Los Malucos
Havana-born rapper Yosvel El Maluco has been a star since he was seven-years-old. After being hand-picked and shepherded by Louis Frank of Buena Vista Social Club and Cuban superstar X Alfonso, he went on to become one of the first rappers in Cuban history to receive institutional approval to perform in public. Along with his wife and manager, ZoKo, he recently moved to New York City, in hopes of transcending diasporic fame and taking the larger hip-hop scene by storm. I sat down with this Afro-Caribbean legend to chat about his life, Cuba, hip-hop, and his epic love affair with ZoKo.
If you ask Cuban-born rapper Yosvel El Maluco about his hometown, Havana, he’ll light up.
“I love it!” he’ll say, shaking his long dreads and flashing his bright chipped smile. “Anywhere you go there's somebody playing music. Everywhere you go is vibrant.”
There’s another side to that coin, too, that he’ll readily express.
“There’s a massive shortage of opportunities in Cuba,” he’ll say, with a sad shrug. “Part of it is that the opportunities are hidden behind privileged access and bureaucracy. Because it’s a tourist economy, there’s a lot of foreign investors, but getting to them can be challenging.”
If you ask him about his new town, New York City, he doesn’t miss a beat. “It reminds me of Havana,” he’ll say, despite the obvious differences in weather and linguistic homogeneity. “I love the vibe of New York, it’s pure energy.”
I found Yosvel enjoying his new life on an early spring evening. Walking down his South Queens street, as the sun was setting, I dodged kids playing in the street and music blasting from parked cars. There’s an electricity to the city that time of year, everyone getting ready to go crazy after trudging through another gray winter.
Yosvel’s wife and manager, ZoKo, met me at their front door with a glass of wine and brought me inside to meet Yosvel and their painfully cute, desperately dough-eyed Tibetan Spaniel named Chi Chi. ZoKo is beautiful with a casual raspy voice and bohemian flair, it’s easy to imagine her either running Rolling Stone magazine or selling joints on a beach in Brazil.
“Have a seat,” she said, gesturing to a chair in their living room. Their house, despite a pretty recent and tumultuous move from Havana, felt warm and lived in, furnished with a colorful assortment of fancy furniture donated by friends and friends of friends. Music blared from a bluetooth speaker and I felt like a grumpy old neighbor, asking them to turn it down, so that I could hear them better.
Yosvel began his career as a child star, hand-picked by both destiny and Louis Frank of Buena Vista Social Club to appear in a documentary with Pío Leyva, a legend from Buena Vista Social Club.
“My mom’s goddaughter was supposed to be in [Frank’s] documentary as a rapper,” Yosvel explained. “I was seven and hanging around with them, rapping like always, and Louis saw me and was like, ‘Who are you?’ It was really just because I happened to follow my mom that day. It was a time when foreign investors were really trying to capitalize on Cuban talent. I couldn’t even read or write yet. I’d just memorize my raps.”
“That’s amazing!” I said. “Did it immediately propel your career?”
“I got this opportunity and it opened a lot of doors for me,” Yosvel said. “Not only was I featured on the album, Homeland, but because of the association with Buena Vista Social Club and the documentary, it ended up giving me a lot of clout from a young age. People already knew I was the kid rapper, but this gave me the opportunity to record my music in a professional studio.”
“Did it make you feel like ‘the chosen one?’” I asked, kidding, but also seeing how such an experience could instill within a youngster a sense of destined greatness.
“No,” he said, laughing. “I was just a kid rapping and having fun! I didn’t realize what was happening. For my parents, though, it was a really big deal.”
ZoKo added, "I really connected with Yosvel’s mom, Mati, who passed away five years ago. His parents have always been his number one cheerleaders.”
“You had another important famous mentor,” I said. “How did you end up working with X Alfonso?”
“X Alfonso was born across the street from my solar,” Yosvel explained, referring to the courtyard-like neighborhood he grew up in, which are common in Havana. “He didn’t live there anymore, but his extended family did. One day he came to the neighborhood, filming a video, he also loved to make documentary music videos. He went to meet this guy Black, who was known as an amazing beatboxer. Black was like, ‘We gotta have Yosvel in it!’”
“Shortly after that they made the video Santa, which still holds the record for the most Cuban VMAs, called Las Lucas,” ZoKo said, looking at Yosvel with pride. “It had 17 nominations and 14 prizes. It was viral. It was everywhere in Cuba, everywhere you’d go.”
X Alfonso is THE man in Havana. Not only is he a famous musician, but also the mastermind behind Fabrica de Arte Cubano, which is a massive nightclub and art gallery in the city, which acts as a cultural hub for artists and thinkers akin to Andy Warhol’s Factory.
X Alfonso’s Video for Civilización, featuring young Yosvel starting at 0:38.
“Tell me about starting New World, as your first project on your own,” I said.
“I had been working with X Alfonso,” Yosvel began. “I had been getting better known, but I was still just a kid from the street, this pretty marginalized area, with no resources. I spent my childhood tagging along on X Alfonso’s career. I was getting a bit older, around 16, and I was ready to make my own band. I went around and built a band of super talented street musicians. But because none of them were formally trained, it was really hard to get into the institutions. In Cuba to be able to perform live, you need the backing of institutions. You have to show formal paperwork.”
To illustrate what Yosvel was referring to, ZoKo walked over to their bookshelf and withdrew a homemade, spiral-bound book of paperwork. “This book is so funny to me,” she said, handing it to me. “I put it together with everything I could find. It includes these kids’ diplomas and grades from school. All of them had to turn in their diplomas, or whatever their highest education was, just to be able to legally play at a bar. It was kind of a monumental moment. It was the first-time street musicians without formal training or connections were able to get the paperwork they needed to perform. A lot of that was just possible because of the clout Yosvel had gathered working with X Alfonso and Buena Vista Social Club. It was no easy feat. It was years in the making.”
I leafed through its pages and marveled at the work ZoKo had put into it. Everything, I mean everything you could imagine, that could make a person look ‘serious’ in the eyes of a government bureaucrat was included for each band member– from grades to YouTube view counts. A tremendous feat, considering she did this in a country with little internet and no Kinkos.
“So, now we’ve gotten to the part in the story where ZoKo enters,” I said. “When exactly did you guys meet?”
“We met in November of 2014 at Fabrica, which had just opened that year,” ZoKo said. “Our whole relationship revolved around that club. New World was very new. Over our relationship is when he started getting more gigs. I worked on their PR, figuring out the image, the story, getting the paperwork in line. It took me a while to realize how famous he was in the community. We were going out all the time, and everywhere we went so many people would come up to him. Even in New York people will run up to us, super excited.”
“And then, New World dissolved during the pandemic?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Yosvel said. “That’s when I released Tanga and Wasa Wasa which were the first two things I made during the transition into my solo career.”
“I love Wasa Wasa!” I laughed. “Your sound is so unique. There are obvious connections to traditional Afro-Caribbean music and hip-hop, but also hard rock, reggaeton, and baile funk. How did you develop it?”
“Because I had the opportunity from a young age to work with these incredible bands, it gave me a lot of opportunity to hear all these different sounds,” Yosvel explained. “X Alfonso had a lot of alt rock influence, but also does a lot of traditional Cuban singer/songwriter music. That gave me a lot of inspiration. The Lil Wayne rock album was also really inspirational. Since seven-years-old I had a full band I could rap to, so I always wanted a full band sound. I just kept experimenting with new sounds. There are world class musicians on every corner in Cuba, so when it comes to influences, I’m a little spoiled. Now, I’ve been spending the past few years working with Yoyi Lagarza on an entirely new solo project. It started with Tanga and Wasa Wasa when New World disintegrated, but was halted when he left for Spain, and me for New York. It’s challenging, because as Cubans we need visas to go EVERYWHERE, but we make it work”
“And what is your process for writing lyrics?” I asked.
“Sometimes I sit down to write, sometimes it just hits me from a muse, sometimes I’ll go into the studio and connect with the music and see what comes out,” he said. “I don’t have a strict ritual.”
While this process sounds normal enough, there are particular struggles an artist faces when creating art within a medium that has a subversive history in Cuba.
“Rap was built on a foundation of giving a voice to the voiceless, both in the United States and in Cuba,” Yosvel said. “Though because of the laws, you need papers to perform, and in order to get those papers you need to be approved by the government. If you are going to copyright an artist's work it has to be ‘in harmony’ with the interests of the Cuban Socialist Revolution. That excludes profanity, anything about sex or drugs or violence, and obviously anything anti-establishment.”
“It was such a big moment for us to get these papers, because it was a rap group with a full band,” ZoKo said, pointing to the book she had made. “It was a rap group that didn’t say anything bad about the government, it didn't swear. It was very wholesome, it was like, ‘We like parties. We like to have a good time. We like parties.’ It was all they could really do. It was a massive limitation.”
There have, of course, been examples of rappers who refused this limitation. In the early 2000s there was a rap group called Los Aldeanos that were overtly political and became extremely popular, who were eventually kicked off the island. Also, like any big city, Havana has a rich and storied underground counter-culture; however, it faces unique challenges as anyone who cares to can report the subversive activity of individuals or groups to the Committee of the Defense of the Revolution.
Cuba’s battle against subversive art and hip-hip recently evolved into an international scandal surrounding the 2021 song Patria o Vida. The song recalled the poetically telling switch on Cuban currency in the 1970s from the motto “Patria o Vida” (Homeland or Life) to “Patria o Muerte” (Homeland or Death). The song, created chiefly by Cuban expats working outside its borders, also featured rappers still living on the island. The song won a Latin Grammy, while one of the rappers residing on the island was banished and one was put in jail, where he remains to this day.
“Do you feel a greater sense of freedom writing lyrics now that you’ve left?” I asked Yosvel, trying not to foist my brain-washed American view of the world too harshly upon him.
“It’s been a process of untraining myself to self-censor,” he admitted. “I still find myself censoring myself. It’s been crazy seeing how much of my creative process was closed off. It will still be a while until I’ll stop censoring myself. What I’ve always done is use innuendo and metaphor, which is a creative challenge, but can be interesting and rewarding. It’s a fine line figuring out what your priorities are as an artist. It forces you to be three times more creative.”
“And ZoKo,” I said. “How did you decide to start committing to managing Yosvel?”
“At first I came back to Cuba for my job and managing Yosvel was just for fun,” she explained. “It was easier and cheaper for me to do it than hire someone else. I didn’t know what I was doing. We got married after three years, and that’s when I started taking it more seriously. I realized that I’m really good at it. We did a lot of projects and we made a lot of videos. I started having so much fun doing it. I decided to go to grad school and learn about music business.”
“I know people affectionately call you two ‘Los Malucos,’” I said. “Where did that come from?”
“We had a friend group everyone called, ‘Los Malucos,’ which means ‘the crazy ones,’” she explained. “We’d show up to the club and everyone would cheer, ‘Pingajos! Llegaron Los Malucos!’ In Cuba, the socialist culture extends into the underground scenes, where everyone is categorized. If you like salsa music, ‘here is your club and friends.’ If you want to be a ‘freaky,’ like a rocker, ‘here is your park and music.’ Yosvel, being a child star, moved through a lot of different social circles and that made people uncomfortable. ‘I just saw you at the reggaeton club, why are you hanging out with the freakies?!’ Yosvel started using the word ‘maluco’ as a maverick identity that would allow him to enter different social circles. It stuck, and now we’re Los Malucos. Now everyone wants to be a Maluco. It’s a catch all for people who are fun and accepting, but Yosvel and I are the original Malucos.”
I looked over to Yosvel, and could see all of the contradictions present in the “Maluco” title, from his long dreadlocks to his sparkle-painted fingernails.
“You’ve centered your world around this relationship,” I said to ZoKo. “It’s changed your whole life. What made you believe in Yosvel enough to stick your neck out this far?”
“Yosvel is my muse on everything,” ZoKo said, looking over to Yosvel on the couch, as he pet and made silly faces at Chi Chi. “We connected from day one. He was like, ‘I’m an artist and that is it.’ I knew I would never change that, which I was fine with. He needed help, and I loved the project and felt grateful. We just fit. I’ve always dabbled in a million mediums and in music everything is incorporated. You need music, visuals, fashion, writing, there’s even acting. It was a blessing, and it showed me what I wanted to do. And I get to do all of that with the person I love.”