This is a Guest Post by Romina Ruiz-Goiriena

After fifty years with a single-party government and more than half the Cuban population born after the triumph of the Revolution, many followers of Cuba  have fixated themselves with hopes of an emerging generation "hungry for change." However as I pointed out in an article for El Mundo that analyzed the state of opposition movements ten years after Oswaldo Paya launched the Varela Project, clearly delineated dissident movements have been ineffective in galvanizing an increasingly alienated and politically apathetic Cuban youth.

While scholars and analysts believe there are multiple reasons for this rift, for the younger generation; their formative years on the Island were marked by the demise of the U.S.S.R. The fall of the Berlin wall not only symbolized an end to Communism as they knew it but with it economic subsidies, education opportunities to the Eastern Bloc and the realization that their ideological identification with a bigger political movement had been obliterated. While their parents or grandparents had enjoyed the fruits of the Soviet-Cuban relationship, they would have to battle out brutal economic strife and a passé political narrative that had failed them--alone.

Youth looked elsewhere and Cuban hip-hop was born.