for vaudeville in the United States in the early days of the Great Depression (1929–1939), viewed a spectacle that no local audience had seen before. The Palace had transformed its stage into a fanciful Havana streetscape. As the orchestra led by the Cuban musician Don Azpiazú (1893–1943) started playing “Mamá Inez,” one of the most famous songs in the Cuban repertoire, the audience heard instruments that were still exotic to US listeners: maracas, claves, güiros, and bongos. Then a crew of Cuban dancers bounded onto the stage, in the first documented exhibition of authentic rumba dancing in the United States. Though they created a commotion with their energetic movements, it was the orchestra’s third song, “El manisero,” sung by the Afro-Cuban sonero Antonio Machín that drove the Palace crowd wild, just as it had when Montaner sang it the year before in Paris.6 Azpiazú’s arrangement of the song, which combined complicated Cuban time signatures (the clave) with sophisticated American-style big band orchestration, immediately struck a chord with the public.7 Indeed, “El manisero” became such a hit, it sparked a passion for Cuban music that swept through North America and then Europe,8 especially after Azpiazú and his ensemble recorded the song later that year for RCA.9 By 1931 the 78 rpm recording of the song reached Africa, selling extremely well throughout the continent, especially in Francophone Africa, where it reached a far wider public than just a few African intellectuals in Paris.10
LA NOCHE CHEZ CABANE CUBAINE: LÉOPOLD SENGHOR, OUSMANE SOCÉ DIOP, AND AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC, 1930S–1960S
I feel the Other, I dance the Other, therefore I am.
Léopold Senghor 11
By the late 1920s Paris had become one of the international centers of Latin music. The vast Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1930–1931 contributed to the music’s burgeoning popularity by further whetting the French appetite for “exotic” foreign cultures like Cuba’s. This Afro-Cuban boom in Paris occurred during a period of decline on the island. The end of prohibition in the United States in 1933 resulted in a precipitous drop in US tourists traveling to Havana right at the time that the global Depression began to devastate the island nation. As the Cuban economy contracted, opportunities for Afro-Cuban musicians dried up.12 Faced with grim professional prospects, some Afro-Cuban musicians migrated to Paris, where a network of Latin music clubs had opened up to capitalize on the craze for Cuban music.13 There the musicians found the work and respect that had eluded them at home.14
This influx of Caribbean musicians coincided with the rapid expansion of the population of Antillean and African students in Paris. The 1930s saw a gradual opening up of the French higher education system to the most gifted students from throughout the French empire. The French motives in providing university education for their colonial and “overseas” subjects and citizens were complicated, a mixture of the pragmatic and the idealistic.15 There was a need for middle echelon manpower in many colonial bureaucracies, and local personnel often were cheaper to employ. In addition, both French assimilationist policy and republican ideals called for at least some non-European French speakers with university training and respectable positions in colonial governments. Financial aid for these students in France was insufficient, and their level of academic preparation was often inadequate. Furthermore, they had to contend with the racism of the French academic establishment and the “glass ceiling” that limited their advancement after they obtained their degrees. For many of these students, their experiences in the French educational system were stressful and alienating. For support, they turned to one another and the few places in Paris where they were welcomed with no ambivalence. Latin music clubs provided one such refuge for them.
The most famous and influential of these clubs was La Cabane Cubaine in the Place Blanche in Pigalle. The Cuban musician and entrepreneur Eduardo Castellano opened the club at 42 Rue Fontaine in 1930. The club featured cabaret shows with both large Cuban orquestas and small son and rumba ensembles.16 Its success appears to have been instantaneous. Probably because the poet and surrealist theorist André Breton lived upstairs, the club soon became a surrealist haunt. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were also habitués. Bohemians and intellectuals of all sorts flocked to the club to hear “authentic” Cuban music and see professional Cuban rumba dancers. The club was simultaneously seedy and stylish, a mix many Parisians found exhilarating.
For somewhat different reasons, African and Antillean students frequently visited the club as well. The club was a place where individuals from the black Atlantic could meet one another, recognize their cultural diversity, and find common ground in Afro-Cuban music. The Senegalese writer Ousmane Socé Diop (1911–1973), in his novel Mirages de Paris, described it as an “ethnographic museum”: “In the throng of blacks gathered at the Cabane Cubaine so similar in appearance, Fara introduced Jacqueline to Africans, Haitians, and Mauriciens. People said this nightspot was an ethnographic museum of the black world, to which each nation had sent a specimen.”17
The club was a cultural contact zone, one of the few places in the world at that time where blacks and whites could socialize on a basis of relative social equality. An image by the photographer Brassaï, “En La Cabane Cubaine,” shot around 1932, captures the special ambience of the club. The photo immediately draws the viewer’s eye to how racially integrated La Cabane Cubaine was in its heyday. There are racially mixed couples as well as all-black and all-white couples, everyone obviously at ease at the club. In the photo’s foreground is a table at which are seated a white couple deep in conversation with one another and a nattily dressed black man lost in thought, smoking a cigarette. Movement is an important visual component of the image. At the center of the image a laughing black man dances with a smiling white woman. The delight they take in each other’s company is palpable. Other dancing couples surround them, equally enjoying themselves. Indeed, pleasure and desire, rather than racial diversity, is the image’s dominant feature. Brassaï’s photo references Paris as a city of erotic adventure where taboos that impede sexual intimacy elsewhere evaporate.18 During the Harlem Renaissance, European American men went to Harlem to hear Duke Ellington and court black mistresses in segregated nightclubs like The Cotton Club. La Cabane Cubaine offered an altogether different experience. It was a combination of a nodal point for people of color in Paris, a space where whites and blacks could freely interact, and a space where desire from all its patrons could be displayed publicly. Most of all, it was a site where young Africans connected Afro-Cuban music, movement, and blackness with modernity.
A La Cabane Cubaine, Montmartre, ca. 1932 Brassaï (Gyula Halasz, called, 1899–1984) © Estate Brassaï-RMN. Photograph PL.473. Photo: Michèle Bellot. Private Collection. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
One of the patrons of La Cabane Cubaine in the early 1930s was a young Senegalese student in Paris, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a major figure in the cultural and political history of Senegal. Senghor was born in 1906 in Joal, a coastal maritime village in a region where Kru and Cape Verdean sailors had been exposing the Senegalese inhabitants to Caribbean music for centuries. After spending his early years in an agricultural village with his mother, Senghor began attending a Catholic mission school as a boarder when he was eight years old. He proved an extraordinary student, and when he was seventeen he entered a newly established Catholic seminary in Dakar. Disenchanted by the racist condescension he encountered there, he withdrew and enrolled in a new lycée in Dakar in 1926. He excelled in his studies and in 1928 received a half scholarship from the colonial regime to study literature in Paris.
Senghor found academic success difficult to achieve in France in the 1920s. His colonial education had not adequately prepared him to excel at the university level. Moreover, many of his Parisian professors were not receptive to teaching African students, no matter how outstanding. One of his biographers, Janet G. Vaillant, also suggests that he found much of the teaching about literature at the Sorbonne hidebound and out of date.19 To make himself better able to withstand the rigors
