Havana

city · earth

The Caribbean port that functioned for four centuries as the hinge of the Spanish Atlantic and, in the twentieth, as the place where Cuban rural forms were professionalised, recorded and exported. Its African population was drawn heavily from West-Central Africa and from the Yoruba-speaking Bight of Benin, and under Spanish colonial practice was organised into cabildos de nación — mutual-aid societies grouped by African origin — which sustained drum ensembles, dance and religious practice with a continuity that had no equivalent in the Protestant mainland colonies. Havana rumba, an urban secular drum-and-voice practice, developed in its dock and solar neighbourhoods, and the clave that son adopted came from there. The city is also where the recording industry met Cuban music early: American companies were cutting sides in Havana from the 1910s, and the traffic between Havana and New Orleans and later New York carried habanera, danzón, son and their descendants into North American dance music continuously from the nineteenth century onward.