Fresh from his Album of the Year Grammy win, Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny – Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio – lit up the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show last night at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
The 13-minute set went down in history for several reasons: Martínez Ocasio became the first male solo Latino artist to perform the halftime show and the first to perform a set entirely in Spanish.
It was a spectacular celebration of Puerto Rican – and, by extension, Latino – culture, one in which the guitar is so deeply embedded that it would have been remiss not to include the instrument in one way or another. In fact, at roughly the 9:24 mark, Bad Bunny's band member, José Eduardo Santana, is shown playing a cuatro.
The guitar-like instrument is Puerto Rican's very own national instrument, and Santana plays a heartfelt solo to introduce fellow Puerto Rican music legend Ricky Martin's interpretation of Bad Bunny's LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii, from his latest award-winning album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.
Unlike your typical six-string guitar, the modern cuatro typically has five double-strings – although some musicians add up to six metal strings to flex their virtuosity.
Although it's closely related to other Latin American string instruments, the Puerto Rican cuatro is wholly unique, tuned in fourths from low to high, with B and E in octaves; and A, D, and G in unisons: B3 B2 – E4 E3 – A3 A3 – D4 D4 – G4 G4. It also has a body typically sourced from endemic woods such as guaraguao, laurel, maga, algarrobo, cedro macho, and roble blanco.
The guitar-like instrument is also far from one-size-fits-all. It exists in a variety of forms, including the cuatro soprano, cuatro alto, cuatro tradicional (the standard variant), and cuatro bajo (bass), depending on the player’s preferences.
As Puerto Rico’s national instrument, it’s a staple of folk genres such as jíbaro music, plena, trova, aguinaldo, and seis. However, as demonstrated by Bad Bunny, it has also been given a new lease on life by a younger generation of artists who blend traditional folk with contemporary genres such as reggaeton.
Bad Bunny had previously employed the cuatro as a key part of his set during performances like his long-anticipated Tiny Desk concert, which featured cuatro player Fabiola Méndez, as well as a recent viral concert in Chile, which saw the artist, aided by his cuatrista Santana, pay homage to Chilean folk singer, Victor Jara through his own rendition of the 1971 protest song El Derecho de Vivir en Paz.
The guitar – and guitar-like instruments – featured heavily across all genres at this year’s Grammys, with standout moments including Justin Bieber wielding a 1988 Yamaha RGX 612S and Slash and Ozzy producer Andrew Watt repping Gibson during a star-studded tribute to Ozzy.
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