Introduction

In Cuba, slaves were able to preserve their religions and transmit them from generation to generation by way of their music. Slaves were allowed to dance in the streets on certain occasions, such as the Epiphany, the Carnival and the Feast of St. John, which coincided with the summer solstice and the feast of the powerful Yoruba god Oggún. This process of syncretism accelerated the absorption of African music and rituals into the national culture of Cuba. Cuban music developed along three fundamental lines: (1) religious music, which remained almost intact since its inception and kept very close to its African models; (2) dance hall music, which kept European instrumentation and structures but gradually added African rhythmic cells and percussion and (3) street music, which was performed regularly in the poor communities known as solares, and during the carnival.

This line of development was greatly influenced by French and Haitian colonists and nationals who fled the prosperous colony of Saint Domingue after the slave rebellion of 1793. In Cuba the job of musician was overwhelmingly performed by blacks and mulattos. The 1827 census in Cuba shows that among 16,250 white workers, only 44 were musicians. However, 49 out of 6,754 free blacks and mulattos were musicians (Díaz-Ayala, 38). While whites rejected such jobs as lowly, blacks sought them as a social ladder and a means for survival. Most orchestras were soon dominated by colored musicians who gradually transformed the structure and even the instrumentation of the dance hall pieces they were hired to play. By 1798 there were about 50 dance halls in Havana dominated by colored musicians who were already leaving their mark on European forms like the contradanza of the 1820’s and gradually transforming it into the danza of the 1840’s and the danzón of 1879, the first truly Cuban creation and the ancestor of the 20th century salsa rhythms (Carpentier, 211-221; Galán, 122-126).

The descendants of the African slaves played a double role in the development of Latin music: they kept alive and transformed African music, but they also imbued the “white” music played in dance halls, churches and theaters with “black” elements. The Haitian contredanse, a syncretic dance which introduced the West African cinquillo, or five-note rhythmic cell, gave rise to the Cuban contradanza, from which the danza, the habanera, and the danzón ultimately developed. A third line of musical development took place in the solares or communal tenements where former slaves lived after abolition, mainly in urban Western Cuba (Havana, Matanzas and Pinar del Río). The dwellers of solares were at the bottom of the social scale and lived and worked in the most abject conditions as street sweepers, coal sellers, and street vendors. Their contacts with white society were minimal, and their music was almost entirely devoid of European influence. This is the environment that gave rise to the rumba in Western Cuba and the son in the more rural province of Oriente, in Eastern Cuba.