Havana, 1890

By the mid-eighteenth century, Havana was a wealthy city. Its population of around forty thousand surpassed that of British New York and Boston at the time. Some two centuries old, Havana was a lynchpin for Spanish America.

Columbus sailed to Cuba’s southern shore on his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, landing after he had been disappointed with what he found at Watling Island in the Bahamas. He and his men immediately began pillaging the “New World.” They stole what gold they could find and kidnapped several Taino people. During this first encounter, the Taino presented Columbus with a brown leaf they called tabaco. The Spanish plunder of the Americas had begun.

The Taino were the most populous people of the Caribbean, numbering in the several hundred thousand across what we know as the West Indies. Within a handful of decades, a combination of war, inhumane forced labor, rape disease and an especially fiendish device the indigenous peoples used to roast meat called a barbacoa exterminated some 90 percent of the Taino throughout the region. The island — approximately the size of Virginia, and larger than Portugal — was effectively depopulated (aside from a few survivors seeking refuge high in Cuba’s mountain interior). Columbus and his son would return to Cuba on subsequent journeys. In 1508, Sebastián Ocampo explored the island’s entire coastline, becoming the first European to sail into Havana Bay. In 1512, Juan Ponce de León, the governor of Puerto Rico who “discovered” Florida, found the Gulf Stream. By 1519, Hernando Cortés set off from Cuba for Mexico, beginning the Spanish conquest of the American continents.

The Spanish established a half-dozen settlements along the island’s north coast between 1514 and 1519, one of which would become today’s Havana. The Spanish governor took up residence in 1553, with Philip II designating Havana as a city under the Spanish Crown in December 1592.

Havana’s central location in the Caribbean, its secure anchorage, and quick access to the Gulf Stream made the city a fulcrum of Spanish power and wealth across the Americas. For two-and-a-quarter centuries beginning in 1564, the Spanish crown gathered the wealth of their American empire onto convoys that would meet in Havana before setting off across the Atlantic. These treasure fleets — at times reaching sixty or more galleons containing unimaginable wealth — sailed twice a year in April/May and July/August.

north side port sixty miles east of Havana, often shared large houses built around courtyards in poor dock areas. Plantation hands working the sugarcane fields piled into barracones (barracks). These solares, cuarterias and barracones served as musical incubators where residents stacked on top of one another in their dingy rooms frequently gathered in their courtyards to socialize. Cuban planters looked farther afield as the slave trade waned. They recruited brigades of cheap labor from China, many of whom eventually settled in Havana’s Barrio Chino during the late nineteenth century. A vibrant, multiracial street culture came to thrive alongside — and often hidden out of view from — the luxurious life of Spanish and creole Habaneros. African fieldhands as well as Chinese laborers and tradesmen brought their own arts to the island. Cuban culture became “theirs” in a process that accelerated following the end of Spanish rule in 1895. Havana unsurprisingly became a target for the English, the French and pirates of all nations; so much so that the city would briefly change hands from time to time. In response, the Spanish constructed Havana as a walled enclave more reminiscent of Medieval Europe than the relative open and orderly new cities established under the Law of the Indies of 1573. The surrounding stone fortresses would define the city and its fate for decades to come. The Spanish needed as considerable an island as Cuba to be more than just a waystation for Spanish galleons. Over time, the colonizers discovered new sources of wealth: tobacco, sugar and rum. All three demanded an endless supply of labor. However, as the Spanish had depopulated the island — in 1544, the royal census counted 7,000 inhabitants on the entire island (5,000 Tainos, 800 black slaves and 600 Spaniards) — workers were not easily found.

African music, dance, polyrhythms and assorted drums of all sizes and shapes conquered the Americas. The sounds of Africa varied according to the region and nation of origin prior to the Middle Passage. They produced unique adaptations throughout the Western Hemisphere depending on the indigenous cultures and the European colonizers Africans encountered on plantations and in cities. The Spanish solved this challenge with African slavery, making the city an important hub in the Atlantic slave trade. By the end of the eighteenth century, 85,000 slaves worked on the island; 287,000 by 1837. In 1850, 436,000 slaves constituted just under half of the island’s — and around a quarter of Havana’s — population. Around one million African men and women were brought to the island before slavery was abolished in 1886.

Afro-Cubans living in Havana and the provincial capital of Matanzas, another Blues, Jazz, Salsa, Samba and Tango emerged from these auditory collisions.

Sometimes African musical traditions — most frequently carried by Bantu-speaking people from greater Congo — entered the Americas directly from the continent; often African rhythms and sounds were filtered through Havana before heading along trade routes stretching up and down the eastern coast of the North and South Atlantic. For nearly five hundred years, Havana was the mothership supporting the endlessly syncretic cultures of the Americas.

As Ned Sublette puts it in his encyclopedic Cuba and Its Music (2004), “The center of the Spanish maritime system in the New World — the grandest port, the one with the most dancing – was Havana.” 3 Cuba nurtured its own distinctive mix of African music and dance traditions blended together with Spanish-based formal and folk musical customs. Cuban music, according to Sublette, is “African music’s gown-up child.”

Three traditional forms, yambú, guaguancó and columbia, spawned an endless variety of indigenous Cuban music including son Cubano, baracoa, danzón, and Coros de Clave. Much of this music arose in rural areas. The rumba in particular moved into Havana and Matanzas slums, drawing on the complex cultural strands that had wound together in Havana since its founding.

Vocal improvisation, elaborate dancing and polyrhythmic drumming — traits transported directly from Africa — characterize rumba’s complex genres and subgenres. Dance and singing groups germinating late in the nineteenth century caught the attention of U.S. recording companies such as RCA Victor and Columbia Records shortly after the turn-of-the-century. The rumba was poised to go global when Prohibition closed down alcoholic consumption in the United States. North Americans streamed to Havana to drink, dance, gamble and have fun any way they could in a criminalized underworld of Havana nightlife that was nothing like home.

American recording executives and impresarios took the rumba north where it connected with radio, cinema and eventually television to forever change the musical culture of the United States. By the 1930s and 1940s, New York was as much a center of rumba culture as Havana, binding these two capitals of the Americas together once more as tobacco, sugar, rum, gangsterism and slaves had done over centuries before.

Street performers at a 2017 festival in Havana. Photo: pxhere.com. 2017. CC license 1.0