Cuban Music Keeps Moving: Cimafunk, Albita Rodríguez, and Obsesión on Tradition, Reach, and Survival

For all the noise around Cuba in U.S. politics, one of the louder blind spots remains cultural: plenty of people north of the strait still miss how active, various, and contemporary Cuban music really is. That scene is not some museum piece. It keeps mutating through longtime émigrés like Albita Rodríguez, newer U.S.-based arrivals like Cimafunk, and artists who never left, including Obsesión.

Cimafunk

Cimafunk came up as a session arranger in Havana, shaped as much by James Brown as by African rhythms, EDM, and the music of Pinar del Río, the province where he was raised. After working with the experimental collective Interactivo, he launched his solo career with Terapia in 2017. His second album, El Alimento, earned a Grammy nomination, and he has since added two more: one for “Todo Colores,” his collaboration with Tank and the Bangas, and another for his 2024 album Pa’ Tu Cuerpa (For Your Body).

Now based in New Orleans, Cimafunk has spent the last few years touring the U.S., moving between headlining dates and festival slots while remaining largely outside the conventional machinery of the industry. He also credits an unlikely force in his early rise: El Paquete Semanal, the low-cost internet-based media bundle launched in 2008 by entrepreneurs who gave Cubans a workaround for the island’s spotty broadband access. “Those kids created this huge mechanism of promotion, and it was 100% effective,” he says. “You couldn’t be famous in Cuba without El Paquete.” The package, he notes, is still a primary entertainment source for many Cubans.

Even after relocating, Cimafunk says the social habits of Pinar del Río still shape how he hears music. “People are really close to their neighbors,” he says. “Really communicative.” That closeness, he believes, shows up in the way music is made there: “Everybody does it their own way, but they collaborate.” In his telling, the atmosphere is less cutthroat than in Havana or Santiago de Cuba.

His name also carries historical weight. Cimafunk says the stage name draws from his ancestral cimarrón culture, referring to escaped enslaved people who formed autonomous communities during the colonial era. He describes the choice as the start of his ability to speak about identity, roots, and the slave trade. Still, he resists turning that symbolism into a burden. “I don’t take it as some responsibility or some work that I have to do,” he says. “I’m just chillin’ with that.”

Albita Rodríguez and Chucho Valdés. (Photo by Martin Espino / Innercat Films)

Albita

Albita Rodríguez has long operated on a different scale. A Havana native with 15 Grammy or Latin Grammy nominations and one win, she built a career around Cuban country and folk traditions, especially the guajira, a poetic style with Flamenco textures that she began performing as a teenager in the late 1970s. Her first album, Habrá Música Guajira (There Will Be Guajira Music), arrived in 1988.

“With its rhythm and simplicity, guajira music has a unique ability to connect with the deepest part of the human soul,” she says. “Through its melodies, you can feel the very essence of Cuba.”

Though she lives in Miami, Albita remains deeply tied to Cuba’s musical and cultural life. She argues that Cuban music’s durability comes from its flexibility. “Over the years, Cuban music has evolved constantly, adapting to new influences without losing its identity,” she says. “Cuban musicians have always been very skilled at merging the best of other cultures while creating something entirely their own, something ‘Cuban.’”

That ability to absorb and transform, she says, is part of why Cuban music travels so well. “Even for those who don’t speak Spanish or don’t know our culture, Cuban rhythms manage to convey vibrant and sincere energy that transcends words.”

Her most recent album is Masters of our Roots, made with Chucho Valdés, the pianist and bandleader who has collected seven Grammys and stands as one of Cuban music’s central figures. Albita describes the record as a meeting point between inheritance and present tense: “We managed to blend the best of Cuban tradition with contemporary touches, creating a work that, while respecting the root, also shows a modern vision of our music.”

For her, keeping the music alive means refusing nostalgia as an endpoint. “Not staying in the past but knowing how to carry that tradition to new generations, adapting it without losing its essence.”

Obsesión’s El Tipo Este and Magia Lopez. (Photo courtesy of Obsesión)

Obsesión

Obsesión, the veteran hip-hop duo of Magia Lopez and El Tipo Este, has been based in Regla, the industrial Havana Bay suburb, since forming in 1996. Their early releases came out on EGREM, Cuba’s national label, which meant the U.S. remained mostly out of reach. Even so, they toured the States in 2003 and shared a bill with The Roots at the Apollo.

El Tipo Este sees no contradiction in folding hip-hop into Cuban tradition. “We can’t deny or separate ourselves from who we are, so turning to the rich Cuban music never cost us much effort, it was truly organic and inevitable. It’s in our DNA.”

That grounding matters in a country where more than a third of the population is Black or mixed-race. For Obsesión, those histories are not backdrop but the material itself. “But I would say that more than expressing the Afro-Cuban experience, we are the Afro-Cuban experience,” he says. “Our songs are influenced precisely by the fact of being Black people in Cuba today. Every social variable takes on a particular nuance when an Afro-Cuban person experiences it.”

Their writing ranges widely, he adds, from street-level observation to the sharp end of social and political critique. “The themes we explore in our lyrics are very diverse,” he says, “ranging from the simplest and most everyday in the form of street chronicles, to the most controversial social, political, and human issues.” However heavy the subject, he insists the group is still after something constructive. Obsesión’s music, he says, is “always in the pursuit of a positive message.”

That seriousness does not flatten the music’s buoyancy. Released digitally by Oakland-based Round Whirled Records, 2025’s Luciérnaga: Crónicas de Luz (Firefly: Chronicles of Light) folds hip-hop and big band jazz into something that feels unusually spacious and immediate. It is easy to imagine a wider American audience finding its way into it, if the record ever gets the airplay it deserves.

El Tipo Este is optimistic, but not naïve about the U.S. market or its assumptions. “I think there’s still a lot of ignorance in the U.S. about Cuban music. There’s a lot of diversity. And Obsesión is proof of that.”

That ignorance persists even as Cuba’s economic strain deepens under an effective U.S. blockade, a pressure that has helped drive more than 1.5 million Cubans from the island in recent years, or 15% of the population. Yet the music continues. El Tipo Este points to Fábrica de Arte Cubano, the former cooking oil factory turned multidisciplinary arts venue, as a focal point of that endurance. “In that single space, young people and the general public can enjoy a wide range of artistic offerings,” he says. “F.A.C.’s fusion of expressions not only enriches aesthetic enjoyment but also stimulates a more critical, diverse, and sensitive perspective.”