Book now available at independent bookstores online
Rumba, Son, and the Orchestras
Son was disliked by the authorities from the moment it first appeared in Santiago
de Cuba, in the easternmost provinces. Rock and roll carried its hint of sexuality
and raciness, but for early son it wasn’t implied, it was clearly displayed.
Son dancing uses a hip thrust and twisting that leaves little doubt what it stands
for. Son and other badges of Africanness were frowned on by many powerful Cuban
officials, but it was the Caribbean, after all, and while the whites may have
controlled the laws, in the end they had little real influence over popular culture.
If the Africanized culture of New Orleans and São Paulo seeped into society
from the bottom up, culture in Cuba went both ways: from the ballroom and the
opera house downward, and from the cane fields and the porches of mountain bohíos
upward to popular and then to symphonic music. Spanish lyric songs were carried
by the first settlers, drums and polyrhythms came with the Africans, and French
Creoles fleeing Haiti brought the ballroom contredanse. Similar to what happened
in Louisiana and Brazil, these elements cooked in the hot climate to give birth,
in the case of Cuba, to la danza, el danzón, the cha-cha, and many less
formal styles.Historically the music of Cuba casts a giant shadow that covers
all of Latin
America, especially Mexico and the Caribbean. The edge of the shadow
falls
onto Louisiana, where Cuban rhythm colored early jazz and provided
what
Jelly Roll Morton called the Latin tinge. Later this influence
reached much
farther, 2,400 kilometers north to Manhattan and the Bronx, where
so many
Puerto Rican immigrants had settled. When Puerto Ricans arrived
on the
U.S. mainland, they added their own traditions to Cuban forms,
and the
style of music everyone played from the 1940s on would become what
is
now called salsa. Where Cuban musicians met big-band jazz, their
tradition
fascinated bebop musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, and the result
of this next
intermarriage was Latin jazz.
In 1928, the year Bartolo turned nine, President General Gerardo Machado officially
outlawed the playing of the most important instruments in son music, bongo and
conga drums, across the entire island. A former cattle thief and hero of the
war of independence from Spain, the repressive Machado hoped to elevate Cuban
popular music by surgically removing its threatening African elements. Thus he
also outlawed comparsa, the exciting Carnival music that originated in Santiago
de Cuba. The ban specifically targeted conga and bongo drums, and any religious
drums of African origin, which in the past had been used to make war.
The next year the white mayor of Santiago followed suit to ban congas and bongos,
and he outlawed the conga line—the wild and chaotic Carnival dance. The
mayor of Santiago was Dr. Desiderio Arnaz, and he had been trying to suppress
the conga lines from the city’s Carnival season since 1925. A Machado supporter
right to the last minute, he would later help haul bags of gold coins to a waiting
airplane when Machado fled the country. Dr. Arnaz was the father of Desi Jr.,
who happened to find fame in American television partly by mimicking Afro-Cuban
music. Ironically, the charismatic Desi, though not a particularly talented singer,
would help introduce the conga line dance to the United States: his signature
song was the afro-cha “Babalú ayé,” which in the Dahomeyan
language is the name for the Yoruba god of sickness. Desi brought only his good
looks to the song, since he was imitating the version that Miguelito Valdés
had made famous in Cuba.
Machado’s culture-control laws forbade the playing in public of African
instruments, although they allowed timbales, which look something like the drums
used in European music. African instruments represented the everpresent menace
of African culture and, as religious, liturgical tools, were often played by
secret followers of the Palo or Santería religion like Bartolo and the
other Congo members. Any drum played with the hand was now a target of federal
and local law.
Oddly enough, General Machado didn’t exactly hate son and
even had his own favorite group, Septeto Habanero, the most popular band of the
1920s. For them alone he was willing to suspend his ban on bongos. With the advent
of 78 rpm records and radio, this group did as much for the future of son as
Machado’s banning of drums in public. The Septeto formed the basis for
son orchestration to which the blind bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez would
later add congas for the first time. During Machado’s dictatorship, upperclass
Cubans stuck to their danzón and jazz in the country clubs and society
concerts, but everyone else went crazy for son. Eventually, white Cuba came around
too, but not until racism had worsened through the 1930s. In that atmosphere,
even international stars Josephine Baker and Joe Louis were refused hotel rooms
in Havana.
In the end, and in spite of the ban, son flourished throughout Machado’s
dictatorship and then exploded when he left power. The music bans functioned
something like blue laws: periodically enforced but not really affecting what
people did in the privacy of their own homes. In fact, by forcing drumming and
Palo beliefs underground for all those years, Machado strengthened the African
element of son by concentrating it among stubborn followers who were even more
keen on its survival. The moment they could, the believers brought their bongos
and conga drums right back out into public parks, plazas, courtyards, and front
yards in the black neighborhoods of every city and town across the island. By
the time Arsenio Rodríguez added conga drums as an afterthought to his
band in 1942 and created the orchestration and format that led the way for Benny
Moré, son was the biggest sensation to hit Cuba since the danzón.
It was at this time that son was mistakenly named rhumba and began influencing
composers like George Gershwin.
In the 1930s in the neighboring Dominican Republic, the equally repressive dictator
General Rafael Trujillo took a lesson from his friend General Machado. More
successfully applying the Machado method, he sought to mold merengue by likewise
downplaying its African rhythmic elements and history. Like son and jazz, the
music had organically emerged as a crosspollination of Hispanic melody and rhythms
of former slaves, but merengue dancing with its rolling, below-the-belt hip thrust
was considered a lascivious outrage by the white Dominican upper class. For the
same reasons, an early form of merengue had been fully banned in Puerto Rico
as far back as 1849. Naturally, the Dominican dictator’s favorite band
was renamed the Orquesta Presidente Trujillo. General Trujillo succeeded in whitewashing
merengue, and repressed all other forms of indigenous Dominican music so successfully
that his approved brand of merengue became the national music of that island.
When Machado attempted to change popular culture and take away son from young
boys like Bartolo, it was as if Calvin Coolidge had forbidden Louis Armstrong
to play anything but waltzes instead of his “funky butt”
blues, or if Dwight Eisenhower had called Elvis in 1954 and warned him he could
only play pure hillbilly music from then on.
Son and drum language were Bartolo’s birthright, and culture laws from
Havana meant little out in the country. He still took his drum and dance lessons
at the Casino de los Congos the nights when he could, or watched when younger
boys were taught their lessons. He had long been able to take part in the groups
that played in the informal but intense music parties at the country festivals
called guateques, and he was already an improviser, a rumbero who knew all the
rhythms of the rumba brava: the guaguancó, the yambú, and the columbia.
He used milk cans to build a bongo set and practiced the rhythms constantly with
his brother Teo and their friends. Three Kings Day and the feast of San Antonio
were still a time when the Casino celebrated openly for days, and Bartolo and
the other novices couldn’t unlearn all the firmas they knew—the pictograph
drawings in chalk used for Palo ceremonies. Dictators come and go in Cuba, but
Africa in the Americas, at least in Cuba, wasn’t about to disappear.
