most of the nineteenth century. Cuba’s African population arrived in waves from different parts of the continent, starting in the sixteenth century. Each of these unwilling African immigrants brought with him or her techniques, beliefs, aesthetic preferences, linguistic practices, and types of knowledge from the “home” culture. The immigrants found themselves in a situation in which they encountered other Africans who came to Cuba with related but sometimes significantly dissimilar conceptual “tool kits.” In their struggle for survival, Afro-Cubans had to construct a culture out of bits and pieces from the “Old World,” mostly African but sometimes Spanish, using shared organizing principles.3
It is probable that creating a common musical tradition was one of the first tasks undertaken by the uprooted migrants. “Music has no frontiers” is an expression often heard in contemporary Senegal, and given the commonalties that exist among many African musical cultures, fashioning a music for their oppressive existence in colonial Cuba must have been one of the less daunting tasks facing the black Cuban community. In the process of undertaking this cultural project, the first black Cubans made one of the hallmarks of their emerging musical tradition an aesthetic conservatism that maintains aspects of the old while layering on the new.4 This tendency made the inclusion of unfamiliar musical cultures from incoming populations a much easier proposition. Because of this aesthetic conservatism, Afro-Cuban musicians frequently have staged conversations between the established and the innovative in their work, rather than submerging or eliminating older ways of playing music in the name of novelty or “progress” as is done in many other parts of the world. They may play old rhythms on new instruments; have a chorus sing in a “traditional” nasal timbre while the soloist performs in a more modern melodious style; or incorporate old instruments in new settings, as the bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez did in the 1940s when he brought conga drums previously exclusively used in religious observances into a popular music ensemble.5 This practice has meant that informed listeners from Africa can hear the many separate elements that comprise Cuban music much more distinctly than in other more streamlined New World musics. Afro-Cuban music is not only part of Cuban history; it seeks to contain as much of that history as possible within many of its compositions. As a result, the sound of Africa insistently comes through.
There is some debate about whether Central or West Africa supplied the bulk of the first forced migrants to Cuba in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ned Sublette, a musician, music producer, and writer who is a respected expert on Cuban music, insists that most of the first Afro-Cubans were from what is now the Congo and Angola. His argument relies more on negative evidence than on substantial proof. Sublette cites a cédula (royal edict) issued by the Spanish king Carlos in 1526 barring the importation of Muslim Wolof speakers (Geofes in the original document) from present-day Senegal to the New World.6 However, it was common for settlers in the Hispanic Caribbean to flout royal decrees because these edicts were difficult to enforce under even the best of circumstances. Moreover, the cédula only banned the Muslim Wolof from being sold as slaves. That left the Portuguese and later French traders considerable latitude to traffic in Serer, Mandinka, Diola, and other captives from Senegambian regions immediately to the south of the zone of the Wolof speakers. It is likely that following the usual pattern in the Caribbean, the first Spanish settlers in Cuba filled their slave quarters with both Senegambians and Congolese/Angolans. The slaveholders believed, with good cause, that a slave population of only one language group was more prone to rebellion than a mixed group, which would find mounting a unified insurrection more challenging.
Musically, it is possible to hear traces of both Congolese and Senegalese music deeply embedded in Cuban song. The sanza/likembe, a Congolese instrument on which metal prongs are mounted above a sound box and plucked, took root on the island, and its descendant, the marímbula, supplied the bass lines for the earliest recorded son groups, like Septeto Habanero in the 1920s.7 Soon the contrabass replaced the marímbulas, and bass players have retained their prominent position in Cuban popular music ensembles ever since. It is their role to articulate the basic beat of any piece so that the dancers know which rhythm to follow. Their crucial musical role led Cuban bassists to become some of the first virtuosos on their instruments in the twentieth century.8
Though conclusive proof is lacking, the Senegambia region might have provided one of the basic building blocks of Cuban music, the clave. The clave is both an instrument (two wooden sticks) and a syncopated rhythm that has become the bedrock of the Cuban sound. Lucy Duran, an ethnomusicologist who has studied both Cuban and West African music, argues that the clave rhythm originated in the Mandinka/Maninka area of West Africa.9 The Mandinka, one of the major population groups in the Gambia River valley, were among the first to supply captives to the Caribbean. Since the Mandinka were forced to migrate to other areas of the Caribbean and the Caribbean Basin, a significant number must have ended up in Cuba, perhaps bringing the clave with them. Certainly the clave abounds in the contemporary Mandinka kora repertoire, although modern Mandinka musicians actually may be borrowing this rhythm from Cuban records.10
In the centuries that followed the initial forced migration of Congolese/Angolans and Senegalese to Cuba, other regions of Africa supplied numerous captives. The peoples of the Calabar River valley in Nigeria (who were called Carabali, Ñáñigo, or Abakuá in Cuba) were one important source of enslaved manpower,11 as were those from the Fon- and Ewe-speaking areas of present-day Dahomey and Togo (who were called the Arará in Cuba).12 In addition, Akan speakers from present-day Ghana (called the Mina); groups from present-day Côte D’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone (called the Gangá); and even some captives from Mozambique in Southern Africa were forced to migrate to Cuba. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was another influx of captives from the Senegambian region, mostly Mande speakers, as well as a huge wave of Yoruba speakers (called Lucumí) from what is now Nigeria.13 By the nineteenth century Cubans with links to Yoruba-speaking areas of Nigeria comprised the largest percentage of black Cubans, followed by the Congolese and the Cross River peoples.14 Not surprisingly, the influence of these three groups became dominant in Afro-Cuban music by the dawn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, reflecting the aesthetic conservatism of Afro-Cuban culture, elements from other African traditions like the clave remained an important part of the “mix.”
The diverse origins of Cuba’s African population were not historically unusual. However, what was remarkable was how the Spanish allowed their African captives to preserve aspects of their culture like drumming and even encouraged them to organize themselves into ethnic mutual help organizations, called cabildos.15 This limited cultural accommodation by the Spanish helped keep African musical expression alive in Cuba. What was even more extraordinary, though, was how Cuba drastically expanded its African population in the nineteenth century with new enslaved laborers. Elsewhere in the New World, with the conspicuous exception of Brazil, direct African cultural influence largely subsided during this period, as first the importation of captives from Africa and then slavery itself ended.16 In Cuba the opposite occurred. The incoming migrants re-Africanized aspects of Cuban music making, especially drumming and dancing. This revitalization of the African roots of many Afro-Cuban cultural forms only two generations before the first recordings of Cuban songs served to make Cuban music especially appealing to African listeners in the twentieth century. The sound of Africa came through loud and clear to them.
Africa, of course, was not the only force molding Afro-Cuban music. Other global influences were at work. Many of the original Spanish settlers of Cuba, for example, were from Andalusia, a part of Spain deeply effected by its interactions with Arabs, Berbers, and sub-Saharan Africans. They brought with them such song forms as the décima, which can still be heard in Cuba. Black Cubans appropriated such song forms and made them part of their cultural repertoire. After the Haitian revolution in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, large numbers of French planters migrated to eastern Cuba with their enslaved Africans. The Haitian captives introduced black Cubans to their rhythms, many of which derived from Fon culture.17 The French planters popularized the French contradanse in Cuba and introduced Cubans to their flute and violin ensembles, which were embraced
