Rebel Dance, Renegade Stance: Timba Music and Black Identity in Cuba by Umi Vaughan (review)

The first North American scholar to produce a monograph on Cuban timba, Umi Vaughan conducted fieldwork during extended stays in Havana between 1999 and 2003. Arriving just after the heyday of timba and deeply involved in Afro-Cuban religion, he was uniquely positioned to write about the music and its surrounding culture. Rebel Dance explores how timba expresses black Cuban identity, and how black Cubans express their shared identity through timba. According to Vaughan, timba is a music and dance culture that exemplifies the Maroon spirit, exposing the marginality, creativity, and self-sufficiency of Afro-Cubans.¹ The chapters thus deal consecutively with Maroon music, Afro-Cuba, the especulador, dance spaces in Havana, and Vaughan's experiences with fieldwork.² The author's rich visual descriptions throughout are complimented by his photographic experiments. Many scholars have pointed to the lyrical, musical, and aesthetic blackness of timba.³ In this volume, Vaughan elaborates on that theme in concrete and useful ways.

In the first chapters, Vaughan culls from the existing literature to construct a narrative that supports his main arguments. He introduces timba by considering the meaning of the word itself and defines the musical genre on the basis of its hybridity and its formal and timbral innovations. He then links lyrical examples to the book's major themes. Comparing iconic timbero José "El Tosco" Cortés with the classic sonero Benny Moré, Vaughan notes their shared refusal to conform to mainstream expectations as evidence of their Maroon spirit. Historical racial stereotypes that continue to shape the experience of black Cubans are contrasted with a tradition of organizing within the Afro-Cuban community, from cabildos and the Partido Independiente de Color to blacks' participation in broader mobilizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The lyrics of a song by Mario "Mayito" Rivera allow Vaughan to reflect on the joy and struggle of the black Cuban experience.⁴

Vaughan's most important contributions come in the next chapters. Based on the lyrical content of timba songs, interviews with musicians and fans, and observed behavior at dance events, he develops the figure of the especulador, linking it to the nineteenth-century negro curro. Like the negro curro, the especulador flaunts his mobility and his wealth, real or imagined, in a variety of discursive and performative ways. The author contextualizes these practices within Cuba's post-Soviet economy, in which Afro-Cubans in particular struggle constantly to make ends meet. Next, Vaughan identifies three main types of spaces where timba is danced in Havana: one that is free and caters mostly to a low-income public, another that is economically exclusive and targets the tourist economy, and a third that is accessible to most Cubans but also attracts tourists. Here he provides rich descriptions of dance movement and social behavior and explores the reorganization of Havana's neighborhood geographies on the dance floor. In closing, Vaughan reveals the insider-outsider complexities of his experiences as a black American doing fieldwork in Cuba.

Without diminishing Vaughan's important contribution to deepening our understanding of the multifaceted relationship between Afro-Cubanness and timba, it must be recognized that at times this exclusive focus produces a degree of myopia. Timba and casino alike draw liberally on multiple cultural archives, black and white, Cuban and international.⁵ Yet the absence of this reality from Vaughan's narrative leads to statements whose intent may be more impressionistic than explicit but that nonetheless distract from the book's critical impact. So, for example, at the public dance venue La Piragua, "[dancingm]en and women together exude Africa in the Caribbean" (114), while at a private wedding performance by La Charanga Habanera, "the flavor … [is] missing … because [the Spanish groom] and Cubans like him do not feel the music or dance it well" (127). Meanwhile, Vaughan hints at but fails to address head-on questions of class, access, and ideology that would allow for a...