Music and Politics

The song Homeland and Life —performed by Yotuel Romero, Gente De Zona, Descemer Bueno, Maykel Osorbo and El Funky— has become the most recent symbol of music's claims against the Cuban government. We talk about the long relationship between music and politics in Cuba in this seventh episode of Los Cassettes de AM: PM, recorded remotely thanks to the benefits of Telegram. 

The musicographer and author of the blog forgetful. Cuban music stories, Rosa Marquetti; the jurist, social science researcher and lover of all music, Julio César Guanche; and the collector and member of our editorial board, Rafael Valdivia respond to the call of our director Rafa G. Escalona to discuss this old and troubled marriage. 

They do so based on some questions that function as a kind of trigger for the debate: What is meant by a political song? Can a love song be a political song? Can the new ways of singing about love have a deep political content? Have there been conceptual or formal changes in the way music approaches politics in the last 15 years?

The guests are questioned in this podcast the double journey between politicizing the aesthetic or aestheticize the political. What paths do creators travel today? They ask. And, over an hour, they show us that there is nothing new under the sun. The route sometimes takes a path in reverse, where the review of our musical past and those compositions that had a tradition of political use becomes necessary.