Music in Cuba

A true tradition is not the witnessing of a past closed and finished; it is a living force that animates and informs the present.

—Igor Stravinsky

It was the New World cultures with the greatest wealth—and with the greatest strength to resist the forces of conquest, that ambivalent process—that provoked European invaders to the greatest effort in matters of architecture and musical indoctrination. When the peoples to be subjugated possessed the strength, wisdom, or industry to build a Tenochtitlán (as in Mexico), or to plan a fortress like Ollanta (as in Peru), the mason and cantor sprang into action as soon as the men of war had fulfilled their mission. Once the battle of bodies had ended, the struggle over signs began. The cross has to be raised above the Aztec teocali; over every demolished temple, a church. Liturgies of great pomp were devised to eclipse the splendor of finely wrought idols. Against songs and traditions that could still foster a dangerous spirit of rebellion, the spiritual force of golden legends and Christian antiphonal chant were marshaled. In brave and prosperous lands, the conquest built bell towers high against the horizon and set its choruses to singing. But in gentler lands, whose inhabitants readily accepted the authority of a king unknown only the day before, the newcomers did not have to work so hard. As a result, the artistic and musical productions of the sixteenth century were of very poor quality, especially in countries whose mytho-poetic heritage did not pose a threat to the Europeans.

Barely three years after the conquest, Brother Juan de Haro and Brother Pedro de Gante set about teaching plainsong to the Indians of Mexico, using a flute ensemble instead of the organ. But this kind of spiritual dissemination was not of great concern to the first wave of colonizers in Cuba. True, they performed mass baptisms and offered indoctrination wherever they could, but there is no evidence that Christian chants were taught to Cuba’s Indians before their rapid and complete extermination, effected in the rational, systematic fashion that Father Motolinía narrated in Mexico. “Newly discovered in the Oceanic sea,” the islands were rich in neither spiritual nor material resources. More copper than gold lay in the Cuban soil. However terrible their face, the coarse and stony nakedness of the Taíno idols could scarcely rival the resplendent robe of the Virgin. The Indians, lacking any impulse to centralize, lived in autonomous clans. Their homes were made of palm leaves; they brandished weapons no more threatening than their myths. In such conditions, choirmasters were more involved in panning for gold (a resource soon exhausted) than in their forgotten world of rules and commandments. Where architecture had not progressed beyond the age of branch and fiber, the mason’s trowel was a luxury; on an island of huts, the first church was a hut.

In 1509, soon after Sebastián de Ocampo first surveyed the coast of the still uncolonized island, a storm hurled several castaways onto the Cuban shore. One of them became ill; unable to continue on to Santo Domingo, in what is now Haiti, he found refuge with Indians in the town of Macaca. He quickly learned a bit of their language, and, being a man of exceeding piety, he convinced the cacique [chief] to be baptized. The cacique regarded this, apparently, as a sort of honorary title bestowed by the foreigner; believing that the governor of Hispaniola was called Comendador, he chose that for his new name. Excited by the gentleness of the village, our castaway showed its people the card-sized print of the Virgin he carried with him, and thus a hut was erected in her honor. “He told the Indians that the image represented a beautiful woman, benevolent and rich, named Mary, Mother of God.” Before long, the good savages were singing angelical salutations at dawn and dusk. Later, they “began to compose songs and dances with refrains to Saint Mary.” Within a year, the cacique and people of the nearby town of Cueibá had followed Macaca’s example...