Havana Cultura: ¡Súbelo, Cuba!

The West likes to glibly glamourise Cuba, keeping it doing a shimmying dance in aspic. The reality is more complex and confusing; the culture is a clutter of old legacies and new imports. Havana Cultura shines a light down the underlit, drug-hawking backstreets of 21st-century Havana and into its fast-evolving club culture. Afro-Cuban rhythms and vocals underpin the 13 tracks, but resisting its excitable, over-familiar energies are trancey electro beats on ‘Diáspora’, featuring Negro WadPro, old-school synths on ‘EnciÉndelo’, with DJ Jigüe & Yissy García and a cod-apocalyptic voiceover on ‘Traketeo’, featuring Luz de Cuba. The island's long isolation from the world's musical mainstreams has diminished as Cubans travel more, hook up to social media and plunder the internet, yet it continues to mutate its musical genes. Cuban rappers never sound as pissed off as Americans. Smooth son motifs and sentimentality surface all the time. Full of both peaks and pastiches, this sampler evinces a certain amount of cultural confusion but lots of home-spun creativity.