Rap fans may be disappointed that there's not more of their favorite form of music in Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal's handsome documentary about the burgeoning, largely underground Cuban hip-hop scene, but that's the point. While the film sets out to help change outsiders perceptions of Cuban life — as one artist profiled puts it, they're not just the mulatto girl, the old man with the cigar or the folk-music loving, rhumba dancing partiers — it reaffirms tragic image of Cuba as an economically devastated island where artistic freedom continues to be restricted by the state.
The title refers to the town of Alamar, an impoverished enclave of peeling, pastel-painted cement housing blocks and small, dilapidated homes located just east of the Cuban capital. Like the poor neighborhoods of the Bronx and South Central L.A. in the 1980s, the mixture of poverty, boredom and despair that was rampant throughout Cuba in the time euphemistically referred to as the "Special Period" — the years following the end of the Soviet Union when economic support Russia disappeared and the U.S. embargo was simultaneously tightened — proved to be the perfect catalyst for a vibrant hip-hop scene. Alamar is now generally considered to be the birthplace of Cuban rap. Saizarbitoria and Menocal focus on three aspiring rappers from Alamar in the weeks leading up to the August, 2004, International Festival of Rap Cubano. In the absence of record deals, radio play and distribution channels for their recordings, the Festival has become the most important venue for aspiring rappers to reach a wider audience both within Cuba and without: In recent years, it's attracted artists from countries like Venezuela, Canada and even the U.S. The film follows artists Soandres Del Rio Ferrer, Magyori Martinez Veitia and Michael "Mikki Flow" Hermida, whose brother left Cuba for New York in 1994 — three solo rappers who are also part of a larger posse know as "El Cartel — as they gear up for the coming festival, but it soon becomes clear that rapping is just a small part of their daily struggle to get by in a country with dwindling options. These hardships, in turn, inform their often politically charged lyrics. However, a coming hurricane — and the state's insistence of seeing their lyrics before they're performed onstage at the Festival — threaten to put a serious crimp in their plans.
Like a third generation BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, another film ostensibly devoted to a musical subculture, EAST OF HAVANA manages to convey the reality of life in Cuba nearly 50 years after the revolution and, most affecting of all, the pain of families still senselessly divided by such poor relations with the U.S. The picture is pretty bleak, but it's interesting how the spirit of revolution survives in a young generation who not only exhibit a kind of uniquely Cuban form of collectivism when it comes to creating music, but dare to dream of taking control of their own futures when older generations — and the state — fail them. leave a comment --Ken Fox