Cuban Fire

The Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon of the late 1990s—which rescued from obscurity a group of aged Cuban musicians and brought them to Carnegie Hall and beyond in the company of a globetrotting North American guitarist and a German filmmaker with a romantic fondness for Old Havana—provoked two competing reactions among lovers of Cuban music. On the one hand, it generated a keen hope that Buena Vista’s rising tide would lift the boats of other Cuban musicians; on the other hand, it provoked a rankling suspicion that it corrupted the very music it purported to save. Often the same observers held both views at once—they wanted simultaneously to share what was theirs by extolling its riches and to protect it by defining it.These two books grow out of this dual reaction, attempting both to latch onto the recent fad for Cuban music and to emphasize that fad’s long historical roots. Both are successful at least in the latter regard, providing enlightening overviews of Cuban music that bristle with information and infectious enthusiasm. At the same time, both leave important questions relatively unexplored. Although their subject matter overlaps heavily, the authors follow markedly different approaches: Roy’s book is an introduction to the subject, stressing its deep historical background, concentrating on a few crucial artists, and drawing a line at the borders of Cuba itself. Leymarie’s more detailed survey runs through a plethora of names and works to explores the influence of the Cuban musical matrix around the globe.Roy’s strength lies in her explanation of musical structure and in the excerpts she provides from interviews with Cuban musicians, ranging from vaunted composers to local buskers. She provides an insightful description of the major typologies of rumba, ably sketching their common threads and linking their differences to contextual factors such as contrasting practices of urban and rural leisure. In addition, in letting the musicians speak for themselves, she comes closest to translating both the joy and the intricacy of the music. She transcribes the words of a Havana rumbero, who recalls unlocking the secret of a local refrain, “Rabo de mono amarra a Ramón [the monkey’s tale wraps up Ramon]” (p. 56). The phrase, nearly an aural palindrome, reveals the foundational influence of both medieval Spanish verse, with its complex verbal doublings, and central African tales of trickster deities in the guise of animals. The requisite musical response, discovered by the rumbero in the midst of improvisation—“¿Por qué rabo de mono no me amarra a mi? [Why doesn’t the monkey’s tail wrap me up?]”—adds the elements of thinly veiled sexuality and gamesmanship, completing the rumba palette.Leymarie’s strength is her authoritative accounting of the activities of all the major—and many minor—performers of the past 80 years. This work will remain a key reference for scholars of all aspects of Cuban popular music for years to come. Leymarie also includes delightful and useful musical notations of notable melodies, riffs, and rhythms, making her book required material for any musician contemplating the Cuban sound. Her decision to include the international offshoots of Cuban music is logical and her coverage enlightening: the spread of rumba’s 2/3 clave, for example, is one of Cuban popular music’s greatest triumphs. The rhythm now rivals chips and salsa as a signifier of a kind of generalized latinidad, with the distinction that it has taken root far more deeply throughout the hemisphere, spawning multiple, vibrant hybrids.Both works also suffer from notable shortcomings: Leymarie’s ungainly prose and the awkward translation of Roy’s work do little to evoke the strong rhythms and irresistible accents of Cuban popular music (for that, thankfully, we have the stories of Guillermo Cabrera Infante). More seriously, neither critically examines the music’s relationship to a larger historical context. Roy does more in this regard, attempting to explain the central role of Afro-Cuban music in the growth of the Cuban nation. In doing so, however, she often avoids acknowledging her own contradictions. On the one hand, she asserts that in the early decades of the twentieth century in Cuba, “everything African was considered by the dominant elite to be lowly, vulgar and uncultured” (p. 30). But she provides ample evidence of Cuban elites of the period enjoying Afro-Cuban music, in contexts ranging from carnival street processions to their own salons and concert halls. Exploring the coexistence of a rhetoric of disdain and repression with everyday practices of sponsorship and participation would help to illuminate not only Cuban music but also the knotty issues of race on the island. Which (apparently) African elements were proscribed, which nourished, and toward what ends? Roy offers only a flat portrait of popular music as successful resistance from below, when it is apparent that Cuban music is something far larger—a body of social practices constituting the core of the national culture. On this matter and others, Leymarie offers solid description of musicians and their circle, but little in the way of broader analysis. Robin Moore’s 1997 Nationalizing Blackness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) offers an excellent approach to these questions but covers a limited (if pivotal) two-decade span from 1920 to 1940. Unfortunately, neither Roy nor Leymarie extends Moore’s inquiry to other periods.Similarly, both authors avoid extensive interpretation of the development of music in Cuba since the 1959 revolution. Each provides an accurate outline of the major trends, but neither delves into the ways in which the meaning of popular music has, or has not, changed along with the political and economic context of the past 40 years. Has the regime’s attempt to institutionalize certain folkloric expressions added a new wrinkle to popular understandings of race, for example? Such analysis would offer a much needed window into recent Cuban social history and give some sense of the obverse view of the Buena Vista phenomenon.Meanwhile, as Leymarie documents, musicians trained formally in the regime’s conservatories and informally in popular venues continue to push Cuban music in ambitious directions, blending classical harmonic structures, jazz improvisation, and Afro-Cuban rhythms. The tradition of deeply rooted innovation described by both authors remains vigorous and central to Cuban life. Roy’s book is a seductive introduction to that tradition, and Leymarie’s a thorough catalogue of its achievements. Deeper cultural analysis of Cuba’s long musical history remains the charge of subsequent authors

Art · Dance · SALSA · Visual arts · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies