Benito resounds in a Cuban key

I didn't leave, I moved away a little bit.
divine script, Habana Abierta

With SHOuT MORE PHOTOSBad Bunny has not only made the most Puerto Rican album of his career; he has woven a narrative that crosses the Caribbean, resonating deeply in Cuba, where the songs have taken on a life of their own. From the first hours his album was released, among the thousands of readings from all corners of the planet, there were the voices of my compatriots, moved with SHOuT MORE PHOTOS.

A century and so long after the histories of Puerto Rico and Cuba took divergent paths, it is ironic to see how similar our yearnings and challenges are. Hence, it is practically impossible not to give in to the temptation of listening to songs like WHAT HAPPENED TO HAWAii and MuDANZA in a Cuban key, because we are so close, trapped in our respective nightmares, and with music as one of the few consolations.

SHOuT MORE PHOTOS is precisely that: a testimony of its time that travels from the intimate to the collective, from the drama of the contemporary subject to the dilemma of a people stripped of its sovereignty, and is inscribed in an aesthetic tradition that has antecedents such as the Sowing Rubén Blades and Willie Colón and Those in the back come with meTheir lyrics speak of love, emptiness and loneliness, but also of disarray, gentrification and social drift.

Precisely, where in Cuba music barely works as an escape spring, Bad Bunny comes to remind us that perreo can also have a political conscience, as Habana Abierta and Orishas demonstrated some time ago.

Perhaps this is the most personal album of his career. Of course there were signs, but nothing prepared us for this. Suddenly, and spurred by nostalgia, the artist has put us in front of a work that puts Puerto Rican identity at the center and disputes the narrative of silence to history. Each theme, in one way or another, shouts "We are here, with our symbols, with our sounds, our dances, our drinks, our struggles, our desires".

The songs (and the accompanying audiovisuals, texts, photos and Benito's happenings) turn the album into a multifaceted cultural artifact that captures and narrates the dilemma of the Puerto Rican subject with heartbreaking lucidity. Bad Bunny, an artist who is part of the global pop royalty, takes advantage of all his communication power to launch a message of vindication that transcends his alter ego and lets us see the most vulnerable version (and therefore the one that is easier to identify with) of Benito, the little boy from Vega Baja.

Of course, there has been no shortage of (sterile) debates questioning the relevance of the reappropriation of these songs by Cubans, with the music of the big island having its own exile anthems, and being born from a (very?) different socio-political context. In particular, I find it more revealing how, despite all that, these songs have been reinterpreted by those who listen to them. It would seem not, but we must remember at this point that music is a bottle thrown into the sea that is re-signified in each listening, in each experience.

A few days ago I was writing about how Puerto Rican artistsare narrating in their music the agony of the Caribbean. in a way that is rare among his Cuban peers of the moment. Without stridency, without too many opacities -although there is also that-, but leaving a margin for poignant and piercing works to shine, with a popular connection as obvious as it is necessary.

In a world increasingly focused on hedonism and fast entertainment, it is encouraging that the most relevant artist of popular music in Spanish in 2025 has decided to focus his work on a message of cultural vindication. In a game of mirrors with his avatar of SHOuT MORE PHOTOSBad Bunny leaves a mark on the present in the hope of conjuring a different future. If that's not a radically political gesture, I don't know what is.

The present selection of texts and commentaries reflects the reception and reading of this work by the Cuban community, which feels so much affected by it.

Marco Alonso 

The first "critique" (if made and possible) should be made from experience. Of course, I won't make you go through the ordeal of listening to his first albums (music that he himself accepted he had to make to sell and refuses to sing in concerts), but I would recommend "X100pre", "Un Verano Sin Ti" and "DeBÍ TIRAR MáS FOTOS", because "Nadie Sabe lo Que Va a Pasar Manaña" and "YHLQMDLG" are cuts from previous albums, but something is always salvaged. I'm really into Ethel Cain's southern gothic and drone music right now, but since the album came out I did sit down and give it three listens. It's a good album, I won't lie to you. On the subject of vocals and all the "what an artist should have" I gave up, because I don't care anymore, especially since it's not static. He's not a voice, he's not Freddy Mercury, or George Michael or the "King of Pop" (that's crazy), but he's very much him (I don't know how to describe him to you). I've seen a lot of writings about it, but so far I still don't understand the hatred to pulse, which almost always comes by indirect carvings without knowing or having heard, just speeches reproduced on Facebook.

Carlos Manuel Álvarez

He has done what a true artist does: survive the death of his own success. He has connected pain with desire, spite with insurgency, and reminds those of us who have followed his career and his music attentively and have made it an integral part of our moments of happiness, that depression is also an excess of self and a lack of people. The guy did not allow himself to be delibidinized. As a friend told me, there is here a triumph of the Tropical Reason.

Scenes from Puerto Rico, listening to Bad Bunny (Julio Cesar Guanche)

In 2011, the centennial of Puerto Rican cinema was celebrated. An extraordinary band of Puerto Ricans went to the Havana International Latin American Film Festival to celebrate. Among them was Jacobo Morales, the island's greatest filmmaker, Oscar-nominated director of the classic God raises them. From Jacobo I heard the very definition of what an artist is: when he was very young, he mortgaged his house, with his wife's agreement, to be able to make a film. He said it smiling, as if he had borrowed 30 pesos. That's Jacobo, who at 90 years old is acting in the short film of the album SHOuT MORE PHOTOS. It is Jacobo who says there: "As long as one is alive, one must love as much as one can". It is Jacobo to whom a young man pays "30 pesos" for a coffee and a quesito (Americanized) in that video. It is the same Jacobo who stars, at the end of the video, in an extraordinary scene in "Un baile inolvidable".

I have heard some people question Bad Bunny's "turn" from "vulgarity to patriotism" as if it were just marketing. Benito had already participated in The blackoutin the midst of a brutal process of gentrification in Puerto Rico. He had also collaborated with René (Residente) on a theme with a strong defense of gender diversity, in the midst of a wave of violence declared a national emergency in 2021, a scenario of a gravity comparable to that of Mexico, on that subject. In Puerto Rico, that violence had reported 7021 cases of domestic violence in 2019, of which 5896 were against women, in a population of just 3.2 million inhabitants.

In Puerto Rico, the best music documentaries and music videos tend to be very political, and therefore extraordinarily beautiful. See the materials of Gabriel Coss, of Kacho López Mari, of Arí Maniel Cruz. And the video clips of Ilé, unique in their kind. There is in all of them a cultural and political substratum of the greatest sophistication, of the greatest political depth and of the greatest love for Puerto Rico and its popular culture. It is the only heritage that this people has today, which suffers massive blackouts, historical extractivism, anti-sovereign juntas, and racist governors expelled at the stroke of a perreo.

It is the substratum of a culture that has Rafael Hernández, Tite Curet, Cheo Feliciano, Ismael Rivera (Maelo), Tego Calderón, Residente and Calle 13, Cultura Profética, and Ilé in its foundations. It is a cultural architecture as solid as it is beautiful. In that tradition, Bad Bunny makes an album that is a Puerto Rican symphony, covering its instruments, its rhythms, its genres: from plena and bomba, to salsa and bolero. It also covers the fauna and the history of PR, with the view that the critical historiography of the island has contributed to it. That's also why the sapo concho, that's why the coconut spout, that's why coffee in the morning and rum in the afternoon.

Bad Bunny proposes a cultural scheme, and he is not the only one to do so. He is part of a Puerto Rican social and cultural movement that has been re-energized in recent years. A movement that challenges the hegemonic cultural scheme of more than a hundred years in PR: the "Americanization", which has always been synonymous with "modernization", "justice" and "freedom", but has found many counter-narratives, including this album. SHOuT MORE PHOTOS. It's not just Bad Bunny, but it's him too.

Bad Bunny sings that in Puerto Rico many people were killed for taking out the flag, and that's why he carries it everywhere. The Puerto Rican flag was created in 1895 by Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles in New York, members of the Puerto Rican Section of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Both flags were born from the republican (and Masonic) imagination. The aspiration to form a republic, of Martí, Maceo, Betances and Hostos, is a common aspiration of our two islands to this day. The Cuban national anthem, La Bayamesa, is a first cousin of La Borinqueña, the Puerto Rican national anthem, both related to La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, of revolutionary origin. Thus Martí said in Patria about La Borinqueña: "It was that the people, when they heard 'La Borinqueña', felt something more than the desire to dance a charming dance, and had something inexplicable that electrified them; the deep and paused moaning of a people that suffers the horrors of a cruel tutelage". (In the film Elpidio Valdés vs. dollar and cannon, the captain of a ship carrying arms for the independence of Cuba raises his flag at the moment of sinking. It is the flag of Puerto Rico, bound for Cuba).

I only have gratitude for this beautiful album, for the depth of his cultural understanding, for the depth of his political gesture. I have admiration and "national envy", good envy, for what the Boricuas are doing.

I only criticize him for not having sung a bolero on the album with Los Rivera Destino.

I want to return the "favor" to Bad Bunny for the piano solo that appears in the video of INoLVIDABLE DANCE. Tell him that this could only have been Lilí Martínez's, Rubén González's, or Gonzalo Rubalcaba's when he fixed the They are for Puerto Ricoby Pablo Milanés.

As Pablo says in that song: "Wherever you go out (Puerto Rico) I go out. I will always support you".

"We're still here."

There is no Bad Bunny without Residente (Michel Hernandez)

At the risk of sounding absolute, I am convinced that the artist Bad Bunny is today is due in large part to his connections with Calle 13 and especially with Residente. "Bad Bunny" is a younger son of Residente who, although he had his first influences in the aforementioned Boricua band, has later taken his own references, political, cultural, social, to elaborate a discourse that is still half-built in the music industry and that it would not be strange that it comes into discordance with its commercial budgets because it tends to radicalize politically, another feature in common with the Boricua band. 

Benito, for example, before becoming Bad Bunny did not hide his admiration for Residente, whom he even sought him out to meet, wrote to him through the networks and even interrupted an interview to ask him for a photo. These are not minor facts to illustrate the development of the author of a summer without you.

In that context, Rene discovered the potential that the very young artist had and began to lend him a hand in developing his career. I would say that over time it has been a two-way relationship that has not anchored Bad Bunny in any foreign discourse, but has served him to develop his own work with bases strongly rooted in the most emancipatory Puerto Rican culture. Let's remember, for example, that Residente and Bad Bunny led the demonstrations that ended with the resignation of the governor of Puerto Rico. But the reguetonero or rapero has not yet shown all the weapons with which he tries to support his work. He is an artist, as his new album shows, in full experimentation, in full research on the popular culture of his country, something he does without renouncing to the most commercial codes of the urban genre.

A sample to the song is his new album, in which although there are several disposable songs, there are others that are worth their weight in gold and for which it is worth getting this album that aims early on to be one of the notorious pieces of the young 2025. Bad Bunny is trying to play -at his own pace- with the budgets of the market, in a dialogue that may continue for the next few years until possibly the musician will continue his career independently if he suddenly faces the wall of the industry that, like Calle 13, the Bad Bunny can push until he knows first hand his limits.

My unforgettable dance (Alina Herrera)

When I first listened to the album, when it was just released, I identified tracks that made me burst with a kind of happiness (INoLVIDABLE DANCE, WELTiTA) and others a tremendous nostalgia (DtmF, MuDANZA). Then I realized that there were songs for everything: for melancholy (TURiSTA, COCONUT PIToR), perreo (i'm going to take you to p.r., KETU TeCRÉ) and the more explicit policy (WHAT HAPPENED TO HAWAii). Nevertheless, all this mixture of moods crosses it in a transversal way; that is to say, all the songs have a little bit of everything. It's fabulous!

The lyrics themselves, something that BB has been criticized so much for, fire a series of truths like temples that, in such a simple way, remind us that we come from common experiences: Life is a party that one day ends; While one is alive, one must love as much as one can; I should have given you more kisses and hugs as many times as I could; Whoever left dreams of returning; Here they killed people for taking out the flag.

In the most intimate areas, it reminded me of my country, my family, my friends who are leaving. It connects me with my son who never paid attention to salsa and when he listened to INoLVIDABLE DANCE went to where I was to dance to it. Or when the video of that same song came out, which makes you search in your memories for details that are so important in life, that mark you and that you don't keep in mind because you don't usually put them on your CV, right? Then I turned back in time and saw my father teaching me to dance salsa and my mother the casino spins.

I felt the love affair that unites the two islands, Cuba and PR. The tragedy (because it is) of the "forced" migration, the loneliness, the nostalgia of those who leave and those who stay (Ojalá que los míos nunca se muden; Otra navidad que no estás aquí). The political emptying (don't drop the flag or forget the lelolai), the cultural resistance in its most popular and impudent forms (Te tengo bailando sin modales; Tú me dices si adentro o afuera, debajo del agua nadie se entera). The tastiness, the rhythm, the sea, the common language; all that also makes life bearable.

When I finished listening to it for the second time, a friend asked me "and what is the hit of the album?" and I answered (shyly, because it was not a trap/reguetón song) that INoLVIDABLE DANCE. I realized that Benito had deployed all his creative artillery. Y INoLVIDABLE DANCE because it was a kind of synthesis of what he wanted to tell us, transmit to us and finally bequeath to us.

Bad Bunny in Barcelona (Carlos Melián)

One night when I was feeling very bad here in Barcelona... a mediocre night, of low sky, of river without water, of immense smallness, well, that night I crossed a traffic light, and when I got to the other sidewalk I realized that the cross street, a little piece of street in Nou Barris, a withered and flaccid neighborhood, where people sleep to work and work to sleep and work again, because the cross street had been eternal. And it had something of a useless struggle, something like: "well, why cross the street, for what purpose?"; and then, "well, why get to the other sidewalk, what called me to cross it?". So when I got to the other sidewalk, after this eternal street crossing, I stopped waiting for the next little green man at the traffic light and there an extraordinary event happened. 

I don't want to exaggerate, but it was as if everything opened up, as if I understood everything, as if a funnel threw to one side and to the other the garbage that separated me from the essential. There is a way of com-pren-der that doesn't take you anywhere, but stays in itself trapped, and then you forget, you can't take note, it's like dreaming. It often happens to me here, for example, when I see a woman's beautiful face, and I underline "beautiful" with full intention. In this global city, seeing, finding a face among others, and getting caught in it, is a journey, an encounter with a distant identity, I don't know where that comes from; perhaps from the fact that I was always stateless, or from my long exposure to the hundreds of portraits of Renaissance painters I consumed in Cuba, who were distant beauties, who did not fit in with the pattern of beauty of my island, inferior, narrow, mediocre. And that understanding is useless.

Beauty in Barcelona, and I suppose anywhere in the wild and withered free world, reaches extraordinary levels. They are faces from all over the world, illuminated from within, each one more ingenious and disturbing than the older one you saw the day before, and which already seemed the maximum of the combinatorial ingenuity of chance, and they are nothing like the faces of Cuba, most of them reduced by the consequences of totalitarianism I suppose, or colonialism, or the inbreeding of a closed country, undesirable and abandoned to its fate.

I like to think that something is liberated in women who are free and strong, who are self-made, with rights, with opportunities, I suppose. Then there, crossing the street I heard a music that seemed beautiful, the bugle of an angel, something like that, all my blood got warm, some glands, the same as always, began to secrete something exciting, I wanted to be aware of what I was listening to and when I looked a little bit I was kind of disappointed: it was a Bad Bunny's song.

Bad Bunny was a popular music singer who became world famous and wealthy in the first two decades of the 21st century. It was prosaic, light and obscene music, (although Bad Bunny had class no matter what expletive he used) seemingly easy to make; those of us who consumed it with pleasure felt guilty at the showiness of the concerts of great orchestras that boasted centuries of musical studies if you added, for example, the lives of career and study of the instrumentalists who composed them.

When I came back to the disappointment, I thought I understood that there was no reason to be disappointed. In the heat of listening to it (it was a song from his album Un verano sin tí, which I like very much) I told myself that between that shore and the other, between that sidewalk and the other, that of success and shame, that of the supposedly cultured, cruel, bureaucratic and beautiful Europe, and the barbarism and flatness of the Caribbean, there was my future, my happiness, or what do I know. But all the beauty came to me all of a sudden. For things like that, simultaneous, unanimous, I liked Bad Bunny.