Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis

Vincenzo Perna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351539074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Cuban music is recognized unanimously as a major historical force behind Latin American popular music, and as an important player in the development of US popular music and jazz. However, the music produced on the island after the Revolution in 1959 has been largely overlooked and overshadowed by the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon. The Revolution created the conditions for the birth of a type of highly sophisticated popular music, which has grown relatively free from market pressures. These conditions premised the new importance attained by Afro-Cuban dance music during the 1990s, when the island entered a period of deep economic and social crisis that has shaken Revolutionary institutions from their foundations. Vincenzo Perna investigates the role of black popular music in post-Revolutionary Cuba, and in the 1990s in particular. The emergence of timba is analysed as a distinctively new style of Afro-Cuban dance music. The controversial role of Afro-Cuban working class culture is highlighted, showing how this has resisted co-optation into a unified, pacified vision of national culture, and built musical bridges with the transnational black diaspora. Musically, timba represents an innovative fusion of previous popular and folkloric Afro-Cuban styles with elements of hip-hop and other African-American styles like jazz, funk and salsa. Timba articulates a black urban youth subculture with distinctive visual and choreographic codes. With its abrasive commentaries on issues such as race, consumer culture, tourism, prostitution and its connections to the underworld, timba demonstrates at the 'street level' many of the contradictions of contemporary Cuban society. After repeatedly colliding with official discourses, timba has eventually met with institutional repression. This book will appeal not only to ethnomusicologists and those working on popular music studies, but also to those working in the areas of cultural and Black studies, anthropology, Latin American st

Part I
Setting the Scene

Chapter 1
Música bailable under the Revolution, 1959–1989

[interviewer]: Do you ever sing, Fidel?

[Castro]: I have a terrible ear for music. I do like music, but I have no musical talent.

Not even while taking a shower?

No, Tomás. Often the water is too cold, and it makes me quiver.

I do not have that habit. Unfortunately, I have a terrible ear for music. I like music very much, especially the revolutionary songs, the music of Silvio, of Pablito, of Sara….

I like classical music, and I have a special preference for marches.¹

I’m gonna tell you something a bit daring. Música popular is possibly more popular than our national anthem. Maybe some people think that ‘Guantanamera’ is our national anthem.

J. Betancourt (interview with the author, 1999)

At the opening of the new millennium, the extraordinary international success of the album Buena Vista Social Club seemed to suggest the existence of a continuity between the present-day accomplishments of Cuban popular music and its ‘golden era’ in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Such an idea has been reinforced by the emphasis placed by the Cuban authorities on national cultural identity, which has given the impression of steady, vigorous state support of local popular music. In the words of Peter Manuel, ‘[t]he revolutionary government has regarded the promotion of popular culture as a high priority; moreover, it has enthusiastically promoted Cuban popular music as a vital part of national heritage’ (1988: 37).

Similar statements need to be qualified, because, since 1959, popular music in Cuba has undergone alternating fortunes and a rather complicated history. After the revolution, the Cuban state extended its control over practically every area of music production, distribution and consumption, also playing a central role in artistic education. At certain stages, the Cuban authorities have supported and promoted selected popular music styles and artists. For a complex series of reasons, however, the most popular type of Cuban recreational music, música bailable, has often met with considerable institutional distrust. In fact, between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, local dance music underwent a period of deep crisis, reaching a stage that one Cuban author has defined as ‘unprecedented paralysis’ (Acosta 1999: 179).²

This chapter examines the situation of música bailable (MB) from the advent of the revolution to the end of the 1980s, that is just before the emergence of timba and the beginning of the período especial. Aspects of this period have been covered by authors such as Linares (1974), Manuel (1986, 1987, 1990b), Elí Rodríguez (1989) and Acosta (1990a, 1999). Here I intend to adopt a different, more critical perspective, looking at the correlation between changes in music and in cultural policies, and underlining how, during the period, Afro-Cuban popular music was often marginalized in favour of other musical styles. The identification of this process, occasionally hinted at but never openly addressed by scholars and writers, is, I believe, crucial to the understanding of the meaning, the popularity and the problems of contemporary timba.

In the first part of the chapter, I look at the changes of music under the impact of the reforms and the new policies adopted by the revolution. In particular, I discuss the way in which, after a period of great expansion during the 1950s, Cuban MB was affected by factors such as the decline of the tourist industry, the emigration of major popular musicians and the nationalization of the media and of music contracting.

I then examine the state of MB between the late 1960s and the 1970s, the stage of its most acute crisis, when the majority of music venues were shut down by the authorities, and Cuban youth turned their attention to international pop and rock. In the early 1970s, foreign popular music was denounced by the government as a manifestation of cultural imperialism and banned from the airwaves. Caught between political pressures and a need to please their audiences, the Cuban media found themselves in a difficult situation and responded by broadcasting a mix of sentimental canción, political songs and, once the ban was lifted, Anglo-American pop. At the end of the decade, to many observers, the decline of Cuban dance music appeared irreversible.

Paradoxically, the rescue of national dance music eventually came via salsa, a type of Latin music born in the USA and initially scorned by the Cuban cultural establishment as a capitalist appropriation of Cuban son. Here I look at the impact of salsa in the mid-1980s, underlining how its influence, thanks to a generation of innovative popular bands that had emerged during the previous decade, eventually led to the resurgence of MB, preparing the ground for the subsequent boom of timba. Ironically, many of the new talents of Cuban música bailable came from the state music schools where popular music and jazz were proscribed.

This chapter reveals how, in its initial stage, the Cuban revolution indeed produced a ‘remarkable improvement of material facilities for cultural expansion’ (Mesa-Lago 1974: 97), particularly in music, but also created conditions that have had a deeply negative impact on dance music. Rather than to a creative crisis, then, the decline of the popularity of local dance music during the first two decades of the revolution can be traced to a combination of factors such as changes in music policies and in the organization of the music profession, and to social and cultural prejudice by the media and institutional bodies. This attitude, I argue, stems from both the persistence of pre-revolutionary cultural and social biases against black popular culture, and fears of a connection between that culture and ‘marginal’ behaviours that might nourish a distinct black identity and challenge the construction of a racially and culturally unified nation.

Popular music in Havana at the advent of the revolution

Never mind political propaganda…. help your friends to the happiness which travel to Cuba can give them.

Fidel Castro, speaking to ASTA delegates in Havana in October 1959

(Schwartz 1997: 201)

In the years immediately before the revolution, Cuba was a major musical scene in the Américas, boasting several radio and TV stations and a thriving music industry, with both subsidiaries of US record companies and music publishers, and a strong national entertainment industry. The main local record company, Panart, produced half a million records in 1954, and by the end of the decade sold half of its production abroad (Díaz Ayala 1981).

The island’s capital was a place of intense musical interchange, with clubs and theatres playing host to international artists such as Edith Piaf, Sarah Vaughan and Nat ‘King’ Cole, and Cuban musicians enjoying popularity on the international market with styles such as mambo and cha-cha-cha (Roberts 1985).³ Besides six major cabarets, Havana nightlife offered at least a dozen second-line cabarets where patrons could see local stars of the calibre of Benny Moré or listen to jazz combos and jam sessions. Dozens of other little nightclubs and bars, mostly concentrated in the new Vedado area, offered regular live music (Acosta 2002).

The expansion of music during the 1950s, and especially of popular music for night entertainment, was closely related to the booming tourist economy. Under dictator Fulgencio Batista, Havana had become an important destination for US travel, famous for its nightlife, gambling halls, cabarets and prostitution industry. With a neo-colonial mix of economic underdevelopment, elite tourism, financial laissez-faire and political repression, Batista had created a favourable environment for the development of night entertainment and dance music and the exploitation of musicians, reminiscent of the position of jazz in the USA during the previous decades. Gambling, in particular, had become a key national economic factor, paying for the entertainment in hotels and cabarets such as the Tropicana. A world-renowned venue celebrated for its excellent orchestras and lavish shows, Tropicana had on its payroll 40 musicians and 70 dancers and singers (Schwartz 1997).

Dance music played a vital role not only in tourist nightclubs and hotels, but in the musical life of the whole city. With more than forty dance events per night, pre-1959 Havana provided different audiences with an ample range of music, catered by a variety of institutions such as bourgeois and aristocratic clubs, associations and dance academies, immigrant societies, ‘coloured societies’ (that is, associations of Afro-Cubans), professional guilds and beer gardens (Carrobello et al. 1991).

The triumphant arrival in Havana of the guerrilleros headed by Fidel Castro in January 1959 did not change the situation overnight. Despite a certain degree of social turbulence and administrative chaos, the early months of the revolution saw an effort to return to normality. Clubs and cinemas remained open, artists and bands kept playing and touring abroad, radio stations went on broadcasting a mix of local and foreign music (Díaz Ayala 1981). In the face of the rebels’ publicized intent to eradicate the vice industry, in the first year of the revolution international tourism and gambling continued to represent the main financial source of the national economy.⁴

The uncertainty created by the new political situation, however, led to a rapid decline in the number of foreign visitors. In autumn 1959, the Instituto Nacional de la industria turística (INIT) made a desperate attempt to rescue the local tourist industry. It issued a promotional booklet entitled Cuba, 1959: Land of Opportunity, Playland of the Américas, and hosted a convention of the (US) American Society of Travel Agents, where Castro ‘unapologetically acclaimed tourism as Cuba’s salvation’ (Schwartz 1997: 201). Despite such efforts, international travel to Cuba did not return to pre-1959 levels and in the following years virtually disappeared from the island.⁵ With tourism vanished a fundamental financial resource, gambling, wiped out not so much by the new government’s moral crusade but by the decline of foreign travel to Cuba (ibid.).

At the opening of the new decade, the somewhat fluid political situation changed, and the international tensions between Cuba and the USA rapidly escalated. In 1960, the Cuban government expropriated all US companies, and the US government reacted by prohibiting exports to Cuba. In January 1961, Cuba–US diplomatic relations broke off. The US-sponsored, failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in the same year, and the missile crisis in 1962, finally precipitated the international isolation and economic decline of the island, pushing it closer to the Soviet Union.⁶

Socialism without pachanga: the forging of a new identity

The young revolution met with ample support among popular musicians, whose working conditions during the 1950s had been far from easy (Díaz Ayala 1981). In the entertainment industry, cases of exploitation had been common, with artists having to play extremely long sets, receiving flat fees for their recordings and not being paid for the copyright of their compositions. Conditions had proved particularly bad for black artists, discriminated from their white colleagues both socially and financially.⁷

The decline of tourism, however, produced a sharp contraction in the number of jobs in the entertainment industry, affecting particularly musicians active in the lucrative hotel circuit. Hit by the fall in employment and by restrictions imposed on salaries and foreign travel, several important musicians decided to emigrate. The process intensified during 1961, when other popular musicians chose to settle either in Latin America or in the USA.⁸ For Cuban music, the eventual break of the relationship between Cuba and the USA marked a turning point. From that moment on, virtually two different Cuban musics existed: one for the international circuit fed by Cuban expatriated and other Latin American musicians, and one made in Cuba by local artists for the local population, virtually cut off from the international scene and the foreign market.

In the field of popular music produced on the island, the years immediately following the revolution did not see dramatic stylistic changes, but witnessed a boom of songs, marches and hymns with a patriotic content, and the zenith of filin (or feeling) (Elí Rodríguez 1989). A jazz-inflected, refined vocal style emerged in the 1940s with composers such as José Antonio Mendez and César Portillo de la Luz and singers such as Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo, filin had developed a strong relationship with Cuban jazz, which had itself reached a remarkable level of sophistication and internationalization (Acosta 2002).

In a famous statement of the period, referring to the enthusiasm and the sense of joyful participation experienced by Cubans in the early 1960s, ‘Che’ Guevara described the Cuban revolution as ‘socialism with pachanga’ (a dance music style that surfaced in 1958 and was played by charanga bands).⁹ While the government implemented nationalizations widening its control on the press, the broadcast media and the music industry, nightlife in the capital city continued to flourish. Without the racial and social barriers separating Cubans under Batista, and with clubs’ prices subsidized by the state, Havana was full of cabarets and clubs, open-air balls and festivals patronized by racially-mixed audiences. Now supported by INIT, some of the big pre-1959 cabarets continued to function, including Tropicana, Capri, the Copa Room of the Hotel Riviera, the Salon Caribe of the Havana Hilton (now Habana Libre) and the Club Parisien of the Hotel Nacional (Díaz Ayala 1981).

‘Che’ Guevara’s reference, however, proved ill-fated. In 1961, the creator of pachanga Eduardo Davidson defected to the USA, and entered the ranks of musicians eliminated from the Cuban airwaves. The last music fad to be exported from the island, pachanga symbolized the paradoxical position of much popular music and the dilemmas of the Cuban media and music industry during the 1960s. Because a great part of the catalogue of Cuban rec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Setting the Scene
• Part II Matters of Style
• Part III Dangerous Connections
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Documentaries, Films and Music Videos
• Index