Washington continues to fund hip hop artists in Senegal. In 2018, the NED’s sister organization, USAID, collaborated with political rapper Last Under to produce an album, while in 2023, it partnered with Sister LB to release a track to promote “transparency and accountability” in the country’s extractive industries.
And if there is one Senegalese rapper that receives more effusive Western press coverage than Thiat, it is Babacar Niang, better known as Matador. “You can learn everything you need to know about the main challenges facing Africa today by talking to just two people in Senegal: the rapper and the weatherman” wrote Thomas Friedman in the pages of The New York Times, describing Matador as a “pioneer,” and the “voice of the voiceless,” and featuring him in his documentary, Years of Living Dangerously.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Matador is also closely connected to Washington. Africulturban, the multimedia center he cofounded, is directly funded by the US Embassy in Dakar.
West Africa: rage on behalf of the machine
Both Thiat and Kilifeu from the Keur Gui Crew also later participated in a much wider hip hop project bankrolled and overseen by the NED’s World Movement For Democracy. As part of a 2019 attempt to build bridges and links between “pro-democracy” (i.e. US-backed) forces across Western Africa, the NED sponsored the production of a rap album, “Music as a Messenger of Democracy,” featuring a plethora of political artists from the region.
In addition to the Keur Gui Crew, this included Senegalese/Beninese rapper Moonaya, Awa Bling and Killa Ace from The Gambia, Nigeria’s Cill, Togo’s Elom 20ce, as well as Ami Yerewolo and Master Soumy from Mali.
Not only did the NED fund the production and promotion of the album, but it further supported the artists by hosting rap shows across the region. One example was a 2018 hip hop night in Dakar, Senegal, where, in addition to Thiat and Kilifeu, it flew in Elom 20ce and Killa Ace for the performance. Meanwhile, Cill spoke at the World Movement For Democracy’s Tenth Global Assembly.
Another West African hip hop act with a close relationship with the NED is DJ Switch, a popular Nigerian artist who collaborated with rap legend Busta Rhymes on a remix to her hit song, “So Tey.”
DJ Switch campaigned against police brutality, and even livestreamed the shooting of anti-government protesters, an act that jeopardized her safety in her home country. Only a few months after this incident, it was announced that, like Thiat, she had become an NED Reagan-Fascell Fellow.
For the United States government, the point of sponsoring huge numbers of individuals and organizations around the world is far less about training the shock troops who will lead a color revolution (although that certainly happens), and more about ensuring that a giant cadre of pro-US agents exists in all countries and in all manner of influential fields, from politics and business to academics and the arts. This is so if the US does decide to do something, there will be a loyal intelligentsia to support it. Rappers are merely a tiny piece of this puzzle.
One country, however, where hip hop artists are very much at the forefront of the US’ regime change plans is Cuba.
Cuba: the great astroturfed revolution
The United States has been trying to overthrow the government of Cuba since the Revolution of 1959. And in July 2021, they thought they had concocted the perfect plan. Washington spent enormous amounts of resources encouraging Cubans into the streets in an attempt to topple President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
America believed it had found the ideal figurehead in Yotuel, an aging rapper who left Cuba in the 1990s, and had released the anti-government song, “Patria y Vida” (Fatherland and Life) to great US fanfare just months earlier. “For those new to the issue of Cuba, the protests we are witnessing were started by artists, not politicians,” tweeted Cuban-American senator Marco Rubio, “This song ‘Patria y Vida’ powerfully explains how young Cubans feel. And its release was so impactful, you will go to jail if caught playing it in Cuba,” he claimed, sharing a link to the track with his millions of followers.
On the same day as Rubio’s tweet, a huge swath of US media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Voice Of America, and National Geographic, all simultaneously published articles profiling the song.
Collectively, this coverage identified “Patria y Vida” as the clarion call for a new generation, noted that it was a retort to the communist slogan “Patria o Muerte” (fatherland or death), and presented Yotuel as a crusading warrior of democracy. But none told readers that anti-government Cuban rappers like Yotuel had been sponsored, hothoused, and coached for years by the US government for precisely this purpose.
The NED was, at the time, financing numerous schemes training Cuban rappers as agents of regime change. One project entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society,” stated that its goal was to “promote citizen participation and social change,” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Another, called “Promoting Freedom of Expression in Cuba through the Arts,” claimed it was partnering with local musicians on projects related to “democracy, human rights, and historical memory,” and to help “increase awareness about the Cuban reality.” This “reality,” as President Biden himself stated the week of the insurrection, was that the Cuban government is an “authoritarian regime” that has meted out “decades of repression” while its leaders only “enrich themselves.”
At the same time, USAID was offering $2 million worth of funding to groups that could use culture to bring about a color revolution in Cuba. The announcement directly referenced Yotuel as a model to follow, stating that,
“Artists and musicians have taken to the streets to protest government repression, producing anthems such as ‘Patria y Vida,’ which has not only brought greater global awareness to the plight of the Cuban people but also served as a rallying cry for change on the island.”
In the end, despite the impeccable coordination from the US government, social media, the Cuban-American lobby, celebrities, and the press, all of whom came together to bombard the country with messaging telling them to get out on the streets, barely a few thousand people island-wide heeded their call. Moreover, they were dwarfed by far larger, pro-government counter-demonstrations (images of which, for some time, Western media often presented as anti-government marches).
The reality was that Patria y Vida’s supposed popularity was largely astroturfed. Yotuel had not even lived in Cuba for a quarter-century, and instead led a much larger sympathy demonstration in Miami. Days later, President Biden invited him to the White House for a special meeting.
Despite its failure, the US government has evidently still not given up on Yotuel as a potential regime change leader. This September, he appeared at the NED’s 2026 Democracy Awards and performed “Patria y Vida” live to those in attendance.
This was not the first time that Washington had been caught using hip hop to overthrow the Cuban government. In fact, inside Cuba, the rap scene is notorious for being full of undercover US agents. Gaining popularity in the late 1990s, local rappers had a considerable impact on society, helping bring to the fore many previously under-discussed topics. The United States saw their biting critiques of racism as a wedge they could exploit, and attempted to infiltrate their ranks.
In 2009, the US government sent Serbian music promoter Rajko Bozic to the island with a mission: to recruit a stable of rappers to use as anti-government shock troops. Bozic was a veteran of Otpor, a CIA-backed political group that led the insurrection against Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević – the first successful color revolution of the century.
Bozic soon found willing partners in rap group Los Aldeanos. With seemingly limitless funds for the operation, he immediately started aggressively promoting the duo, producing an anti-government TV show they starred in. Although it was not broadcast on television, Bozic and his team simply paid for it to be distributed around the country on DVDs and USB drives instead.
He also used Washington’s money and connections to get their music on the radio, and to bribe big Latino music stars into allowing them to open for them at their gigs, thus buying them more credibility and exposure. Los Aldeanos were even flown to Serbia for secret training, under the guise of playing at the Exit Music Festival.
Cuban authorities eventually exposed the scheme, however, and Los Aldeanos fled to Florida.
Being a hip hop fan in Cuba is fraught with difficulties. Without realizing, many Cubans are listening to albums, reading hip hop magazines, or even going to concerts secretly funded by the US national security state. The Caribbean island is without doubt where Washington has most concentrated its efforts in attempting to co-opt the rap scene.
Yet, for all its efforts, Fernandes told MintPress that the US government has had little success. Cuba, she said, is a place with an organic hip hop movement built from the ground up, and rappers are “not trying to overthrow their government but to create more spaces for their demands of anti-racism and equality under an expanding market economy. They had little reason to collaborate with U.S. agencies.”
As Fernandes explained, being found to be in the pay of a CIA front group would be seen as something of a scarlet letter:
“Cuban artists are wary of working with any U.S. government agencies, because it would completely damage their credibility and compromise their own belief systems. That’s not to say there aren’t newer and younger artists who may be more willing to engage with the U.S. government. But among long-term and established artists, they realize that any such engagement would risk closure of their critical spaces and loss of their credibility.”
Nevertheless, the Trump/Rubio administration has made toppling the Cuban government a major foreign policy priority. If they continue with this plan, it is quite possible we will soon be seeing more Yotuels and Los Aldeanos.
Orinogo Tribune
