SPRING 2026
ISSUE 06

₁ Casas de Cultura are state-run, community-based cultural centers that were first established by the Cuban Ministry of Culture in the 1970s.

₂ A neighborhood gathering featuring rumba music and dance, typically in the street or in the courtyard of a multi-family housing complex.

₃ Cuban slang for a street or house party.

₄ “Special Period” refers to a period of economic crisis in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

₅ A type of improvised jam session that first emerged in Cuba in the 1950s, influenced by jazz and featuring styles such as son, rumba, bolero, guaracha, and guajira.

₆ Sea wall on the shore of Havana.

₇ A yuma is a foreigner, typically but not necessarily from the United States.

₈ National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, a professional organization founded in 1961.

₉ A jinetero is a hustler; literally translates as “jockey.”

₁₀ A high-pitched, plucked string instrument used in various Spanish and Latin American musical traditions.

₁₁ The term reparto refers to a working-class Cuban neighborhood and is also the name of an urban music style that emerged in Havana in the 2010s.

₁₂ Paquete semanal is an informal system of offline digital media circulation that emerged in Cuba in the late 2000s.

₁₃ Cuban slang for “what’s up.”

This piece condenses several longer conversations with Tony Hernandez, a former professional musician and a self-described “amateur historian” of Cuba’s urban music movements. 

Tony’s account begins with his childhood in the working-class Havana neighborhood of Lawton in the 1980s and 1990s. He recalls family stories about the years before and after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, a period of rapid social transformation driven by worker and tenant self-activity. Like many Cubans, he remembers the post-Soviet “Special Period” of the 1990s as a time of both hardship and solidarity. His adult working life coincided with the liberalization of the Cuban national economy in the late 1990s and 2000s, a period marked by an expanding tourism sector and shadow economy. He describes his experience of informal worker control over the speed of production in a state-run steel plant amidst a boom in hotel construction. In the evenings, he began earning tips as a musician on a bustling corner where queer people, sex workers, foreigners, street vendors, and other performers converged. After moving to the United States with his wife Tori, he lived in several cities and took various manual labor jobs, through which he developed relationships with coworkers across racial and linguistic lines. After settling down in New York City, an unlikely reunion with an old bandmate from Havana led him to resume a professional music career. Since retiring from gigging to care for his daughter, he has undertaken a variety of cultural and political projects. Along with his brother Pablo, he runs Radio Ragga Morffa, a multimedia digital platform for documenting and promoting Cuba’s urban music scene. Recently, he campaigned for Zohran Mamdani during his run for mayor, while grappling with the political disillusionment of Black Caribbean neighbors in East Flatbush. 

Tony’s account highlights moments of camaraderie, drudgery, and pleasure that will be familiar to anyone who has worked for a living – even as these memories reflect his particular idiosyncratic journey through disparate workplaces and neighborhoods across Havana, Nashville, and New York City, and the specific historical contexts of Cuban late socialism and US racial capitalism. Music figures in his life story as a constant source of passion and conviviality, whether performed for pay or on time off, and heard with kin, coworkers, or strangers. Marked by a spirit of curiosity, humility, and open-mindedness, Tony’s narrative demonstrates a deeply egalitarian understanding of the creative capacities of everyday people and a social sensibility that strives to engage with them wherever they might appear.

My father was from Cienfuegos. My mother always tells me that she was born in Habana Vieja but she lived with my grandmother in Las Yaguas. At some point, maybe when she was with my father, my grandmother said, “You have to have your own place.” So they built another little house there. Some of my brothers and sisters were born in Las Yaguas. It was an important cultural place – my mother said that Tata Güines, a really big conga player, was always hanging out there in Las Yaguas. When I was ten years old, my mother took me to the empty field where Las Yaguas used to be, and I remember seeing some floor tiles in the grass from the houses that used to be there. It was cool to see, but at that point it didn’t represent that much for me. 

After the Revolution, the government gave the people the right to build their own houses in other neighborhoods. My grandmother built a house in Lumumba, which is named after the African revolutionary. Lumumba, Caballo Blanco, and Vista Alegre are three neighborhoods that owe their existence to the construction work of people from Las Yaguas. But my mother had so many kids, and my father, at that point, was cutting cane in the big campaign undertaken by the Revolution. So my mother was not able to take part in the construction. But because of the Revolution, she was given a house in the neighborhood of Lawton. That house must have belonged to a rich person before the Revolution because it was huge. I didn’t realize at that point, but we were living in a paradise. We had so many trees – fruit trees, you know, like mangoes, plantains, avocado, mamey, soursop, lemon, guava, pineapple, capulin, tamarind, coconut. It was a paradise. We didn’t understand that at the time. We thought everybody must have this!

I realized later that my house was like a Casa de Cultura.¹ People would train in casino dance or play conga. Every Sunday my father and brother and people around the neighborhood would play rumba. There was a guy, Pedro Lugo Martinez, that used to sing in Los Jóvenes Clásicos del Son. We would just sing there, on the porch outside. It’s a rumba peña, improvising.² People that were Black and poor would come. They cared about that. Other people did not. Other people would see us and be like, “Ugh, what the fuck is this?”

In 1988, my mother bought me a little radio, a Russian radio that had good reception. We would take it to the beach, put up the antenna, and listen to the radio from Miami. We would go to Bacuranao beach, the beach of the poor people, and we’d hear Black North American music, or salsa, like the station Super Q. There were DJs in Lawton called El Nene and Moreira, who would play reggae and dancehall. We’d record music from the radio and play it at the bonches³ on Saturdays, even with the DJ of 99 Jamz talking over the music. That created a movement, which was really strong in Lawton. We listened to this DJ in Miami named Clint O’Neil. I spent so many nights listening to that guy without knowing what he was saying. The biggest rock ’n’ roll party in Lawton happened at my house too. The whole block was full of people. There were so many people dancing that when they kicked up the dirt, it looked like a smoke machine. The police came to stop that party.

I remember that in the Special Period we had a lot of blackouts.⁴ And somebody would just start singing and then others would join in. I could not tell you why. We called it a descarga.⁵ We’d just be sitting there, and my mother starts singing a song. And when her song is done, my sister sings one, and then they jump into another. It was like this conversation. People say things to each other, singing boleros, you know? I think that disappeared from Cuba. I don’t know if the entire country did that, but I know that families as poor as mine in Lumumba would do it. If I went to Caballo Blanco, where all my family members were, they would too. When they got drunk, they would sing. I don’t know why people don’t do it now. I’m sure that if one day it is late at night and the electricity goes away, some people in Lawton would still sing. I don’t know why those moments come, why the people decide to sing when the electricity goes away. It was sad not to have electricity, but it was fun to hang out with family. I do remember that, as the country was getting out of the Special Period, families became distant. People started getting separated.

In the morning, you were given a paper that said what you had to do that day. Some people rushed because they wanted to go out to the cafeteria or something. You always had plenty of time to do a job, but we would slow it down. I remember my friend would be like, “Let’s walk,” “Let’s go do this,” or, “Oh, I think this girl wants to talk to you.” And I was young, and my feeling was like, “I’m not working, I’m doing other shit.” I was walking, talking to the girls. They controlled the quality of the finished product. They didn’t control if you were working or not working.

The company would realize we were behind and contract us for the afternoon. Then we’re flying because we know that we are getting more money. So we move. We actually want to leave early because it’s about finishing this job. It could be dark, and we are still cutting things. And the boss knows, like, “You motherfuckers fly here in the afternoon, why don’t you fly like that in the morning?” But the boss also knows that if you have a number of pieces that you have to get out in the morning, and you usually get 90 pieces – if you make 180, the people that write those numbers are going to change that, and then you will have to work more. Instead, everybody works just on time, like, on count – tick, tick, tick, tick. You only rush when somebody tells you this is late. When I had to hammer, when I had to mark the points, it was tedious work to do, so I would adjust it into, like, music, you know. I would create a rhythm, just, like, do these repetitive things with a tempo. In the afternoon, you just fly, fly. You’re not flying because you want to get it out. You fly because you want to leave.

Around that time, I started learning to play the bongó. I was teaching myself and learning with other percussionists from the street. I listened to a lot of son music, Cuban traditional music, in order to learn parts. I started playing with real musicians that I knew from Lawton, from my neighborhood. And I started playing with a son band from Centro Habana. We all had the dream of going to Europe and then coming back to Cuba. We would practice in the afternoon after I’d get out from work. On some weekends, we would have a little show at a place called Casa de la Trova, on San Lázaro. We were trying to get a license from the government, and oh man, that was a struggle.

The band had been playing at night at the Malecón.⁶ I still remember my first day as the new guy that had just joined the band. Malecón and 23rd was the corner where all the trans and homosexual people went. And when I went there, I was like, “Where did you guys bring me to?” They were like, “Hey, relax, we’re here every day, nothing happens.” There were a lot of tourists there. People would gravitate to that place after events finished. It was a business thing there too. Like, prostitution, drugs. In the beginning, I thought, “I just want to play my music, get my money, and go.” But after some time, I said to myself, “There is nothing weird here, these people are talking, having fun, drinking, this is a party.” I started connecting with some of the homosexual guys who would bring tourists to us or would call the band over. After a while, it felt like that was my home. I was so comfortable there. And that was the first time in my life that I was able to talk to homosexuals, to prostitutes. I’ve always been a person who wants to understand things. The prostitutes were men and women, and many were from other provinces. The girls would tell crazy stories – things like, “This yuma wants to do it without a condom,” or whatever.⁷ I talked to the people that were selling peanuts, flowers. I played there for a long time, and I made the most money that I made in my entire life in Cuba. I would make in one night what I made in a whole month at Cubana de Acero.

Some nights when we were playing, the police would come and be like, “ID, ID, ID, let’s go. You cannot play there without a license, blah, blah, blah.” We never got a ticket, but they would take us to the police station and keep us there for a few hours. I remember one time that they kept our instruments for three or four days. The day after, we started calling each other, like, “What are we gonna do?” But Giovanni, one of the members of the band, his father used to work in La UNEAC.⁸ So he went there, and he talked to the boss of the police station, and they gave us the instruments back.

Oh man, I was so used to those police trucks. It could be at any moment. I could be in Habana Vieja, walking or whatever, and they would put me in the truck. They’d just see you, like, “You are brown, you are Black, you are a jinetero, let’s go.”⁹ It could be any random person. I saw people that were working – you could see by their clothing that they were working in construction – or people with a bag of groceries or whatever. I took the police truck so many times, it was like I was taking the bus. And I always understood why this was happening. It was the change from a comfortable country, a socially comfortable country, to being a capitalistic country open to tourism. A bunch of tourists were coming to Centro Habana, Vedado, Habana Vieja. People would grab their bags and run or try to sell them cigars or whatever. So the strategy of the country was to scare everybody and keep people out of the street in the tourist areas.

I met my wife Tori on that corner of Malecón and 23rd. She was a student coming from the United States to take a summer class on Cuban culture and history. That day we were not working, we were playing guitar and singing, just hanging out and talking to people. I talked for a while with Tori, and we decided to see each other two nights later and share CDs. We started building a connection. After she left, we emailed and sent letters, and she called me on my neighbor’s phone. She came back to visit in the summers. After talking like that for years, we got engaged and I got my visa to come to the United States.

Later I got a job with this company where we laid the fiber optic in the ground for AT&T. We laid the concrete and put in the cabinet and cables. I felt good with my coworkers, even though they were different from me. Hunters, fishermen, mostly from Nashville. They were workers, like tough guys who drive in backhoes and use shovels and collect guns. Most of the time we would be three, four guys. Sometimes we would drive from Nashville to another place, which could be an hour away. When we were driving we always had the radio on. Other times, we drove in our own cars. I would go with this one guy named Mike. He was the whitest person that I have ever seen, but he just loved Black music. He had been in prison and was still on probation. He was living in a really poor area, where there were some white people and a lot of Black people. I went to his house a couple times. He was living, I think, with his mother and brother and his brother’s wife and two kids. Mike was the person that first took me to the projects. Because I was always curious to know what the ghetto, the projects, were. One day, we were driving around in the company truck, and I just wanted to pass through there and see. What I remember is seeing a group of six, seven guys or whatever, and everybody’s looking at us, and they didn’t take their eyes away from us until we got far away.

Mike was the person that introduced me to trap music. He showed me LimeWire and would play music that he had on a flash drive. When I was working with him, we would listen to trap music all day – when I was working with other guys, it was rock ’n’ roll and country. Later, when I moved to New York, I realized that all the trap music that I used to hear in Nashville was not played there. I still loved trap, and I was like, “What happened with all my music?” Later it started coming little by little.

Then I decided I wanted to leave Nashville because I was not able to play music there. I could listen to country, bluegrass, rock ’n’ roll music, and I like some of those songs, but it’s not like, “That’s my music.” When a salsa band would go to Nashville, and you would go see them, you were always gonna see the same two hundred people. And it was not a local band playing Latin music, you know. I connected with a lot of Colombian people that were there in Nashville. Every time that there was any salsa or Latin music, you would see those Colombian people. And it was fun. But I didn’t find musicians to play with in Nashville, so I couldn’t jam with people.

My wife and I stayed in Nashville for two years, and then I said, “I cannot live here, we gotta move to New York.” She was nervous about the idea of coming to a new city without a job. It didn’t occur to me that, like, here you don’t do that. You don’t just move to a city without money and start looking for a job. Havana people, we pretty much are born and die in the same city. So we saved money for a year. First, we moved to Bed-Stuy. I was just trying to work any kind of job. I went to an agency, which connected me with a carpentry company within a couple weeks. But for her it took a bit longer, maybe two months. She started working at two universities – one private and one public, maybe a community college.

I worked at the carpentry company for two or three years. They had a lot of illegal workers. It was near the coast; they produced things for Martha Stewart. It was cool to know all those people working there, you know, and hear a little of the Caribbean English too. It was people from all over the Caribbean – Dominican, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guyanese. Russians and Liberians too.

I worked there during the day, and at night I played music. With the same guy from the band in Cuba, he also moved. I was not in contact with him after I left Cuba. I didn’t even know that he was already in the United States. But when I came back to Cuba, I went to his house, and his mother showed up. I was like, “Where is Nelsito?” And she said, “He’s there too.” Once I came back here, he called me, and we decided to make a band again. We were a Puerto Rican and two Cubans. In New York, usually the bands don’t stay together, so they do what they call ven tú. This means that you create a band just for a specific day. You have no special arrangement, and there can be a lot of little mistakes. For me, this is really bad. We played in the Roxy Hotel, in Guantanamera, in Amor Cubano, in La Cocina, in El Toro – in Williamsburg, or in White Plains, so many places. We had the same three guys together always – on requinto, bass guitar, and bongó.¹⁰ So we started getting tight, tight, tight, different from other bands. I like to play because playing is like a party all the time. It’s like you are working, but you are not working. And you get tired of playing, but you are enjoying it. And you talk to people. And you meet a lot of new people every day. The bar gives you some free drinks, whatever. In my case, the only problem was that my wife worked during the day. When I came back at two in the morning, she would be asleep. So it’s good the time that you have, but you feel like your life as a couple is not working, you know?

Things changed when my daughter was born. I started playing less and less and less. I would pick my daughter up from school and keep her until my wife came home from teaching. Prepare food, you know. I’m so happy that I had that opportunity to be with my daughter and put so much time into playing with her. My wife would leave at eight and we were playing the whole day, you know, until four or five p.m. Sometimes I would feel like, “Oh shit, I cannot do anything else” – but at the same time, I would be like, “Not many people can do what I do.” And by that time, I felt like music was becoming just a job.

In 2009, when I first came back to visit Cuba, I realized, like, “Oh shit, Cubans don’t listen to American music anymore.” Reggaeton took over. The things that I heard that caught my attention were Ire Oma and Los Cuatro – when I started hearing them, I was like, “This is, like, timba with the beat of reggaeton.” I think by 2010, I wanted to be part of the next thing, the reparto.¹¹ And I just kept asking people questions, you know, investigating and trying to understand. Radio Raggamorffa started in 2017. But all my investigation of the paquete semanal and the music started in 2014.¹² The movement was completely different from my time. Like, in my time, the promotion was radio and TV. There was no other way – we didn’t have the internet. But when I came back to Cuba, the music was moving all around. And it’s, like, this music that I didn’t hear on the TV, on the radio. So I think when I came back, I was so interested, like, how was this music moving? At that time, it was the “combo” – one CD, but with ten albums burned onto it.

I have a Cuban friend, Andrés, who’s also from Lawton. He’s the only person in my life here in the United States who will show up at my house without calling ahead. Like, “Ding!” “Que bolá!” “Ay, come in!” And we’ll talk, have a beer.¹³ He’ll be around the area for work. We’ll talk for five, ten minutes, half an hour, whatever time he has to give. He works for a company that inspects buildings, I think. Normally, in Cuba, people just show up at the house, just come and go. I miss that. In New York, if somebody knocks on the door, it’s somebody that has already called, or the postman, or somebody trying to sell you some product. But nobody knocks on your door, like, “Ay, what’s up.” That’s the type of thing that I miss about Cuba – the people. I’m not gonna miss a blackout or being hot in a bus. But the connection, the friendship, the casual things, talking to anybody – that part, yeah, I’m gonna miss it forever. Here, it’s more weird. I think it’s part of the culture. Like, there is no incentive for people to get connected with others. It’s a culture of independence. Like, you have all you need. You would never go to the neighbor to ask for a hammer. So every single house has a hammer. Every single house has a tool that they need at some point, and maybe they are not going to use it for another 12 years. But if you need something, instead of going and asking somebody, “Could I borrow this thing that you are going to use one time in twenty years?” No, you go and buy it. So you never need to go to your neighbor. If you feel bad, you call an Uber. You call 911. You never think, like, “Oh, let me call Ernesto that has a car” to say, “My mother has a problem, can you take us to the hospital?” You know, like, “Oh my God, I don’t have salt, man, can you give me a little salt?” No, anything you need, you go to a store and you buy it. Any service you need, you call it. So there is no longer a culture of any need. I think that when you need stuff, the other culture comes, the cooperation. If people are struggling, they are going to cooperate. But when everybody is relatively fine, there is no reason to ask for help, no reason for people to talk to each other. So you have to make an effort, which we do in this house. You know, we want to talk to the neighbors. One of my neighbors helped me look for a ladder one time. He is from Panama. His parents went there from Haiti to work on the canal, like many in my neighborhood had done. 

I heard about this guy Zohran from my wife. For me, politics in the United States is completely crazy. But I was trying to understand, and my wife was explaining to me, “This guy is a socialist, he’s against the war on Palestine,” etc. I found a poster for Zohran on the corner of Avenue D and 42nd, in front of the supermarket. I took a picture and uploaded it to a group that I have on Facebook called East Flatbush Action, and then suddenly I started getting a lot of very negative comments about the guy. East Flatbush is a Black neighborhood with a lot of Caribbean people. Now, the reaction that they had against this guy, it just made me feel like, “What are they talking about?” And some people started saying, like, “Oh, he’s a socialist, he’s trying to make a Cuba in the United States.” And my first question was, like, “Do you know anything about Cuba?” From there, a discussion started that is still going on.

I like Zohran because he’s a democratic socialist who thinks about other people, as I learned to do growing up. I feel like this guy has more or less those ideas, you know – like, certain things could be free, just by taking the money of people who have way too much and do nothing. So let’s take a little of that money and help all the people that are working, struggling. Why not? So I decided to support this guy. Nobody had to tell me how to do it. I’m creating posters that could make people think and find out by themselves who this guy is. Like, “Zohran Mamdani: Fighting for Tenants.” I’m campaigning for this guy, and he doesn’t even know it.

My brother Pablo tells me, “You were always trying to understand how things work.” I don’t know why I’m like that, honestly. As I was growing up, I started reading – books about psychology, Malcolm X, the slave trade, composition, politics, Immanuel Kant. I never went to university. I would go to the library in my neighborhood every week and look for books. One thing that I enjoy in life is discovering things early. I’m always looking for something that changes the social view of the planet, that makes it a little different. I want to know about all the big events that happen – in society, in my family, with my daughter – and engage with them. It’s awkward to go and ask somebody random a question, but I want to understand things that I didn’t know about before. I don’t care what Taylor Swift is doing. But if you told me that there was a place on the planet where there was no gravity and that it was discovered five years ago, I’d feel so late!