National Symbol or “a Black Thing”?: Rumba and Racial Politics in Cuba in the Era of Cultural Tourism

The Afro-Cuban music and dance genre rumba has historically been considered una cosa de negros (a black thing) and reviled due to racialized stereotypes that link the practice with el bajo mundo (the low life), excessive alcohol use, and violence. Nevertheless, the socialist Revolutionary government has sought to elevate rumba’s status during the past half century as part of a larger goal of foregrounding and valorizing the African contributions to Cuban identity and culture. In addition to rumba’s association with blackness, it is often portrayed as a particularly potent symbol of the masses and working-class identity, which constitutes another, perhaps more significant, reason why the Revolution has aimed to harness rumba to its cultural nationalist discourse. Finally, unlike Afro-Cuban religious practices, which until the early 1990s were heavily marginalized within the context of an official policy of “scientific atheism,” rumba is a secular practice. In short, it is the most significant and popular black-identified tradition on the island.

In this article, I discuss the contemporary situation of rumba performance in various Cuban cities, highlighting the impact of the cultural tourism industry and arguing that it reinforces, with both positive and negative effects for musicians, the long-standing racialization of rumba as una cosa de negros. I believe that despite the discursive valorization of the practice found in much Cuban scholarship and political rhetoric, rumba continues to be identified with a particular and marginalized sector of the population. In many ways, the complex situation of rumba performance conforms to the more general trend of contemporary racial politics on the island. While it would be very difficult to prove that rumba faces racial bias in the era of cultural tourism, particularly as this would be a politically sensitive issue for an American researcher to raise with representatives of the Cuban state, my primary aim is to foreground the experiences and perceptions of musicians vis-à-vis the continuing racialization of rumba.

Rumba’s Place within the National Cultural Imaginary

Primarily influenced by the instruments, rhythmic patterns, formal features, and dances from Central and West African traditions, rumba has always been a hybrid musical practice that also integrates elements of European melody and Spanish language and poetic forms. Rumba emerged as the main musical accompaniment for parties and secular festivities in poor black and racially mixed communities in western Cuba in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Although a decidedly secular performance tradition, rumba was influenced by percussion ensembles and dances associated with both sacred and profane African traditions, primarily those of Bantu origin such as yuka and makuta (León 1991; Crook 1992). This close association with Afro-Cuban sacred practices stems from rumba’s probable emergence within cabildos de nación (Martínez Rodríguez 1998), colonial-era mutual aid societies formed by Africans and their descendants whose official purpose was to orient newly arrived slaves to life in Cuba. Cabildos were formed principally along African ethnic lines—for example, the Lucumís (Yoruba) had their cabildo, the Congos (Bantu) had a separate one, and so on—although in practice there was a good deal of interethnic exchange within the societies (Delgado 2001). They also functioned as the primary venues for slaves and free blacks to continue practicing their musical and religious traditions and as a site of cultural exchange between Africans of different ethnic groups, creating the conditions for the emergence of syncretic genres such as rumba (Crook 1992). By the early twentieth century, cabildos had all but died out due to policies instituted after emancipation (1886), although there are still a few extant ones in different Cuban cities.

Throughout the twentieth century, rumba occupied shifting positions within the cultural nationalist discourse. In the early decades, rumba was a marginalized and criminalized cultural practice owing to its associations with poor and working-class blacks, many of whom had migrated from the countryside to the port cities of Havana and Matanzas to search for employment as dockworkers after emancipation (Crook 1992). During the nation-building decades of the 1920s and 1930s...