by Dunja Fehimovic*<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having attended a screening of Ema<\/em> (Pablo Larra\u00edn 2019) during the Festival internacional de Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, I left Havana with Nicolas Jaar\u2019s hypnotic beats resounding in my head and Sergio Armstrong\u2019s luminous frames burned onto my retinas. However, the audience\u2019s response to the film \u2013 particularly their vocal approval of Gast\u00f3n\u2019s anti-reggaeton tirade \u2013 proved just as memorable. But how to make sense of this? The morning of the screening, I had awoken to the sounds of reggaeton coming through the open windows and doors of multiple neighbours\u2019 houses. I had passed by vendors blasting it from portable radios, circumnavigated teenagers playing it on their phones, even driven to the cinema in a colectivo<\/em> (shared taxi) playing it at a level that may have slightly deafened me to the full auditory experience of Larra\u00edn\u2019s film. But, in fact, reggaeton\u2019s ubiquity in Cuba covers over \u2013 and contributes to \u2013 the kinds of perceptions and beliefs expressed by the audience, via Gast\u00f3n, that day. We need only look to the \u2018Pal\u00f3n divino<\/a>\u2019 phenomenon to expose how the genre\u2019s popularity coexists with widespread disdain. The runaway success of Chocolate\u2019s 2017 song led to not one but two <\/em>sequels (imaginatively entitled \u2018Pal\u00f3n divino 2<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018Pal\u00f3n divino 3<\/a>\u2019), and triggered both parodies and public outrage. It was even taken up by Alexis Vald\u00e9s, a Miami-based Cuban comedian beloved by Cubans inside and outside the island alike. In this video, Vald\u00e9s uses one of his well-known stock characters, Nereida, to place the hit within a longer trajectory of increasingly outrageous innuendo in popular music:<\/p>\n\n\n\n