Edrey is the one with the movie-star smile who can sound like James Brown (“get funky!”) or Snoop Dogg (“I got my baby…”) when a lyric calls for some convincingly sung African-American English. Ulises sticks to Cuban Spanish and exudes the kind of patient intelligence that might seem more adapted to teaching university classes than rapping in music videos. They call themselves Ogguere, a Yoruba word that translates as “soul of the earth,” and they’re the elder statesmen of Cuban rap.


In fact Ogguere has been around only since 2004, but their partnership began a decade before. Edrey and Ulises got together in the early 1990s in the Santos Suarez neighbourhood of Havana, where Edrey lived (and still lives) with his grandmother on Avenida Serrano. Ulises grew up in El Cotorro, the site of the old Modelo Brewery, and he had to travel two hours to come to Santos Suarez every day. The two would hang out in Parque Policía , a public playground where people from all over Havana came to rap and breakdance. “I know Alamar gets credit as the site of the first rap festival, and I respect that, but people should know about Parque Policía.


In 1996 Edrey and Ulises started working with Pablo Herrera, Cuba’s premier rap producer, who also happened to live in Santo Suarez, on Calle Zapote. Somehow they managed to resist the temptation to slide into the potentially lucrative reggaeton niche, as many other Cuban rappers had done before and have done since. “Our idea is to use all the rhythms that we have in Cuba – mambo, son, chachacha – and bring them into rap music and mix it up with funk, rumba, and the music that all our ancestors were listening to in Cuba,” says Ulises. “We want to make folkloric music, as far as the way we ‘poeticise’, the way we rap. We want our grandparents, despite their age, to feel like they can share something with us, and us with them.”