Underground Music Censorship

Discussing underground music, the Cuban society creates the perfect climate for it by censoring it. This leads me to the next issue, the censorship in Cuba on underground and the relation that censorship builds between these two. According to Baker, this relationship between dominant and underground cultures would remark their interdependence as demonstrating the way in which confrontation or criticism simply serves to strengthen the power of the state, which prefers engagement to silence. According to this then the underground would then be understood as a function of the state, necessary for its continued power, rather than evidence of a genuine challenge. Before the reggaeton, in the end of the 20th century, the music genre called timba, became Cuba’s most popular music. Timba, as a cross between son, rumba, salsa, jazz, funk and rap, developed during the special period, used everyday life picture and language that made timba songs ironic and powerful records picturing the special period the Cuba was in that period. In his book on timba, Perna, explains how the censorship worked back then in Cuba. He states that according to the Instituto Cubano de la Musica, everyone can write a song and nobody can prohibit that. The interesting part comes when the promotion of a product needs to happen. It is important to
mention that in Cuba the media is controlled by the state, so the state decides what Cubans can watch/ hear. According to Perna, there were a lot of timberos who did not promote neither themselves nor their music, because the media simply did not want to hear their songs. The censorship of the timba, especially the group La Charanga Habanera in 1997, represented an unpreceded repressive measure, a warning that the political establishment was taking music very seriously and was determined to put an end to the provocations of timba.
On the other hand, as Baker argues and I will later on in chapter 2 on the case of Chacal & Jakarta, censorship can be good business.
Artists like Porno Para Ricardo (PPP) and Los Aldeanos, who are fighting against the censorship, have built an international reputation on this and have benefited from the censorship. None of these names stopped working while they were censored. It seems that their decision to stand against the Cuban state has given them a green light to travel and promote their music. Hereby I have to mention that one of the strategies of the state to control the artists is withholding the permission for musicians to travel outside of
Cuba.
In the 1990s, while American hip hop was turning towards a direction of bling-bling fashion and luxury-goods product validations, two rappers in Havana were defiantly heading back underground. Aldo Roberto Rodríguez Baquero (Aldo) and Bian Oscar Rodríguez Gala (El B), together known as Los Aldeanos, styled themselves as keepers of the hip-hop flame, and they were going to do it the hard way. They opted to pursue a music career without help from the Cuban Rap Agency, the government-funded organization that connects artists with performance venues and promotes concerts in Cuba. In 2015, Miami New Times would describe them as: “Conscious lyrics, heavy bass, and a big fuck you to Fidel were all in order for El' B's set at Calle Ocho in Miami. About their lyrics, they would say that the song America is a song that talks not just about Cuban problems but about problems all over Latin America. Aldo points to the title song