I was in the back of an almendrón last August, riding from Vedado to Centro Habana, when the driver — a man in his sixties wearing a guayabera and chain-smoking — put on a reggaeton track I had never heard before. By the time we reached Línea, I had recognized that the entire car was singing along. There were six of us in the back of that Lada. None of us knew each other. All of us knew the song. The song had not been released yet. The song is not yet on Spotify, eleven months later. The song was being passed person-to-person on memory sticks and via Bluetooth and via the messenger services that work intermittently when the internet works at all.
This is the thing about Cuban reggaeton right now that the international coverage does not yet have a good way to describe. The music is moving through a distribution system that is mostly invisible from outside the island. The streaming platforms have very partial coverage of what is actually being made and listened to. The records that get released internationally are often a year or two behind what is circulating on the island. The artists who are most popular in Havana are sometimes artists who have never had a single Spotify play.
What the music actually sounds like
The current generation of Cuban reggaeton — the music being made by the producers in their twenties and thirties who are working out of home studios in Havana, Santa Clara, and Holguín — has moved a substantial distance from the reggaeton sound that the genre carried in its 2000s phase. The tempos are slower in some quarters and faster in others. The harmonic vocabulary has expanded in ways that draw on Cuban traditional music, on trap, on dancehall, and on a kind of synthesized R&B that I do not have a good name for.
The lyrical content is harder to characterize because the variation is wide. There is the explicit party-and-club content that has always been part of the genre. There is a more reflective strand that I associate with several younger producers, in which the songs are essentially small narrative pieces about specific aspects of daily life — the queue at the bank, the cousin in Madrid, the girlfriend who is leaving for Miami, the hustle that is not working. There is also a strand that I would describe as harder-edged social commentary, which is the strand that has produced some of the most-talked-about songs of the past couple of years and which is also the strand that has produced the most institutional friction.
The production has gotten substantially more sophisticated, in part because the equipment available to home producers has improved and in part because the producers themselves are talented in ways that should make the genre take notice internationally. The vocals are increasingly processed in interesting ways. The percussion is doing things that the older reggaeton template did not have room for. The sample selection is drawing on a wider repertoire of Cuban music, including son and timba and the church music that nobody outside Cuba thinks of as a major influence and that turns out to be a major influence anyway.
What the old guard says
I had dinner last month with two musicians I have known for years, both of whom are in their sixties, both of whom have spent their lives in Cuban traditional music. One is a tres player who has performed in the orchestras of two of the most important son groups of the past forty years. The other is a singer who I will not name because she is more famous than the tres player and what she said was less circumspect.
What the tres player said was that he did not love the current reggaeton, but that he had stopped being annoyed by it, because he had finally listened carefully and had heard that the kids who were making it actually knew the music their grandparents had played. He said you could hear the son in it. You could hear the rumba in the percussion. You could hear the church in some of the vocal lines. He said that the surface of it sounded foreign to him but that the underneath of it was the underneath of Cuban music, which made it Cuban music, even if it did not sound like the Cuban music he had grown up making.
What the singer said was less generous. She said that most of it was garbage and that the lyrics offended her and that the kids did not know what they were doing. She also said, after the third glass of wine, that some of it was actually pretty good and that there was a song her granddaughter played her the previous week that she had not been able to stop thinking about, and that she was annoyed at herself for liking the song. She named the song. I have not stopped listening to the song either.
This is, I think, the more common position among the older generation of Cuban musicians I have spoken to. Public dismissal, private grudging respect for the talented producers, occasional outright admiration for specific songs or specific artists. The tres player's position — public, considered respect for the underlying continuity — is rarer but is not unheard of.
The institutional friction
The relationship between Cuban reggaeton and Cuban institutions has been complicated for the past decade and has gotten more complicated in the past few years. The state radio and television apparatus has had a difficult time figuring out which artists to give airtime to and which to leave off the rotation. The institutions of cultural promotion have made several attempts to fold the reggaeton scene into the broader cultural infrastructure with mixed results.
Some artists have found arrangements that work. They have moved between independent production and various forms of institutional engagement in ways that have allowed them to keep working. Other artists have had a more contentious relationship with the institutions, with periods of unofficial restriction followed by periods of return followed by further friction. The specifics vary case by case and I am not going to detail individual cases here because the situations change quickly and I do not want to publish something that is out of date by next week.
What I can say is that the friction has not slowed the music down in any visible way. The home-studio infrastructure is robust. The peer-to-peer distribution system reaches more listeners than the official channels would in any case. The artists who matter to the audience are the artists the audience listens to, regardless of which institutions have what relationship to them.
What the international coverage gets wrong
The English-language coverage of Cuban reggaeton, when it appears, tends to do one of two things. It either treats the genre as a curiosity — a footnote to the global reggaeton boom, included for color in pieces that are really about Bad Bunny or whoever else is dominating the streaming charts that month. Or it treats the genre as an opposition narrative, with the artists framed primarily as commentators on Cuban political conditions and the music itself relegated to background.
Neither framing captures what the music actually is. The music is, first and most importantly, music. It is being made with substantial craft by people who care about the music itself. It is being listened to by an audience that is responding to the music itself. The politics are there — Cuba is Cuba and you cannot write a song about an empty refrigerator without the politics being implicit — but the politics are not the substance. The substance is the music.
I keep thinking that the international coverage will catch up. The producers who are doing the most interesting work right now will eventually get the attention their work deserves. The international audience will eventually hear the music with the same ears that the audience in the back of that almendrón heard it. It may take five years. It may take ten. The music will still be there when the attention arrives.
What the older generation will eventually concede
I think the tres player is right and I think the singer will, eventually and grudgingly, agree with him. The current reggaeton generation is making music that is part of the Cuban tradition, not separate from it. The continuity is real. The kids are not betraying the music their grandparents made. They are doing what every generation of Cuban musicians has done, which is to take what came before and remake it for the world they are actually living in.
The music my grandmother loved sounded foreign to her grandmother. The music my mother loved sounded foreign to my grandmother. The music my younger cousins love sounds foreign to my mother. The continuity is in the foreignness, not in spite of it. The next thing always sounds wrong until it doesn't. The wrongness is the sound of the tradition continuing to be alive.
I am going back to Havana in three weeks. I will ride in the back of an almendrón. The driver will play whatever he plays. Someone in the back will know all the words. The song will not be on Spotify. I will write it down. I will, eventually, find the producer. The music is happening whether the rest of the world has noticed yet or not.
