Nueva Trova

It's "Hispanic Heritage Month", a 31-day long pseudocelebration which, along with Black History month, makes a mockery of anything on US soil that is not Anglophilic.

I loathe the term 'hispanic' so much that I am willing to bring to you 31 reasons why Latin American culture is not mired in 'Hispanic' colonialist nostalgia; and what better way to start that than with a little taste of Nueva Trova.

One of the most outrageous pieces of misinformation spread about Fidel Castro is that he somehow has ruled in a complete political vaccum. Americans love to infantilize anybody they deem lesser (ie: a minority) to their cause and since 1959 they've spent a remarkable amount of ink describing Cubans as a country of cowering, uneducated twits who have been easily manipulated by "The Bearded Demon".

Cuban society and culture is much more complex than that and nobody embodies this distinction so well as Silvio Rodriguez.

Silvio is considered one of the pioneers of the Movimiento de Nueva Trova, the Cuban equivalent of the Nueva Canción movement that was sweeping Latin America back in the 1970s and 80s.