From Son to Salsa: The Roots and Fruits of Cuban Music

When assessing the disproportionate global impact that the island of Cuba has had in areas as diverse as politics, literature, sports, and music and dance, the country is frequently and erroneously referred to as a "small island nation." In fact, Cuba is large—far larger than any other single Caribbean island and roughly the same size (110,860 square km) as the rest of the Antilles combined. Given this fact, we should not be surprised to find that while other islands have produced just one or two styles of "national music" (e.g., merengue and bachata in the Dominican Republic; bomba, plena, and música jíbara in Puerto Rico; reggae in Jamaica; calypso and soca in Trinidad), Cuba has developed and successfully exported a seemingly endless succession of musical styles and infectious rhythms, many of which have gone on to conquer the hemisphere and circle the globe: son, rumba, contradanza, danza, danzón, habanera, punto guajiro, canción, "rhumba," conga, mambo, cha-cha-chá, trova, bolero, fílin (feeling), nueva trova, Latin jazz, descarga, batanga, pachanga, pilón, pacá, mozambique, songo, timba, Cuban hip-hop, and of course, salsa itself, whose Cuban paternity is universally recognized by the mostly Nuyorican musicians who brought it into existence in New York City in the 1970s.

In different ways, most of the books under review here attempt to trace the origins and development of Cuban popular music during the twentieth century. These books also emphasize how Cuban music has successfully "crossed borders" to the rest of Latin America and the United States, reinventing itself many times and with different degrees of success along the way. All the authors are particularly concerned with uncovering the African elements that infuse popular Cuban music and dance, continuing a tradition of scholarly and popular curiosity begun most famously by Cuban anthropologist don Fernando Ortiz and taken up again most recently by ethnomusicologist Robin Moore in his pioneering study Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (1997).

The first book under review is a new translation of Music in Cuba (2001), Alejo Carpentier's landmark study of the historical development of Cuban sacred, symphonic, and popular music, and of the creative tension that has always existed among them. First published in 1945, before Carpentier wrote the works that made him one of Latin America's leading novelists, this is the last of his major works to be translated into English. Editor Timothy Brennan reminds us that Carpentier was a professional exile, taking it upon himself to explain Europe to provincial Cuba and, increasingly, to convince Parisians why Cuban art and culture mattered. In this role, Carpentier had much in common with many other colonial expatriate...