Cuba: A Powerhouse of Latin Music

By JAMES NISSEN

The traditional and popular music of Cuba is among the most widely known and enjoyed music in the world today. As the powerhouse of Latin music, it has produced some of the world’s best-known musicians and genres, in the form of rumba, son and salsa, and it has influenced musicians and musical forms around the globe, from American Jazz to Congolese Soukous (‘Shake’); Colombian dance to West African Afro beat; Argentinian tango to Ghanaian high life; Spanish Nuevo flamenco to Senegalese Mbalax. As such, Cuban music has a prime place in World Music both in direct representation but also as a fundamental undercurrent of the global movement. Traditional musics in Cuba are syncretic fusions of Spanish and African musical systems (i.e. gradual acculturation and merging of the two), while its popular musics emerged as an eclectic patchwork combining these creative tensions with other influences predominantly from the USA. The more you learn about la Musica Cubana, the more difficult it becomes to define as, despite the efforts of salsa to contain it, its plethora of different traditions, styles and genres resist generalization and are as overwhelming in their intricate musical distinctions as they are irresistible.

Country Profile

Located just off the coast of North America, La República de Cuba, is the largest island in the Caribbean Sea. It has a population of just over 11 million across its 15 provinces. The official and universal language is Spanish, although there are African-derived languages like Lucumí, but, today, these are only used in religious contexts. The dominant religion in Cuba is Roman Catholicism and, due to the pervasiveness of Communism, the next largest group is nonreligious. Other religious affiliations include Protestants and Santería, a syncretic Afro-Cuban sect that merges Yoruba from Nigeria and Benin and Roman Catholic religious frameworks. Its ethnic composition is majority white Europeans, mainly from Spain; a small black demographic descended directly from African slaves; a medium-sized Mulato group of mixed European and African heritage; and a very small Chinese minority. Despite only having one major city, La Habana (Havana), almost 80% of the Cuban population lives in urban settings, which also include smaller cities like Santa Clara, Santiago and Trinidad.

 

Cultural History

Around 1000 years before the Spanish ‘discovery’ of Cuba, the Arawak-speaking Taíno population dominated the island, with small pockets of Guanahatabey and Ciboney peoples in the West and South of the island respectively. Little is known of Taíno culture, as it was organised around oral traditions that perished with its peoples, but the Spanish wrote that they ‘Drank smoke’, having developed a sophisticated system of rolling, preparing, burning and smoking the leaves of a plant they called Cohiba (Tobacco) over centuries. The first European contact with Cuba came from Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus, who landed on the island during his first voyage to the Americas (1492), naming it Juana (it was later renamed ‘Cuba’, allegedly after the Taíno designation Coabana 

(‘Great place’). Spanish colonialists, led by Diego Velázquez, then returned to settle the island. They enslaved the Taíno and forced them into hard labor on coffee and sugar plantations, killing any who were not strong bodied (16th Century). Within 30 years, almost the entire indigenous population had been wiped out by disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, murder or suicide. Spanish settlers drew on the nascent slave trade to generate a new labor force: They imported huge numbers of slaves from Africa to the island, with Cuba becoming the largest importer of slaves in the Caribbean, bringing over more than 600,000 mainly Yoruba and Bantú slaves from West and Central Africa (16th-18thC), and, following its fortunes, Spaniards themselves, primarily from the poorer south of Spain, flocked to the colony to grow Tobacco on small farms as Guajiro (peasant farmers). Later on, refugees from the slave rebellion of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1803) also came to find work in Cuba. Dutch and British expeditions attempted to take the island, occupying La Habana (1628) and Santiago (1662) respectively, but Spanish forces in the colony fought them off. Over the next centuries, Cuba emerged as Spain’s most important island in the Caribbean, ‘the Pearl of the Antilles’: it became its largest source of raw sugar and its hub for transporting New World gold back to the motherland. Cuba’s production output increased further still when it became clear that Cuban cigars survived the transatlantic voyages better than tobacco leaves, and so large Fabricas 

(Cigar Factories) were built on the island.

 

Music Culture

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Little is known about Taíno music because, as with their culture, their music was organised around oral tradition and perished with the people. Spanish colonial accounts of Taíno areitos(festivals) mention, in predictably bigoted language, their ‘savage’ song and dance rituals, which allegedly involved hundreds of participants dancing in concentric circles around musicians playing idiomatic percussion instruments. Certain Taíno instruments also survived, including jingles, güiro (a open-ended hollow gourd with parallel notches on one side played by rubbing a stick), Guamo (a snail shell horn) and forms of maracas. However, Taíno music is believed to have had no significant impact on subsequent Cuban music traditions. Instead, Cuban traditional musics developed through transculturación (‘interplay’ or ‘acculturation’, a term coined by folklorist Fernando Ortíz): the long-term transmission and exchange of exogenous cultural traits between Spanish and African cultural traditions, which eventually led to the development of new, original syncretic Cuban musical forms.

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Early Spanish and African Traditions

The Spanish colonists played traditional music from their homeland. These included Spanish church music genres, such as hymns and Villancicos (Christmas carols), but also semi-religious songs, song genres with religious and pastoral texts, which alternated estribillos (refrains/choruses) and coplas (stanzas/verses). These folk songs were performed for dance and for entertainment, and offered a means of maintaining a connection to Spanish culture and identity. Later, once Cuba had been firmly established and protected as a Spanish possession, colonists from high Spanish society came over to the island and so art music and European ballroom dances became popular in its emerging urban centers. Song forms included the Zarzuela, a light operatic song genre from Andalucía featuring a distinctive modal I-VII-VI-V progression, while dances featured mainly waltzes, mazurkas, gavottes and minuets and, later, the French contradanza. These were performed as a stimulus for dance and as a form of aesthetic pleasure and entertainment at social events, but they also acted as a signal of class and power, an affirmative symbol of the wealthy, educated elite who ruled the island.

As the colonists imported slaves into Cuba, traditional African musical forms came to the island. The slave trade routes meant that Central African Bantú slaves were mostly transported to the east of Cuba while West African Yoruba slaves were mainly settled in the west. For both groups, music revolved around drumming and dance related to religious worship, including ritualised communication with the spirit realm and spirit possession ceremonies. The Spanish forced all slaves to convert to Roman Catholicism, but they permitted them to maintain their own traditional customs and to run their own cabildos (Social associations administering their communities and their cultural and religious practices). The cabildos thus became the site of the first transculturación processes: the transmission of Christian religious beliefs and motifs into African devotional practices. Over time, the Bantú slaves and their descendants, known as Congos, and the Yoruba slaves and their descendants, known as Lucumí, both developed whole new syncretic religions: Palo and Santería. These religions merged Yoruba and Bantú religious sects with Catholic motifs, and both christened their spirit powers, the Kimpungulu(Bantú) and the Orichas (Yoruba), as corresponding Catholic ''Santos'' (saints). They also integrated some aspects of Christian worship, such as Catholic liturgical chant, but they both largely maintained their traditional worship customs and, by extension, their religious music practices.

 

In the rural country side of the Oriente, the Guajira (The poor white Spaniards who had moved to Cuba from the south of Spain, mainly from Andalucía and Las Islas Canarias, to work on small tobacco farms) also developed their own new Cuban traditions. Their early music bore some affinities to that of the folk music of the earlier Spanish settlers, and they too sang religious and pastoral canciones, but their traditions were influenced by newer Arabic-infused Andalusian musics and, as they adapted their form to their new life in Cuba, their texts, sound world and purposes for music emerged as completely distinct.

Drawing on their Iberian roots, the guajira developed their música Campesina (‘Country music) called Punto Guajiro (named after its distinctive guitar/tres punteando (‘picking’) playing style). Its tonadas (melodies) could be libre(‘free’), improvised in unmetered recitative style often with melismatic embellishments, or fijo (‘fixed’), sung in a clear metric patterns using set notes and contours committed to memory; and its coplas followed the décima and its lyrics tended to express witty or romanticized reflections on countryside life or wistful professions of love. 

In the urban centres of La Habana and Santiago, European dance traditions evolved into the syncretic Cuban danzón. The ‘Contradanza’ has a complex history, leading one Cuban musicologist to label its genre sarcastically as Anglo-Franco-Hispano-Afrocubano, so it is worth recognizing that there are three distinct lines of danzón that developed in Cuba: the Contradanza, a purely European ballroom dance form of English (country dance) and French (contre dance) descent employed by the aristocratic Spanish colonists; the Francophone Haitian Contradanza that, via the Tumba Francesa (‘French drums’), combined Spanish and Creole French styles with Afro-Cuban rhythms to develop into a different form of danzón in the Oriente; and the Contradanza of the workers’ dance halls in La Habana that evolved into the Habanera (‘Havana Dance’), with its own signature rhythm (X..XX.X.).

The Haitian-derived Creole danzón was significant in that it combined European classical harmony, binary form and graceful movements of ballroom with the cross-rhythms Afro-Cuban percussion instruments, bringing syncopated African-derived rhythms into elite salons of the Oriente for the first time. It also developed the Charanga, a new street band ensemble of strings and flutes with claves (Hard wood sticks struck against one another), Güiro and timbales (Pairs of shallow, single-headed drum), that, until the early 20th Century , became a standard ensemble for a whole range of Cuban musical performance.

 

In the West African milieu of the dance halls around La Habana, the contradanza, which the colonists had introduced to some of their slaves to ‘civilize’ their dancing, was creolised into the Habanera which maintained its binary form but introduced the Tresillo (X..X..X.) syncopation to create the dance’s idiomatic, and world-famous, cross-rhythmic pattern (the bass plays the duple-pulse  ‘Habanera’ (X..XX.X.)  against a triple-time Tresillo or later cinquillo (X.XX.XX.), pattern in the accompaniment); and the Danzón Habanera became the national dance of Cuba in the late 19th. Around the same time, itinerant black and mulato artisans, based in Santiago in Oriente, developed a vocal tradition, Trova, which involved the sentimental performance of poetic song genres like bolero accompanied by guitar. Trovadores could achieve a great deal of fame and recognition with their compositions and performance talents and, as wandering musicians, they played a key role in transculturación by spreading diverse regionalism Hispanic and Afro-Cuban styles around the island.

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In the USA in the 1960's, Cuban music fell out of favor from its earlier fervor due to the tense relations between the two countries. However, in the 1970's, it rose from the ashes as Cuban refugees started to gain musical presence and recognition and through the creation of a marketing ‘power word’: salsa. Exploding in New York City, salsa branded Cuban dance music as ‘Hot’, ‘Spicy’, ‘up-tempo’ and ‘uplifting’, and it encouraged stylistic fusions between the array of Afro-Cuban musical traditions and other Latin American dance music influences, notably from Puerto Rican bomba. It also devised a formalized dance approach for Cuban dance styles, including standardized movements, choreography and routines. Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans in the USA, especially New York City) like Ray Barreto and Tito Puente galvanized the salsa music movement in the USA, and it went on to produce stars like Celia Cruz and Gloria Estefan who, today, represent ‘Cuban’ music to the world as much as most Cuban musicians themselves. Indeed, in later years when Cuba started to open up again, Cuban musicians playing in the burgeoning tourism industry adopted the term in the form of ‘Cuban salsa’ as a way of symbolizing their vast array of different Cuban styles, including Son Cubano, Rumba, Guajira, Guaracha, Mambo, Cha cha chá and others, all of which of course predated the salsa label. They also labelled their spontaneous and improvisation approach to dancing to styles like Son Cubano as ‘Cuban salsa’ as a way of linking it to, and yet differentiating it from, the prescribed New York dance style.

 

Since the 1970's, in Cuba itself, traditional and popular music has been through waves of fusion and nostalgia. Songo, popularized by the group Los Van Van, developed in La Habana as a combination of Afro-Cuban dance styles with American rock and jazz and Latin, especially Afro-Brazilian, dance styles, and its ensemble is essentially an electrified Charanga. Novísima Trova, which took off in the hard times after the fall of the Soviet Union,emerged as a generation of new songwriters who started to criticize aspects of the Revolution and voice comment on modern society, often subtly and metaphorically drawing attention to gap between the principles of socialism and its realities in Castro’s state. Son experienced a surging revival in the 1990's-2000's with reunions of groups like Septeto Nacional and Sierra Maestra and the revival efforts of musicians like Eliades Ochoa. Along with other traditional Cuban genres, son achieved international fame in ‘World Music’ through the Buena Vista Social Club album (1997) and film (1999), which involved a collaboration between American guitarist Ry Cooder and veteran Cuban musicians like Juan de Marcos González, Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Manuel ‘Guajiro’ Mirabal, Rubén González and, later, the prolific Omara Portuondo. Timba, pioneered by groups like NG La Banda, Orishas and Son 14,arose as a fusion of Afro-Cuban music with the African-American forms like hip-hop and funk and other Afro-Caribbean forms like reggae and dance hall, and focuses on black Cuban ‘Street’ experiences.  The state reacted ambiguously to this, on the one hand founding the Cuban Rap Agency to support it and, on the other, promulgating ‘Moral panic’ and economically censoring emerging musicians if they were too outspoken about issues like racial discrimination; it has, nevertheless, reinstated a uniquely and proudly black Cuban identity. In a sense, Cuban music since the Revolution has continued to narrate the story of Spanish and African fusion, harboring the spirit of transculturación: always adapting, always infusing and always changing.

 

James Nissen (The University of Manchester), April 2017