The story
Festival de Rap Cubano in Havana
Launched in 1995 by the East Havana collective Grupo Uno and the state youth organisation Asociacion Hermanos Saiz, the Festival de Rap Cubano gave Cuban hip-hop, born from bootlegged Miami radio broadcasts picked up in Alamar, its first public stage. The festival ran for a decade, most famously when Amenaza, later Orishas, fused bata drumming with rap in 1996, before the AHS disbanded it in 2006.
Cuban hip-hop began as an accident of geography: in the 1980s, young residents of the East Havana housing district of Alamar built homemade antennas to pull in Miami radio stations broadcasting rap and R&B, and a generation of mostly Black Cuban listeners turned imitation into a genre of its own.