Marc Perry’s Negro soy yo is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand race and artistic expression in Cuba. I brought a Kindle version of the book with me on a recent trip to the island; I found in invaluable to understanding some of the complicated and often (to me) subtle racial politics on the island. Perry’s long-term research in the country show us the interplay between the revolutionary state and Cuban hiphop after the state opened to more kinds of expression, and expanded recognition of difference, in the 1990s. The author, a cultural anthropologist trained at the University of Texas’ famed African Diaspora Studies Department, argues that black raperos helped shape a new kind of public awareness of race and racism in Cuba. His approach is ethnographic, demonstrating deep, personal engagement with Cuban musicians, but also, crucially, historical, showing the long history of the struggles that raperos took up in the late 1990s and into the 2000s.