The Universal Resonance

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Along with iron and horses, physical symbols of the Spanish conquest of what became Spanish America, other complementary ideological and cultural symbols also arrived: the Gospels, the Christian Cross and the mysteries of Mary Immaculate. These symbols were imposed and conveniently manipulated by the Spanish church, the church of the Iberian Re-Conquest and the Counter-Reformation. Along with the armed forces sent by the Castilian throne, there were also religious contingents at hand. On behalf of God and the throne, each took its portion of the lands, the people and the riches. Both of these forces contributed cultural values — e.g., the Spanish language — a legacy that became inscribed in the New World, acquiring new traits and characteristics. Music is part of that legacy.

Since the aboriginal population of Cuba was scarce and not highly developed, the cultural heritage of the Indo-Cubans was soon lost along with the population. Almost completely displaced and uprooted, the Indo-Cubans have survived in a few references in the works of chroniclers of the Indies and in precious artifacts for the study of archaeologists and historians.
 

But to this cultural base of the colonizers a new component was soon added, a contribution brought by peoples from many places in Africa. These cultural traits were not imposed but rather survived against the grain. They were scorned as much as the enslaved cultural subjects that carried them from Africa. These qualities were considered "stuff for Negroes" (cosa de negros), "things" for savages, for the uncivilized, ways without reason or moderation, customs often repudiated as diabolical.

Beginning with those two components, living side by side in spite of secular antagonisms, the Cuban people and culture developed.

In his Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar), Don Fernando Ortiz makes use of those two main products of the Cuban economy: the white sugar and the dark tobacco, to analyze the emergence of the Cuban people and of Cuban culture. He used this counterpoint as an effective method to explain the historical mixture of races, emphasizing the importance of music: the merging in Cuba of the Spanish guitar and the African drum.

From Columbus' caravels, and others that followed, many young men set foot in the Americas: lads who could sing and dance, guitar and viola players, organists, flute players, harpists who accompanied themselves with castanets, flageolets and piccolos as well as drums. Africa did not have a monopoly on drums, although it contributed the greatest variety of them to countries throughout the Caribbean. Their variety was more significant, clearer and richer: drums to make music, drums sacred to life, destiny and death, talking drums, receptacles of the dead and deities. Dances and ceremonies — sacred, profane and even military — were all pleasantly organized at the sound of the drums. They were a heritage transmitted from parents to children, through the generations, until the present.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Catholic Church held a privileged position vis-à-vis the teaching and performance of music in the present Spanish-American nations. One of the Cathedral dignitaries was the choirmaster, who was responsible for teaching and for the preparation of the music for the religious ceremonies. Thus, the Cathedral in Santiago de Cuba, and later the Cathedral in Havana, became important quarters for the training of musicians, settings for the composition and performance of both sacred and classical music. There are references to high (sung) masses at the Cathedral of Santiago from the beginning of the 1520s, with some references to organ music. In 1544, Miguel Velázquez, the half-breed offspring of a Spaniard and an Indian woman, played the organ as the choirmaster in Santiago, where he also served as presbyter and an alderman for the city. He became one of the founding pillars of the bountiful musical tradition at Santiago de Cuba.

Without the pomp that characterized the viceroyship courts on the Continent, concerts of sacred music were presented and performers were tutored in the great cathedrals as well as parochial churches at cities such as Bayamo, Puerto Principe later Camagüey) and Sancti Spíritus. These activities were often criticized for their laxity of decorum. Indeed, in these premises profane dances were held, as well as theatrical performances that provoked not only laughter but also disturbances. On special days such as Corpus Christi, the Feast of Saint John or other patron saints, religious processions and ceremonies were organized as well as cavalcades, much consumption of food and beverage sold by black women (mondongueras, sellers of tripe), cock fights and card games, dances and serenades, with lots of zapateos ("shoe dances" with tapping) and remeneos (sensuous movements) to satisfy all tastes.

It was also at the choir chapel of the Cathedral of Santiago that Esteban Salas, a pioneer in the history of music in Cuba, produced his extensive work: sacred music, Christmas carols, motets, psalms and masses. He did not limit his work to the temple. He trained musicians who contributed to the amusement of the inhabitants of the city. Such was also the case at the Havana bishopric in the second half of the eighteenth century. The chapel not only had a choir, but also an orchestra of violins, bass violas, horns and other musical instruments. It was also favored by the presence of musicians who expanded it and graced it, such as the German Juan Goetz, during the years 1803 to 1811, and Joaquin Gavira, founder in 1811 of the first classical trio of Cuba. This trio included a black cellist among its musicians. In the nineteenth century, Laureano Fuentes Matons once again elevated the Cathedral choir to the level of concert hall. He was the author of a symphonic poem entitled América.

A musician's craft was mainly a poor man's occupation. One significant outcome of this was that contrary to what happened in other crafts, despised by white people who considered them solely fit for "Negroes," the orchestras and other musical groups in Cuba had accepted in their ranks both white and free "colored people" since the sixteenth century. The main factor for inclusion and participation was neither the social origin nor the skin color of the musicians, but their musical merit. Inherently an unstable occupation, it required work at another productive activity in order for the artists to earn a living.

An early example of such social and cultural experience in the sixteenth century was the sisters Teodora and Micaela Ginés, free black Dominican women (from Santiago de los Caballeros), members of small musical groups in Santiago de Cuba, where Teodora remained when Micacla chose to move to Havana. At the capital, Micaela formed a group with three white musicians: a guitar player from Málaga, a clarinet player from Lisbon and a bass-viola player from Sevilla. She would go with them to parties where "the gourd was scratched" and castanets snapped, all for remuneration that included the supply of a horse for personal transportation and enough food for the trip back.

The title El son de la Ma Teodora - the first musical composition of a popular origin that we know in Cuba comes from Teodora Ginés, and makes use of the suggestive word son (a popular dance). The son is a principal genre in the evolution of the Cuban music, created at the end of the nineteenth century. Alejo Carpentier states in his book La música en Cuba that El son de la Ma Teodora derives from the following ballad from Extremadura. Its words read as follows:

¿Dónde está la Ma Teodora? Where is Ma Teodora?

Rajando la leña está. She's splitting firewood.

¿Con su palo y su bandola? With her stick and mandolin?

Rajando la leña está. She's splitting firewood.

Among other meanings, "rajar la leña" has been interpreted as "going dancing."
 

The two poetic forms from Spain with the most impact on Cuban popular and country music (guajira) were the romance (ballad) and, above all, the décima (strophe of 10 eight-syllabled lines), which continues to be the favorite poetic meter among the improviser poets who cultivate the punto cubano. "El punto" is present throughout Cuba's rural regions with some regional variants. Same as the Mexican corrido and other musical forms of similar characteristics in Hispanic-America, el punto is an American (the continent) version of the kind of improvisation or repentismo practiced in Andalucia or in the Canary Islands. The ten-line stanzas, or décimas — with its accompanying guitar (also with the accompaniment of a lute and a trés, a guitar with three pairs of strings) — are sung and improvised at every Cuban country party (called guateques). At these gatherings they also dance the Cuban zapateo, also found with variants in other Hispanic-American countries, and celebrated with typical songs from the Cuban repertoire, such as the guajira, the criolla, the son montuno (mountain son) or the bolero (slow sensual dance, song with romantic lyrics).

Cuban children sang them in choirs and went to sleep listening to ballads brought from Spain. Some of them were from olden times, making references to the afflictions of Moorish kings. According to Carpentier, the famous song Guantanamera also has its origin in a ballad from Extremadura entitled Gerineldo. Guantanamera was written by the Cuban improviser Joseito Fernández, and is famous around the world today for the beautiful lyrics, taken from José Martís Versos Sencillos. It became a perennial internationally after Pete Seeger sang it, and many other musicians followed his tune.

The other main ingredient of cubanía - Cubanness— came with the African slaves, originally from a very extensive coastal region extending, with various degrees of penetration into the inner lands, from ancient Senegambia to Angola. But, unlike the Spaniards, the Africans and their legacy were scorned, remaining sociocultural components strange to the dominant and excluding official culture. These were so vital and lively, however, that not only did they survive but were integrated and reproduced. This "Africanness" was part of the sacred memory of their bearers, a culture of deep dignity, character and meaning, facing the misery of their New World oppressive conditions.
 

Contrary to what slave owners would have preferred, they found it necessary to allow on special occasions the playing of drums in the African way, in order to diminish as much as possible the constant threat of insubordinations.

The slave owners, and the colonial administration itself, felt a real threat of rebellion after the Haitian revolution, which caused permanent fear throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, the drums from Africa resounded under the tropical moon, recalling the ancestral lands, leading the Afro-Cubans in their dances and songs.
 

But even more important to the preservation and transmission of various African cultural complexes, with the constant and unavoidable presence of music, were the cabildos (councils), cabildos de nación or cabildos de negros, the Cuban equivalent to the gypsy cabildos in Spain. They have been present on the Island from the sixteenth century to the present in spite of enduring periods of persecution and even confinement. The sacred and historical memory of the African legacy was preserved in the mostly urban cabildos for generations to come. It became an integral part of the national identity with its myths, ceremonies, instruments and even slang, mostly of Bantu origin (Congo Angola), or those of present-day Nigeria (Regla de Ocha and the Náñigos secret societies) and from the Popular Republic of Benin (Regla Arará).
 

On certain dates, generally tied to the official religious feasts, the cabildos were allowed to hit the streets wearing their multicolor outfits and playing their music. Their exotic representations, noisy and provocative activities, were one of the main attractions at Cuban carnivals. Especially the elaborate festivities at Santiago de Cuba, but also the very ardent variants in places like Havana or Bejucal, are at the heart of the Cuban carnival. The comparsas (street dancing ensemble) played a part in these street celebrations and became a cherished cultural trait and an integral component of the carnival.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, at one of these parades, upon hearing the sonority of the festivities, a Spanish musician named Casamitjana became fond of the excellence of the music and chants in the streets of Santiago. He tried to reinterpret the rhythms but found it too difficult due to the high level of improvisation on the part of the talented percussionists who ignored the beats and structures of the musical compositions characteristic of Western white people. Those sonorities have been described as "naked chants over percussion" (cantos desnudos sobre percusión), performed by those who "invent music."

The incorporation of Afro-Cuban music into theaters and concert halls, or at parties, is a relatively recent event of the twentieth century that has extended beyond Cuba. Several fissures contributed to undermine and crumble the rigid rules imposed by the color line. The one created by music was decisive due to many aspects, including the emergence of nationalism and the recognition of equality among blacks and whites, which led to many interracial marriages, unions that were both ethnic as well as cultural. Cuban ethnologist Don Fernando Ortiz coined the term transculturation to define this process:

inging, dancing around, and music came 

and went from Andalucia, from the Americas 

and from Africa, and Havana was the center 

where all of them merged with most color 

and intense polychromatic reflections.

The reference to Havana is deserving since, for centuries, both at the bay and at the harbor of the capital of Cuba the "Fleet of the Indies" would gather. These galleons transported the treasures from the Americas to Sevilla, riches that came from Portobello, Cartagena de Indias or Veracruz. The crews were restless to the point of becoming unruly. The dissipated capital of Cuba offered wine taverns, brothels, gambling, music and dances (chaconas, batuque, zarabandas, zampalos) and other forms of entertainment in which Afro-Cubans participated. This took place despite protestations on the part of the Inquisitorial Holy Office because women would dance "lifting their aprons" or because couples were dancing "belly to belly." Here we find the origins of the rumba, columbia, yambú and guaguancó and also of the conga that moves and swerves with the comparsas. 

In Santiago de Cuba, where Casamitjana came under the influence of the Cocoyé interpreted by the blacks, the "French tumba" became prevalent, dancers swaying, people ever marching and dancing.

After the seizure of Havana by the English in 1762, the occupation troops introduced the country-dance or contradanza to Cuba. It was, however, the French variant, brought at the beginning of the nineteenth century by immigrants (black and white) from Saint Domingue (Haiti) that caught on in Cuba and became most important to the subsequent development of Cuban music. These immigrants settled primarily in Santiago de Cuba but also in Havana and other regions. The Cuban contradanza derives from the French contredance, and from it, in turn; a great number of musical genres came into being, among them, the clave, the criolla, the guajira, the danza, the habanera, and the danzón, all inter-related. In these genres figure dance (baile de figuras) was substituted with dancing by couples. Manuel Saumell, composer of more than 50 contradanzas is recognized as "the father of Cuban musical nationalism."

Because Santiago de Cuba and Havana were both centers where contredance was introduced and developed, we have two variants of contradanza in Cuba: the santiaguera and the habanera. The santiaguera is more popular and belongs to the street. It is based on the music played by the Haitian blacks, of great richness nurtured by the previously mentioned Cocoyé. It inspired Cuban twentieth-century composer Amadeo Roldán, who brought its rhythms to the concert halls. The habanera, on the contrary, became pieces for enclosed spaces, for ballrooms and parties. This contradanza was performed after a court minuet (minué de corte). The French-Haitian influence, added to the earlier Spanish and the African influences, was not limited to the above, but rather it benefited the educational context and the social milieu in Havana and Santiago as well as in others like Matanzas and Cienfuegos. In Cienfuegos there was the added influence of the French who came from Louisiana. All of these French men and women inaugurated music academies and schools for basic learning and even a theater in Santiago, where works by Racine, as well as comic operas and concerts, were performed. In the year 1803 the renowned German Juan N. Goetz arrived from Haiti, a musician whose solid musical training contributed to the improvement of the choir chapel at the Cathedral in Santiago de Cuba, both as regards the training of musicians as well as introducing new composers into the selection of programs.

People danced all over Cuba, at the black cabildos during sacred ceremonies, at the guateques in the countryside, at neighborhood parties and in private houses and, even more, in theaters, social clubs and academies. From top to bottom, including all races and social classes, dancing was the fashion, and orchestras and smaller musical groups were growing in number to satisfy all tastes and social expectations. An outcome of all this interest was the appearance in 1812 of the "Monthly Philharmonic," the first publication specializing in music in the country. In addition, in 1814 the first Academy of Music was founded. This institution was for white people interested in learning instruments like the violin or the pianoforte. Very soon, other academies were started all over the Island, in both cities and towns.

Growing out of the contradanza, and becoming its substitute in terms of popularity from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the 1920s, came the danzón, a genre created by Miguel Failde, from Matanzas, with the famous piece Las Alturas de Simpson (The Simpson Heights). Other genres like the guaracha and the bolero were added to the growing repertory of the Cuban orchestras. The popular Cuban music reached its maturity through such genres, deeply rooted in national musical tradition and receptive of other influences. The danzón, for example, incorporated musical themes taken from operas and zarzuelas as well as Spanish cuplés and North American ragtime.

The danzón was in turn supplanted by the Cuban son, with strong influence by Afro-Cuban rhythms, during the time that— no small coincidence— Langston Hughes was visiting Cuba, Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén was writing his collections Motivos del Son and Sóngoro Cosongo, Alejo Carpentier was writing his first novel Ecué Yamba O and Fernando Ortiz was conducting research on the contribution of Africans and their descendants to Cuban culture. Carpentier considers that, same as the rumba, there are more than one son and that they are not solely genres with definable characteristics but "atmospheres." Even the word son captures the fact that we are dealing with an "imprecise form of popular dance music," which could be traced to El son de la Ma Teodora. In his opinion, son was, then, the sounding of voices and instruments accompanied primarily by Afro-Cuban percussion: kettle-drums, bongos, musical gourds, botijuelas, maracas and clavichords. In his book he gathers the eloquent impressions of Frenchman Emile Vuillermoz, who wrote after listening to a Cuban "Sonera" orchestra:

Tell me: what are our kettledrums, our tambourines, 

our triangles, our cymbals and our 

music boxes worth when facing a Cuban battery 

and its bewitched buzzing, its tender 

silk strokes and its small silver anvil?

And he concludes that: "The great revolution that took place on account of the battery of the son consisted in giving us the sense of the polyrhythmic submitted to a unity of time."

Other dancing genres followed: the cha-cha-chá and the mambo, both of them derived from the danzón and fashioned by Enrique Jorrín and Dámaso Pérez Prado respectively. Leonard Bernstein in West Side Story successfully incorporated them. Aniceto Díaz produced the danzonete — a cross between the son and the danzón. The sucu-sucu came from Isla de Pinos (now the Isle of Youth). The Pilón rhythm, and the feeling saturated — as its name indicates — of the North American influence, were composed by the likes of César Portillo de la Luz and José Alberto Méndez and interpreted by well-known stars such as Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo. It is simply a matter of prolific production, known worldwide, of music made for dancing or, as in the case of feeling, for listening. A vast production that reaches to the present by way of the Cuban salsa boom with orchestras like the Van Van, or the most recent interpretations by the musicians and singers of the Buena Vista Social Club, winners of a Grammy and applauded on many stages in Europe and America. Benny Moré — a singer, composer and orchestra director, whom the Cuban people affectionately called el bárbaro del ritmo — belongs to that same mainstream of the best dancing music, together with the Trio Matamoros and the group led by Ignacio Piñeiro.
 

Other important stages where popular music made strides were at the comic theater (teatro bufo) and at variety shows. In the nineteenth century, Francisco Covarrubias — an actor and composer — was an originator of the teatro bufo, which was preserved despite a wall of silence due to official censorships up to the twentieth century. Variety shows peaked at the Teatro Alhambra during the first decades of the twentieth century. Having roots in the Spanish comic theater, the Cuban bufo distinguished itself by three essential variants that underlined its national character: the subjects of the scripts of the cuadros de costumbres (study of manners), which at times included political denunciation; the supplanting of the Spanish picaros (rogue), as for example gypsies and pretty boys supplanted by their national equivalents such as guajiros (country folk), gallegos (galicians, from the province of Galicia in Spain; all Spaniards regardless of their place of origin in Spain tend to be called (gallegos in Cuba) and even the chino (Chinese). The music forms were also modified: seguidillas (Spanish stanzas of seven lines with a peculiar rhythm), boleros (melody of a dance from Andalucia) and villancicos (Christmas carols), replaced by guarachas, pregones (song of street vendors) and other Cuban musical genres. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the comic theater incorporated the free black and the newly arrived African (bozalón) as characters played by white actors with blackened faces. These characters were well received and had a long life at the theater.

At the Alhambra Theater, for 35 years, songs of every type were performed and musical comedies written by Cuban authors and on Cuban themes were represented. Other theaters on the Island organized similar theatrical seasons. Unlike opera, musical comedy enjoyed, and still enjoys, enormous popularity in Cuba. A particularly successful following is enjoyed by the works of the three great masters of the Cuban zarzuela: Ignacio Roig, Ernesto Lecuona and Rodrigo Prats, with titles like Rosa la China, Amalia Batista, En el Cafetal or Cecilia Valdés and their beautiful lyrical songs.

Delivering their songs at bars, cafés, tertulias and other public performances, the trovadores or troubadours contributed an extraordinary treasury of melodies comprising criollas, boleros, guajiras, habaneras, claves or songs. In the case of the so-called Trova Tradicional, its origin can be traced to 1883, to the song Tristezas (Sadness), written by "Pepe" Sánchez from Santiago de Cuba. He delineated the "trova" genre starting from the classic Spanish bolero of three-fourths transformed into the Cuban two-quarter time, and had among his pupils some troubadours who are preserved in the Cuban people's heart, Like Sindo Garay, Alberto Villalón, Rosendo Ruíz and Miguel Matamoros. With the accompaniment of the guitar, troubadours like these proliferated around the country, enjoying a bohemian life at peñas (intimate music clubs or groups) and serenading about, producing enduring compositions such as Perla Marina, La Bayamesa, Longina or Santa Cecilia.

Thanks to the work of the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (Sound Experimentation Group) at the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC) under the direction of Leo Brouwer, the internationally known guitarist, composer and conductor (of the National Symphony), this tradition was enriched, recovering all of its vigor, in 1969 with Nueva Trova songwriter-performers like Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodriguez. Some of these new troubadours used more sophisticated electronic instruments for their work and interpretations of pop music, without abandoning the guitar of the trovadores.

So-called classical music had a similar trajectory of successes beginning with Esteban Salas, bringing together black and white musicians, throughout both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
 

The black violinist Claudio Brindis de Salas is an example of a virtuoso musician who did not receive the recognition he deserved due to racial prejudices in Cuba. He did succeed without any impediments in many other countries. Salas was the son of a dance teacher who had his own orchestra. He was persecuted and imprisoned because of his participation in an alleged conspiracy in 1844 (The Conspiracy of La Escalera). Salas studied violin in Havana, and at the Paris Conservatory. He was known as "the black Paganini" and the "king of the octaves," and offered concerts in the principal capital cities of Europe. France awarded him its "Legion of Honor" and he was honored with the title of "Baron" in Germany, where he was a chamber musician for the Emperor. But all this was not enough for the Cuban pro-slavery bourgeoisie that was not willing to accept a black violinist as soloist on Cuban stages. Brindis de Salas finished his life in misery and loneliness in Buenos Aires, where he died in 1918. Such deplorable situations repeated themselves with other great Cuban interpreters of classical music during the transition years between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Two other cases of success abroad and neglect at home were violinists "Lico" Jiménez and José White. Jiménez composed many lieds after he received his musical training in Germany, where he became a professor at the Hamburg Conservatory. White, a professor at the Paris Conservatory, was the author of the famous song La bella cubana.

As was reviewed above, the first stages in Cuba for the performance of classical music — by Pergolessi, Handel and Bach — were the Cathedrals and important churches with choirs. This cultural context benefited by the decisive assistance of several foreign musicians. In the nineteenth century, three pianists, the Alsacian Juan Federico Edelmann, the North American Luis Moreaun Gottschalk and the Belgian Hubert de Blanck, made significant contributions. Edelmann was the director of the Santa Cecilia Philharmonic Society in the first half of the century. Among his many merits was being the professor of Manuel Saumell, the acknowledged father of Cuban musical nationalism.

Gottschalk, a native of Louisiana, was an internationally famous figure. Berlioz called him "the poet of the piano." Gottschalk fell in love with Caribbean music and places. At the Tacón Theater in Havana, he was the first to introduce a battery of Afro-Cuban drums in a symphonic performance. For this concert he brought a black French group, king included, from a cabildo in Santiago de Cuba. He was also a professor who trained, among many pupils, Nicolás Ruíz Espadero who, according to many specialists, was the best composer of romantic music in Cuba. Gottschalk brought many of Espadero's works to Europe and America. Hubert de Blanck was a composer and established a distinguished Cuban musical family. His daughter Olga was the most prominent member. In 1885, de Blanck opened a conservatory in Havana that carried his name. In the twentieth century the Catalan José Ardévol, both a professor and a composer like his predecessors, founded the Chamber Orchestra of Havana. Among his pupils was the distinguished musician Harold Gramatges.

As a result of this musical progress were performances of works by composers like Mozart, Haydn, Pleyel, Cimarrosa and Cherubini, by soloists, orchestras and musical groups in theaters and concert halls. The development of good taste in music was accompanied by more interest in opera. Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer and Verdi were added to Beethoven, Liszt, Mendelsohn, Chopin, Tchaikowsky, Grieg, C. Franck, Debussy and Stravinsky. Especially in densely populated and rich Havana, demanding audiences supported the visits of foreign opera companies and the creation of complete orchestras to accompany them.
 

In 1866, the Classical Music Society was established in Havana and the Beethoven Society was founded in Santiago de Cuba in 1872. With such institutions in place, Guillermo Tomás, director of the Municipal Band of Havana, transformed his ensemble into a real symphonic orchestra with educational programs designated to attract wider audiences, and with carefully selected programs. This Municipal Band is the most remote forerunner of the National Symphonic Orchestra that was created on October 1959 with the expressed purpose of serving to promote both national and universal music.

The Symphonic Orchestra enjoyed among its directors important national and international personalities: Enrique González Mantici, Manuel Duchesne Cuzán and its current director Leo Brouwer, with Iván del Prado as assistant director. It is the main symphony orchestra of Cuba offering more than 2,000 concerts in Cuba and abroad. To those already mentioned, we must add two symphony orchestras from the 1920s that left a deep impression on the history of classical music in Cuba: the Symphonic Orchestra of Havana, Led by Gonzalo Roig and the Philharmonic Orchestra, promoted by a Spaniard named Pedro Sanjuán Nortes. He was also seduced by the world of Afro-Cuban sounds, composing, among other works, Liturgia Negra (Black Liturgy). He was the professor of another outstanding Cuban personality of the twentieth century: Amadeo Roldán. After the debut of Roldán's Obertura sobre temas cubanos (Overture on Cuban Themes) in 1925, Carpentier called it "one of the most important events in the history of music in Cuba."

Upon these ground-breaking works and the mastery of the native virtuosos as soloists, the symphonic development in Cuba continued its development, reaching in our days positions of great prestige worldwide. These honors have been bestowed on Cuba for the works of the National Ballet of Cuba under the guidance of Alicia Alonso and her National Ballet School, and for its National School of Guitar, the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional and the Conjunto de Danza Moderna. Achievements made possible by the efficacy of an Arts School National System, with professors like Frank Fernández, a Steinway pianist reputed among the five best in the world, Jorge Luis Prats and Víctor Rodriguez, both also internationally recognized and the renowned guitarist Leo Brouwer.
 

The historical process towards musical nationalism also had an important representative in Antonio Raffelin, as well as in many other musicians trained in Havana, Paris and in the United States. Unarguably, its top figure was Ignacio Cervantes Kawanagh, who died in 1905. Cervantes received a Grand Prize at the Imperial Conservatory in Paris for his mastery at the piano and was congratulated by Liszt and Rossini, as well as by Paderewski in the United States. Because of his sympathies in favor of Cuban independence, Cervantes was exiled. He was a musician of European training but his immortality is due, above all, to his 21 Cuban Dances. They created a trend that had Ernesto Lecuona as its greatest representative in the twentieth century. Lecuona, in his own right was a prominent pianist and an outstanding composer who produced universally famous songs like Siboney and (under Spanish influence) the suite Andalucía and Malagueña, not to mention many other works in various genres.
 

Other composers who contributed to the consolidation of the musical nationalism were Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, author of internationally known habaneras and criollas, Moisés Simons, Eliseo Grenet and Jorge Anckerman, composers of the first operas of a national character. Notwithstanding, Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla occupy a special place because of their interest in linking their symphonic production to Afro-Cuban themes and instruments.
 

Under similar motivations as those that made Fernando Ortiz the great discoverer and publicist of the culture of African origin in Cuba, Roldán and Caturla penetrated that "black jungle" and discovered its fascinating wealth. Roldán, a violinist who received the Sarasate prize in Europe, was the author of ballets such as La Rebambaramba and El Milagro de Anaquillé, a choreographic piece in one act with influence from the black music of the southern United States. García Caturla, who also studied in Paris under the guidance of Nadia Boulanger, composed La rumba, bembé and Cuban Danzas. Using texts by Nicolás Guillén, Roldán composed his Motivos del Son, published in New York in 1934, while Caturla was composing boleros, danzas, and other pieces that explored polytonality. This was a music distant from any calculation, that still may be heard at bembés in the Island, an instinctive music described by Langston Hughes in 1930 as "life emerging hot from the earth, while the earth and the sun keep moving in constant rhythms for procreation and happiness." This was the same year Louis Armstrong recorded in the United States Moisés Simons' El Manisero, a song that became unforgettable in Cuba sung by Rita Montaner, known as "Rita of Cuba," who was also an excellent singer of operas, zarzuelas (Spanish operettas) and other popular musical genres such as the pregón (street vendor song).

It would take too much space to name all great interpreters, some of them composers, who are worthy of being mentioned. At least we must recall Ignacio Villa (known as "Bola de Nieve"), the exquisite Esther Borja (Ernesto Lecuona's Damisela encantadora), the international vedette Rosita Fornés, the singer of puntos guajiros Celina González and the interpreters of Afro-Cuban music Merceditas Valdés and Celia Cruz.

Due to geographic proximity, favorable for multiple historic relations including a constant exchange of people and cultures, Cuba contributed to the cultural enrichment of the Caribbean and has been enriched by Caribbean culture in its broadest meaning. Such exchange is also close at hand with the United States, with a growing intensity in the twentieth century.

Many Cuban orchestras are hired to play in the United States, but very popular orchestras have also been created there with musicians who perform a Cuban repertory. Suffice to mention the names Xavier Cugat, Desi Arnaz and Dámaso Pérez Prado, all with a significant presence in Hollywood's films. Pérez Prado was responsible for the creation and diffusion of the mambo, a genre he created in the 1950s as a mixture of Afro-Cuban rhythms and North American jazz. In those same years Cuba also had its own jazz. and "jazz bands" that would alternate in public events, cabarets, radio and television with the charanga orchestras or the sounding (sonoras) orchestras.
 

The essential Cuban musical universe also penetrated the United States, with the prevailing drums of the Cuban houses of santeros, paleros and Náñigos, by way of great North American musicians like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and even Ella Fitzgerald. This influence started around 1930 and became stronger in subsequent years through the interpenetration of Afro-Cuban sonorities along with jazz or the blues. This extraordinary dialogue continues down to the present through musicians from both countries, such as the much-praised award winner "Chucho" Valdés and his orchestra Irakeres, on the Cuban side.

In the United States, this productive exchange had, in its beginnings, the participation of Mario "Machito" Bauza, a trumpeter, after he organized a huge orchestra in New York that in the 1940s used to interpret jazz with Afro-Cuban sonorities. The drummer Luciano "Chano" Pozo, associated with Dizzy Gillespie in the great popular number Manteca, is an example of Afro-Cuban jazz with energetic and lively ingredients transplanted from Africa to Cuba, and then to the United States. Dan Morgentern reviewed and praised the spectacular quality of "Chano" Pozo's appearance on the stage of the Apollo Theater in New York in 1948 as follows:

...a strong Negro, naked down to the waist, 

bathed in a red light 'cause he lit up his oil 

lamp and started to heat the leather of his

"congas" [sic]. It was a picture that created 

tremendous anticipation, and when he was 

concluding his chronometric, slow, prudent 

and dramatic anticipations and was beginning 

to play and sing, he was delivering 

everything the prelude had promised, and more.

According to specialists, it was a matter of Afro-Cuban music's contribution to the North American music, with a deep esthetic meaning based on the application of its polyrhythmic character, which led to more harmonious and melodious freedom by jazz soloists. Meanwhile, in Cuba, couples interlocked and danced to the rhythm of the fox trot, the slow swing, the Charleston or the boogie-woogie, as well as the blues, rock-and-roll and other North American genres. They enjoyed them in small clubs, private homes and big cabarets such as the international Tropicana in Havana, where prominent artists like Cab Calloway and Nat King Cole not only interpreted their repertories but also enriched them with Cuban rhythms and songs.

Demographic movement — Cuban communities in places like New York, New Jersey and Florida — has been, and continues to be, the principal agent in this multiple and valuable exchange. For example, thousands of Cubans settled in Key West starting in 1869 and, although Key West lost importance in the twentieth century in comparison, for instance, with Miami, it still preserves a strong Latin atmosphere that is largely due to its Cuban community, to its Cuban-American descendants. Hence, the Cuban-American Festival is held in the city every year, "offering something for the whole family," from typical food and dominoes games, to conferences, exhibits and musical soirée, where dancing is everywhere, being its main attraction a street conga, linking a multitude of persons and extending for several blocks.

In Cuba, as is also common to other peoples and cultures, music shares two distinctive qualities: it serves as a means of communication, from bottom to top, without any distinction as to social class, race or gender, with a universal presence inside and outside the home; and secondly, by being essentially democratic and shared, it doesn't erect inhibiting borders.