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.

I don't believe it is a coincidence that the Nueva Canción and Nueva Trova movements exploded in the pop culture scene around the same time that theories of Latin America's economic, political and social underdevelopment were pushed through globalization channels like the World Band, United Nations and the World Trade Organization. From the end of the 1960s all the way into the 1990s, Latin America becomes a de facto "child with special needs" of the Pan-American and world economic scene that could only look up to and hope to become one day like its "betters" the United States.

In view of this political context, the Nueva Canción and Nueva Trova movements was Latin America's response to multinational entertainment companies positioning of US pop music as the only popular culture worthy of air play. The music of Silvio Rodriguez, Pablo Milanes, Roy Brown, Haciendo Punto en Otro Son, Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil (who is now Brazil's Minister of Culture), by mixing traditional folk music from around the region with rock 'n roll, jazz, flamenco, indigenous and other musical traditions from around the world, served the purpose of putting Latin America's mixed heritage front and center as a subversive agent of modernity.

The biggest irony about this movement is that its main purpose was to redefine Beauty within a globalized Latin American context. Aesthetics became a weapon against the homogenizing effect of US-branded pop culture; with poetry, literature and music becoming the two most important cultural channels by which artists and intellectuals fought against the framing of Latin American culture as a mishmash of underdeveloped, undercultured and underperforming artifacts that could never compete with the cultural production of the United States.

Without Silvio Rodriguez we wouldn't have the lyrical pop culture explosion of writers like
Silvio's music has always been incredibly popular inside and outside of Cuba. He is one of the biggest influences in pop musicians and latino rock bands such as Maná, Carlos Vives, Juanes, Café Tacuba, Rubén Blades, Ricardo Arjona, José Luis Guerra, and even the controversial father or reggaeton, Daddy Yanqui.

This is particularly important when one considers that Nueva Trova was founded and promoted by Cubans who have lived and died Revolutionary Cuba.

Even though many Cubans in exile look at Silvio as an agent of Fidel Castro and a traitor for playing along as cultural ambassador for the 'tirano', the truth is much more complicated than that. Even though it is true that Silvio Rodriguez has been granted a sort of cultural ambassadorship by the Cuban government so he can play his music in front of millions around the world, his relationship with la revolución has been more like a precarious pas de deux. Depending on how the winds blow within Cuba's Ministerio de Cultura he is either an ally or a traitor of the revolution, and at times has been censured and even banned from playing his music for not coming up to the ministry's quality standards.

That said, Silvio Rodriguez has said in more than one interview that he has had the opportunity to leave the country yet has never really had a reason to do so. Just like a lot of other Cubans who've never left the island, it's as if staying is a revolutionary act in itself.

Which is why his music is so deceptively radical. The song that I include here, Te Doy Una Canción, was during my youth one of the de facto canciones de gesta --songs that one would sing to praise the very colored, very mestizo, very Latin American motherland over the white, gringo and imperialist yanquis.

Yet, in researching the lyrics of this song, I stumbled upon a little detail unknown to me until today : Silvio wrote Te Doy Una Canción as a love song for a girlfriend with whom he had broken up at the time.

The 1970s was the height of Cuba's communist propaganda machine and everything and anything that came out of Cuba was supposed to be representative of the revolucion's success. This song seems to play on that theme, especially in the last verse :

If you read it closely within the context of for who this song was actually written, you can then see that Silvio Rodriguez is not only demanding 'his right to speak', but this song is a protest against the need to create propaganda laden music that only served the purpose of promoting Castro's agenda.

In other words : This song is deceptively counter-revolutionary.

Read closely, it is about the right to sing love songs, the right to give way to poetry in the face of crumbling cities or public displays of patriotism. It's a song of subtlely coded Hope --the hope to love, to sing, to write, to fuck, to ache and love, just because. Not because he is Cuban or an ambassador for a revolutionary agenda.

This is a song about a man who demands his right to speak first and foremost to his ''unseen" yet not invisible beloved --above all and everything, even as the city and the country itself crumble around him.

This is a song that is about acknowledging "la patria" but creatively going beyond it. If he were the lapdog of Fidel, what would the bearded one do with that?

So here's to revolutions in poetic language and to Silvio Rodriguez, one of the pioneers of Latin American pop culture.