Recognized for songs like “La Tuba”, “El Ditú” and others that have become classics in Cuban reggaeton, Elvis Manuel passed away when he was at the peak of his career.
In addition to honoring the artist, the festival intends to donate funds raised from ticket sales to his mother and sister in Cuba.
The cast or morpha is a variant of Puerto Rican reggaeton promoted by Chocolate, who is called the creator of this trend of the island’s native genre. The name cast comes from the marginalized neighborhoods where this music is mostly consumed and where many of its exponents have come from.
The delivery men, young people from these poor neighborhoods throughout the archipelago, are his biggest followers, although he has already permeated other strata of Cuban society, despite the rejection of government institutions.
The cast songs are a reflection of how these young people born in neighborhoods such as Centro Habana, Marianao, San Miguel del Padrón, Boyeros or El Cerro live and think.
It should be noted that repartera music has already spread throughout the island, although it is fundamentally a Havana phenomenon.
“The cast sings what is lived in the neighborhoods, we use the pupular gaiety, everyday life to get the choirs of the songs,” Hirám Amores, one of the participants in the festival known in the guild as the Mulatoide, told DIARIO LAS AMERICAS.
One of the biggest criticisms that the genre has had is about the explicit content of the songs regarding sex, drugs or violence.
Given this, the organizer of the event, Clara Cabrera, says: “I am against filthy lyrics. Cuba injects the artist, keeps your senses activated to create. When you are there, you take out a chorus
and it sticks, I think that the music that leads the baton is the one that is being created in Cuba and it has changed, it is not so much the pedal anymore, they already put wind instruments on it, they are timbiando it and it is changing. The first idea to internationalize the cast is to mix it with other rhythms”.
The unrestrained exodus, which has been taking place in Cuba towards the United States across the border from Nicaragua, has brought a large part of the distribution public and its artists to Florida.
Reggaeton players with long careers such as Adonis Mc and Pipey, who were promoters of reggaeton in its beginnings in the 2000s, make up the poster of this debut edition of the festival. Santiago singers Candiman and Kola Loka also perform, who despite not making morpha, were promoters of reggae in Spanish on the island.
For delivery men, Elvis Manuel is an apostle of reggaeton, and Chocolate, the king of delivery men. But Santiago de Cuba is the matrix of everything.
By Mauricio Mendoza
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