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Orishas' success has given hip-hop a sheen of legitimacy and energized the island's small but fervent rap community. In the past few years, some 200 rap groups have sprung up in and around Havana, bearing names like Obsesion (Obsession), Reyes de la Calle (Kings of the Street) and Anonimo Consejo (Anonymous Advice). Many of them hail from tough neighborhoods of Havana or Alamar, a town of 300,000 mostly Afro-Cubans living in concrete high-rises originally built to house Soviet laborers in the 1970s. Working with budgets so small they probably wouldn't be enough to cover the cost of gassing up one of Jay-Z's SUVs, Havana's raperos have scratched their own thriving world out of nothing, much as America's first rappers did in the Bronx in the early 1980s.
Rapper Alexei Rodriguez, 28, who with his wife Mahia Lopez, 28, forms the highly popular duo Obsesion, says that "hip-hop is growing quickly. It's a way young people have of expressing what's inside." Many of the new rappers grew up in the so-called special period. After the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Cuba was economically squeezed, leading the government to crack down on small-time black marketeers, a move some felt hit Cubans of color harder than whites. One of Grandes Ligas' raps asks, "Why do you stop me, Mr. Policeman? Is it because my skin is black?"
Hip-hop circled the globe during the mid-1990s. Why did it take so long to get a foothold in Cuba, the richly musical culture that gave the world rumba and mambo? "Hip-hop everywhere else has one reality. We have another," explains Ariel Fernandez, 24, a DJ, organizer of Alamar's annual summer rap festival and a central figure in Havana hip-hop. Fernandez couldn't be more right: Cuba's record industry is entirely government run, from the recording studios to the record stores. Which means that raperos, like bus drivers, hotel clerks and doctors and lawyers, work for the state. And state bureaucracies never move quickly; Cuban officials were slow to recognize the commercial potential of homegrown hip-hop. Indeed, the members of Orishas became so frustrated that they relocated to Europe when a French producer offered them a contract. Their album A Lo Cubano sold more than 400,000 copies in Europe and spawned countless bootlegs in Cuba. Orisha member Ruzzo says, "Cuba is still my home, but when you are offered a record contract, you take it."
Part of the cultural resistance to hip-hop has to do with the music's do-it-yourself style. Musicianship in Cuba is traditionally measured purely by formal skill. Even the players working the lounges of Havana hotels are stunningly accomplished. Older Cubans, accustomed to salsa, have difficulty accepting rap as music.
Access to recording studios is also well out of reach for the average Cuban, who takes home about $20 a month. Even the prices for a boom box and a turntable--the two launching pads of the U.S. hip-hop explosion--are prohibitively high. So only a few raperos have had the privilege of actually making a CD. Cuban rap thus evolved first as a live art form. "Hip-hop is not a good business here yet," admits Fernandez. "Very few people can afford to buy the CDs, and most of the clubs can only charge a $1 cover, which doesn't yield enough to pay a rapper and stay in business long." The rappers of Grandes Ligas make ends meet by living at home with their parents.