Cuban Reggaeton and the Marginalization of Black Music

Reggaeton has been the soundtrack of Cuban daily life for over a decade, spilling out of homes, cars, and bici-taxis all over the island. Cubaton, as it’s sometimes referred to, is the preferred genre of Cuban youth, displacing the Cuban dance genre called timba (a late 20th-century Cuban form of salsa), and redefining the latter as music for tembas, mi…