by Alan MacLeod
Through its myriad of agencies, the United States government has recruited and groomed rappers from around the world to further its political interests. Washington has spent tens of millions of dollars funding, training, and promoting artists who foment public discontent, organize protests, and lead color revolutions in nations in its crosshairs.
In Bangladesh and Senegal, U.S.-funded rappers led political movements that toppled governments. Washington-backed musicians were the face of a failed counter-revolution in Cuba, and will likely be called upon again by the Trump administration. And artists in dozens of countries worldwide (including the U.S. itself) are paid to promote American government interests.
This is the story of how the U.S. government uses hip hop, a medium of struggle pioneered by Black artists in New York, as a tool for regime change.
Part 4 - Cuba: the great astroturfed revolution
The United States has been trying to overthrow the government of Cuba since the Revolution of 1959. And in July 2021, they thought they had concocted the perfect plan. Washington spent enormous amounts of resources encouraging Cubans into the streets in an attempt to topple President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
America believed it had found the ideal figurehead in Yotuel, an aging rapper who left Cuba in the 1990s, and had released the anti-government song, “Patria y Vida” (Fatherland and Life) to great U.S. fanfare just months earlier. “For those new to the issue of Cuba, the protests we are witnessing were started by artists, not politicians,” tweeted Cuban-American senator Marco Rubio, “This song ‘Patria y Vida’ powerfully explains how young Cubans feel. And its release was so impactful, you will go to jail if caught playing it in Cuba,” he claimed, sharing a link to the track with his millions of followers.
On the same day as Rubio’s tweet, a huge swath of U.S. media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Voice Of America, and National Geographic, all simultaneously published articles profiling the song.
Collectively, this coverage identified “Patria y Vida” as the clarion call for a new generation, noted that it was a retort to the communist slogan “Patria o Muerte” (fatherland or death), and presented Yotuel as a crusading warrior of democracy. But none told readers that anti-government Cuban rappers like Yotuel had been sponsored, hothoused, and coached for years by the U.S. government for precisely this purpose.
The NED was, at the time, financing numerous schemes training Cuban rappers as agents of regime change. One project entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society,” stated that its goal was to “promote citizen participation and social change,” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Another, called “Promoting Freedom of Expression in Cuba through the Arts,” claimed it was partnering with local musicians on projects related to “democracy, human rights, and historical memory,” and to help “increase awareness about the Cuban reality.” This “reality,” as President Biden himself stated the week of the insurrection, was that the Cuban government is an “authoritarian regime” that has meted out “decades of repression” while its leaders only “enrich themselves.”
At the same time, USAID was offering $2 million worth of funding to groups that could use culture to bring about a color revolution in Cuba. The announcement directly referenced Yotuel as a model to follow, stating that,
“Artists and musicians have taken to the streets to protest government repression, producing anthems such as ‘Patria y Vida,’ which has not only brought greater global awareness to the plight of the Cuban people but also served as a rallying cry for change on the island.”
In the end, despite the impeccable coordination from the U.S. government, social media, the Cuban-American lobby, celebrities, and the press, all of whom came together to bombard the country with messaging telling them to get out on the streets, barely a few thousand people island-wide heeded their call. Moreover, they were dwarfed by far larger, pro-government counter-demonstrations (images of which, for some time, Western media often presented as anti-government marches).
The reality was that Patria y Vida’s supposed popularity was largely astroturfed. Yotuel had not even lived in Cuba for a quarter-century, and instead led a much larger sympathy demonstration in Miami. Days later, President Biden invited him to the White House for a special meeting.
Despite its failure, the U.S. government has evidently still not given up on Yotuel as a potential regime change leader. This September, he appeared at the NED’s 2026 Democracy Awards and performed “Patria y Vida” live to those in attendance.
This was not the first time that Washington had been caught using hip hop to overthrow the Cuban government. In fact, inside Cuba, the rap scene is notorious for being full of undercover U.S. agents. Gaining popularity in the late 1990s, local rappers had a considerable impact on society, helping bring to the fore many previously under-discussed topics. The United States saw their biting critiques of racism as a wedge they could exploit, and attempted to infiltrate their ranks.
In 2009, the U.S. government sent Serbian music promoter Rajko Bozic to the island with a mission: to recruit a stable of rappers to use as anti-government shock troops. Bozic was a veteran of Otpor, a CIA-backed political group that led the insurrection against Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic – the first successful color revolution of the century.
Bozic soon found willing partners in rap group, Los Aldeanos. With seemingly limitless funds for the operation, he immediately started aggressively promoting the duo, producing an anti-government TV show they starred in. Although it was not broadcast on television, Bozic and his team simply paid for it to be distributed around the country on DVDs and USB drives instead.
He also used Washington’s money and connections to get their music on the radio, and to bribe big Latino music stars into allowing them to open for them at their gigs, thus buying them more credibility and exposure. Los Aldeanos were even flown to Serbia for secret training, under the guise of playing at the Exit Music Festival.
Cuban authorities eventually exposed the scheme, however, and Los Aldeanos fled to Florida.
Being a hip hop fan in Cuba is fraught with difficulties. Without realizing, many Cubans are listening to albums, reading hip hop magazines, or even going to concerts secretly funded by the U.S national security state. The Caribbean island is without doubt where Washington has most concentrated its efforts in attempting to co-opt the rap scene.
Yet, for all its efforts, Fernandes told MintPress that the U.S. government has had little success. Cuba, she said, is a place with an organic hip hop movement built from the ground up, and rappers are “not trying to overthrow their government but to create more spaces for their demands of anti-racism and equality under an expanding market economy. They had little reason to collaborate with U.S. agencies.”
As Fernandes explained, being found to be in the pay of a CIA front group would be seen as something of a scarlet letter:
“Cuban artists are wary of working with any U.S. government agencies, because it would completely damage their credibility and compromise their own belief systems. That’s not to say there aren’t newer and younger artists who may be more willing to engage with the U.S. government. But among long-term and established artists, they realize that any such engagement would risk closure of their critical spaces and loss of their credibility.”
Nevertheless, the Trump/Rubio administration has made toppling the Cuban government a major foreign policy priority. If they continue with this plan, it is quite possible we will soon be seeing more Yotuels and Los Aldeanos.
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