Roberto Zurbano, La Habana, Cuba:
In his keynote for the symposium #hiphophavanaberlin, Roberto Zurbano situates Cuban hip-hop in the transnational context of Paul Gilroy´s Black Atlantic, arguing that the genre is part of the Afro-diasporic musical flows that have shaped popular music in Cuba and the Caribbean since the seventeenth century. Emphasizing the political agenda of hip-hop, it is argued here that the issue of racial discrimination entered the Cuban public debate of the 21st century thanks to the openly anti-racist critique of hip-hop culture. A closer examination of three decades of Cuban hip-hop identifies different models of ideo-aesthetic expression that emerged on the island and in the Cuban diaspora.