During a bus ride with children with learning disabilities, a Cuban woman encounters the ubiquity of reparto music, a genre with explicit lyrics that contrasts with the island's rich musical heritage. Fabiana del Valle reflects on how this sound has replaced traditional poetry with vulgar noise. She argues that it normalizes a discourse lacking cultural depth.
Fabiana del Valle, in her diary published in Havana Times, recounts a recent incident while traveling to her mother's house in Cuba. After waiting an hour at the bus stop, she boarded a vehicle transporting students from a special school for children with learning delays. The driver was blasting a song by Bebeshito, a Cuban urban music artist in the reparto genre, at full volume.
This style, which originated in Cuba around 2007, fuses reggaemuffin, reggaeton, timba, and Cuban rumba. Its lyrics are explicit, crude, empty, and repetitive, with sexual content mingling with the children's innocent laughter, according to del Valle. "Phrases loaded with sexual content slipped in amid the children's laughter, mixing with an innocence I would like to protect from noise and vulgarity," she writes.
Del Valle contrasts this with traditional Cuban music, once synonymous with poetry, identity, and soul, expressed through claves, sones, boleros, and trovas. Today, reparto dominates corners, parks, bars, shops, and buses, adopted as an identity marker even by people of various ages. Its lyrics focus on money, naked bodies, and parties, which defenders justify as a reflection of a society struggling to survive.
Cultural institutions have promoted this genre in public media and community programs for three decades, while talented artists create from the margins. Del Valle regrets the normalization of this discourse, which lacks discernment and formative power. Music, she asserts, shapes taste, awakens imagination, and educates the ear and soul.
"Cuba remains a country of talented musicians, but the current soundscape feels more like a caricature than a heritage," she concludes. That day on the bus, del Valle stared out the window, pondering how this music might confine the children in a repetitive bubble, leaving no room for sensitivity or playfulness.