ABSTRACT
April 2010 and Havana’s Teatro Acapulco, a large, old 1,500-seat auditorium, is full to bursting, with another probable 1,000 people outside listening in as leading Cuban hip-hop group, Los Aldeanos, open their gig with the song ‘Censurado’. The message of this event is ambiguous, and the central question arising from it is this: what does it mean to invoke the idea of censorship if one is free to sing about it to a live audience? Indeed, Los Aldeanos were not just free to sing about censorship, freedom and other issues; their concert was organized by the Asociación Hermanos Saíz, the cultural arm of Cuba’s Young Communist movement, so there is no doubt that it had been sanctioned at the highest level.
