban diaspora, in

within that community in terms of how to imagine and perform notions

Moments of Transnationalism in Cuban Music

Cuban music has a transnational trajectory that informs the construc-

The above-mentioned musical genres also had a great influence on US

popularized by many other Cuban and Latino musicians as groundbreak-

had to assimilate as they couldn’t or didn’t want to go back to the island,

became available in US stores nationwide. I witnessed many of these

represented by these artists, promoted a radical nationalism by explicitly

Cuban music after 1959. Cepeda points to the existence of “hegemonic

Those measures have been part of a gradual and ambivalent system of

of how to operate in the global music market. They faced a dramatic

The changing perceptions of those living in the diaspora, developments in

After decades of mutual prohibitions and isolation, and in the after-

Oakland, CA, USA Eva Silot Bravo

3 Cubanidad “in-between”: The Transnational Cuban

Negotiating Post-Soviet Narratives 76

5 Conclusions: Cuban Fusion Music Across Borders135

ationalism Revisited at the Turn

Cuba as an Imagined National Community

Cultural Politics of the Nation-State

he “Special Period”: The Deconstruction

he Transnational Space: Por un “patriotismo

Moments of Transnationalism in Cuban Music

Alternative Music in Cuba After 1959

Habana Abierta: Alternative Cuban Trova

Mapping Music Reception

Negotiating Post-Soviet Narratives

Cuban Fusion: Timba Style

Ivan Melón Lewis: Cosmopolitan Cuban jazz

Alain Pérez—Timba–Cuban Jazz Fusion

Dafnis Prieto: Intertextuality in Cuban Jazz

Yosvany Terry: Redefining Afro-Cuban Jazz

edrito Martínez: African Diaspora Music

Mapping TCAMS: Miami Style