Hip-Hopping In Havana.

On a postcard-perfect spring evening, with Caribbean breezes rustling the palm trees under a full moon, dozens of foreign tourists take their seats at linen-covered tables beside the pool at Havana's Hotel Nacional. Each has shelled out $60--about six times a Cuban worker's average monthly wage--for dinner alfresco and a recital starring the king of the homegrown musical genre known as son, Compay Segundo. Dressed in a black suit and trademark felt hat, the 95-year-old superstar is helped onto the stage to join his eight-man band. Taking up his guitar, he strums classic tunes like "Esa Negra Linda" and lends his mellifluous bass harmony to a chubby lead singer young enough to be his great-grandson. "Echa!" he shouts at the end of each song.

Like the stately, five-star Hotel Nacional, Segundo is something of a national monument. As the smiling icon of the Buena Vista Social Club, he represents the Cuba that Fidel Castro's Ministry of Tourism wants to market to the outside world. And his crisply paced 75-minute set delivers the goods with a panache that is irresistible, especially after a few mojito cocktails.

A brisk seven-minute walk away, the seedy Las Vegas Cabaret offers up a slightly more subversive version of Cuban culture. In a neon-lit, smoke-filled back room, a young and almost exclusively black crowd of hip-hop performers and fans gathers on Friday afternoons for four hours of deafening rap rhythms. In a totalitarian regime where no independent judges, schools or television stations exist, some of the lyrics pointedly address taboo issues like police brutality and social inequality. "In the eyes of the police I'm nothing but a criminal," shouts the frontman of a group called Explosion Suprema. "Stop me on the street for no reason/Just to screw me over." The protest lyrics and the low-rent clientele at the Las Vegas Cabaret--which is not mentioned in any of the government tour guides--have almost nothing in common with the feel-good entertainment on display at Havana's top hotel. "This is the real Cuba," barks Junior Clan, a 24-year-old pioneer of the movement.

Hip-hop is relatively new to Cuba and owes its existence in part to an accident of geography. In the late 1990s, youths living in the squalid east Havana neighborhood of Alamar discovered rap via Miami radio stations. The angry message of U.S. rapmeisters like Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre resonated with the black kids of Alamar, who regularly suffer discrimination despite the state's claims to have stamped out bigotry long ago. Three-man groups soon surfaced with names like Los Reyes de la Calle ("The Kings of the Street") and 100 Percent Original and gained a loyal following.

At first the abrasive, in-your-face musical import from the United States posed a quandary for Castro's cultural commissars. This is, after all, the same paranoid nomenklatura that once banned the Beatles from the government-run airwaves on the ground that "I Want to Hold Your Hand" might be a shrewdly concealed weapon of bourgeois imperialism. With time, however, the regime overcame its wariness and pronounced hip-hop to be what the cabinet minister in charge of arts and letters called "an authentic expression of Cuban culture." That seal of approval came after police raided a number of rap concerts that produced angry confrontations with neighborhood youths. The regime ...