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Preface “¡Ivan, ven acá!” Come inside, somebody yelled. He stopped his rapping , laughing, and dancing, quickly entered the house, and disappeared into the igbodú (altar room). After improvising outside in all the latest styles of hip-hop and timba dance to the beat of a popular singer called El Médico de la Salsa, now, accompanied by a respected elder and a young apprentice, Ivan began to recite an ancient musical liturgy in honor of the orisha Changó on the batá drum.1 Their percussive prayers echoed and explained the energy and complexity of the new, secular dances. The intricate arcs and turns of his salsa steps embellished and protected ancient information that lives at the center: la raíz, the root. This balance of modern and ancient continues to captivate me. Ivan and Cubans like him are time travelers and magicians. El Médico and Changó are one. This book tries to explain the connection. The Beginning As I left for Cuba, many questioned why I would expose myself to what seemed to them a dangerous situation in a “far away,” “communist,” “poor,” “Third World” country, and for such a long time. I especially recall the playful, yet serious teasing of my grandfather who would say, “We want you to be done with Cuba so you can hurry up and get a job! Don’t fool around and can’t get back!” As in the Buena Vista fever that took hold of the United States and the Elián ‹asco that brought the island into view as well, perceptions of Cuba are made of fear and fantasy. People of the African Diaspora who travel and dwell throughout its many frontiers and communities need to tell our stories. Through these encounters much can be learned to advance academic knowledge, im- prove living conditions, and expand life opportunities for people of the diaspora in various contexts from local to global. Too often, as with Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, or St. Clair Drake, the work gets lost somehow, and never reaches the scholarly canon or any wide audience. I want to tell our stories so that everyone may hear. Finally, after much dreaming, anticipation, and sacri‹ce by my family and me, I traveled to Cuba many times, between 1999 and 2002, staying two or three weeks around Christmas and New Year’s or a few months during the summer, welcomed by my friend’s mother and of‹cially hosted by Olavo Alén at the Center for the Investigation and Development of Cuban Music or Alberto Granado at La Casa de África. Each of these experiences was building familiarity as well as personal and professional connections, working up to a longer stay. Moving through Havana City, I was convinced that I had to be there to learn something, though I was still unsure what. Over the course of several trips and an extended residency, I truly caught the rhythm of the place. Sometimes people refused to believe that I was American and not from Cuba! They say cubanizao or aplatanao about foreigners who have “become Cuban.” In Havana, they thought I was a guajiro or palestino from Oriente. In Oriente, they thought I was from some other monte or maybe from the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico. I watched the telenovelas, saw a Cuban interpretation of world politics nightly on la mesa redonda or roundtable, I drank sweet coffee in the morning and at night, ate caldosa stew on July 26 and comida de cajita, the delicious meals in a box found throughout Havana. I tossed my dreams to the wind at the edge of Havana’s seawall. I sang to the orishas and learned to play Changó’s drums. I rode up close and personal with humanity on the P1 bus and the infamous camello or camel bus. I went from Havana to Santiago by train, I was mistaken for a Rastafarian and a pimp, and signed as a witness in the counting of votes for representatives in the Havana municipality of Marianao. There and in neighborhood of Los Sitios, we told stories to pass the time during apagones or blackouts. Fui a buscar los mandados (I ran errands). Family, the grandmother in the home where I lived, died and we grieved. I went to the cock‹ghts with my friend Pedro. I cruised around the perimeter of the U.S. military base in Guantánamo and felt the unity and the power of Cuban patriotism and, dare I...

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