¡Oh Cuba hermosa! El cancionero político social en Cuba hasta 1958 by Cristóbal Díaz Ayala (review)

The distinguished collector and independent scholar Cristóbal Díaz Ayala has been assembling materials, teaching, and writing about Cuban popular music for six decades. His voluminous collection of Cuban and Latin American popular music, now housed at the Florida International University Libraries, holds more than 150,000 items, including phonograph records, sheet music, audio and video cassettes, CDs, books, photographs, and other documents. Throughout the years, Díaz Ayala and many other researchers have mined his collection to document the history of Latin American music. Díaz Ayala himself has published more than a dozen books and scores of articles drawing on his extensive and diverse sources of information.

In his latest work, Díaz Ayala covers a broad spectrum of social and political issues found in the lyrics of Cuban songs, beginning with the Spanish conquest of the island and dwelling on its Republican phase (1902–1958). (An introductory chapter speculates about the possible influence of the indigenous areítos on Spanish musical traditions on the island.) The author’s main goal is to provide a detailed chronological account of the dominant ideological concerns of Republican Cuba as seen through the eyes of composers and performers. Recurring themes include the legacy of African slavery and racial inequality; Afro-Cuban religious and musical practices; the rural landscape and its inhabitants, the guajiros; government corruption and graft; national identity and sovereignty; and the mythical representation of the Cuban mulata as the epitome of racial integration, female beauty, and erotic allure.

Díaz Ayala’s painstaking method is to listen carefully to, transcribe, and comment on thousands of song lyrics from his extensive record collection. The songs include the one quoted in the book’s title, “¡Oh Cuba hermosa!,” taken from the first line of Eliseo Grenet’s 1931 protest bolero, “Lamento cubano,” for which he was forced into exile during the Gerardo Machado dictatorship (1929–1933). Most of the lyrics are transcribed verbatim, without additional observations by the author other than their title, author, and year of recording. Although this approach might leave many readers wishing for more interpretation, it lays the groundwork for further research and reflection by other scholars of Cuban popular music.

Díaz Ayala writes in a clear and direct narrative style. Given its lack of technical jargon and academic pretension, ¡Oh Cuba hermosa! will appeal to a broad audience of music researchers and teachers, graduate and under graduate students, and the general public. One of the book’s significant accomplishments is to clarify the meaning of colloquialisms present in Cuban songs—such as choteo (a peculiarly Cuban form of humor) and jiribilla (a restless and determined person)—and to situate the historical context of somewhat obscure musical references, such as “La chambelona” (a wildly popular conga that may date back to 1908). Because this publication concentrates primarily on lyrics, it offers little musical analysis.

Díaz Ayala’s main argument is that popular music articulated Cuba’s major social problems and its people’s cultural values and political aspirations, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. The two volumes of his work provide ample evidence for that claim. They reproduce and classify the lyrics according to their historical period and the leading genres for which Cuba has become internationally known—from the punto guajiro, a guitar-based type of song relying on the traditional poetic form of the décima, to more commercialized dances, such as the guaracha, son, rumba, and chachachá. Díaz Ayala pays special attention to the military marches and patriotic hymns composed in Cuba since the end of the nineteeth century, including the national anthem, “La bayamesa” (1868), and the twenty-sixth of July march (1957). He also devotes two separate chapters to the development of a vernacular...