Close to the Edge Read Free

informed me once we were out on the street.
    After the cult thriller The Hitcher , I thought no one hitch-hiked anymore. In Havana not only did people hitchhike, but hitchhiking was enforced by the baton-wielding police. Few Cubans were privileged to own cars. Those who did were mostly people with a dollar income from tourism or those who worked for a joint venture. Even then there was the gas shortage. The Soviet Union used to be Cuba's main oil supplier, but in 1990 the Soviets just stopped delivering oil. Cuba's transportation system was paralyzed. As the economy picked up slowly again, those with advantages were forced to share. Making sure that every car was full of passengers was one way of keeping things moving.
    Deepa and I walked over to the intersection of Linea and Paseo to coger botella , as hitchhiking was known locally. Cubans refer to a ride as a botella , or bottle. So to coger botella was to get a ride. Deepa stuck out her thumb, true hitchhiker style. But when a red Volkswagen spluttered to a halt before us, the police officer directing traffic came over and bent down to speak to the driver. “Are you going to Playa?” he asked the driver, a thin older man in a pink shirt. “Yes,” was the response. “Then you can take them.” He motioned us toward the car. Legally enforced carpooling. Only in Cuba, I thought as we drove toward the tunnel to Miramar. In a revolutionary society solutions were collective and relied on people's sense of obligation to others. And maybe some fear of the baton-wielding cops as well.
    When we arrived at her house, Lily was watching her TV—a Russian model with a greenish hue to the screen. In the 1980s Lily had gone to Czechoslovakia to work with Cuban delegations. She spoke fluent Czech, another of those skills of little use in an era of Canadian and French joint ventures. She was a single mother who supported her son, Randy, on her peso salary from her job at an advertising agency.
    As we chatted over thick Cuban coffee and mani , a popular sweet made from palm sugar and peanuts, Randy walked in. He pulled off his bicycle helmet and shot us a broad smile just like his mother's. He tentatively pulled back a chair to sit down with us. As Randy talked about his passion for rap, he became more animated. He told us that he had always identified with rap, with its cadence and the drums. It was hard to find American music in Cuba. So he mostly watched bootleg recordings of video clips on friends' VCRs.
    His shyness dissipated, Randy performed his rap song “La Bicicleta” (The Bicycle). The song was about the scarcity of transportation and his journeys around the city on his Chinese-made Flying Pigeon bicycle. Randy's five-year-old cousin Cesarito—who had memorized the words—repeated the lyrics and chimed in with a childlike attempted beatbox. As I looked on, it all seemed so familiar: the rhythms, the hand gestures, the flow. But what he was rapping about was entirely unfamiliar, a scene taken from the tableau of his own life and told in the vernacular of his peers.
    T he early gender politics of Cuban hip hop—like the race politics that I had witnessed with Primera Base—were still underdeveloped. As in most places around the world, the culture of machismo in Cuba was strong. As an ardent feminist, I was taken aback by the whistles and propositions that I, like most women, attracted from street-corner types. After years of organizing protest marches to mark International Women's Day in Sydney, I was surprised to hear that on this day in Cuba women were handed roses and congratulated for being women. So would Cuban hip hop be any different? Deepa's friend Pablo Herrera, Cuba's most prominent hip hop producer, took us to a peña , a small afternoon rap show at the local Café Cantante. He said that we would see and meet some of the prominent women artists in Cuban hip hop.
    Café Cantante was a small intimate venue facing the