Cuba

In Cuba, the communist regime has set up the Cuban Rap Agency — which is exactly what it sounds like. The state chooses which hip hop musicians become stars and pays their salaries. Shana Bromberg met up with one certified Cuban rap producer at his studio outside Havana, where he discussed the strangely familiar plight […]

Music journalist Gianluca Tramontana took a bumpy, 8-hour bus ride from Havana to the remote eastern province of Granma —- the heart of Cuba’s sugarcane country — to find an extraordinary relic: a hand-cranked mechanical organ that is still the life of the party.