Hearing the Change: Reggaeton and Emergent Values in Contemporary Cuba

This article deconstructs the wave of moral panic caused by reggaeton in Cuba to suggest that behind issues of "national" and "legitimate" culture lays a social but mainly political rejection to the marginal subject that this music brings to the fore. Reggaeton's embracing of money is a painful reminder to the authorities of the dreadful consequences of the dual economy and of the increasing gap between emergent values rooted in everyday life experience and socialist ideology. The text also discusses ethnographic work at performance venues that shows how this genre has been particularly successful in articulating not only the values and subjectivities of an underclass, but also the practices of symbolic distinction of more upward class sectors. In a different direction, the article exposes how reggaeton further participates in change, through discourses that voice the contradictory responses of male identity to the impact of sex tourism and the role of money in romantic relationships.