At Coppelia there are still long lines, but the ice cream parlor is no longer an experience for foreigners. Cubans now pay in Cuban pesos, and foreigners in Cuban convertible pesos (CUCs). A CUC costs much more than a peso, which prevents foreigners from taking advantage of the extremely low peso prices and prevents tourism from making Cuba unaffordable for Cubans. But—and the Cuban government might not be unhappy about this—the two types of currencies have separated foreigners and locals. Coppelia now has a dedicated line for those paying in CUCs, and it has almost no wait time. Worse, although the menu on the wall for all customers still has slots for twenty-six flavors, only one or two or three have labels in them: strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate.
The revolution has lost its crème de vie.
TEN
The Sound of an African City
Y bien, ahora os pregunto:
¿No veis estos tambores en mis ojos?
Well then, I ask you now:
Don’t you see those drums in my eyes?
— NICOLÁS GUILLÉN, “El Apellido” (1958)
The old, falling-down houses of Havana can still breathe because they still have no glass in their windows, only iron gratings. They no longer display lovely young women like flowers, and novelist Abilio Estévez’s claim that you could peer in and see gorgeous naked bodies as you walked around the city is, at the least, an exaggeration. But there is still probably no other city in the world where a strolling visitor is afforded so many candid domestic scenes. And what are Habanero families doing in their homes? A lot of the time they are listening to music.
Walk down a street in Havana and you will hear music coming from every window and doorway—boleros, son, guajiras, danzón, conga, charanga, pachanga, nueva trova, filin (proving that you don’t need elevators for elevator music), jazz, Afro-jazz, Afro-Latin jazz, rock, hip-hop. Most bars and restaurants have live music, and most of the groups are good enough to make you stop and listen. Drums, maracas, and guitars, especially the tres, are traditional. Trumpets have always been popular, too, along with woodwinds. There are inexpensive clubs throughout the city, often housed, in the Havana style, in unlikely reused spaces; one such club, Fábrica de Arte Cubano, popularly known as la fabrica, is in a former brick factory in Vedado. The clubs have to be inexpensive or no one would be able to go. Some concert venues are even less formal—in vacant lots, or on the street.
Dance has always been central to Havana life. According to a Santería legend, told by Havana-born anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, Changó seduced Ochún by dancing. He started dancing and “she said ‘yes’ immediately, and they began living together.” That is how it is supposed to work in Havana.
Trollope wrote, “They greatly love dancing, and have dances of their own and music of their own, which are peculiar, and difficult to a stranger. Their tunes are striking and very pretty.” In Cecilia Valdés, life is centered around dances, and when the novel’s young scion is assessing the white woman he doesn’t love but is supposed to marry, he does point out in her favor that she is a good dancer.
Music never goes out of fashion, though dance styles sometimes change. The music of the revolution—nueva trova and pachanga—is still popular. Nueva trova derives from American protest music and was much popularized in Cuba by Joan Baez. Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés sang songs of the revolution and still do. Pachanga, which is still popular, is an upbeat blend of son and meringue, usually with the kind of satirical lyrics Habaneros love. It is percussion-driven dance music featuring bongos, congas, cowbells, and trumpets. Che Guevara famously called the revolution “socialismo con pachanga,” socialism with pachanga.
But at the root of all Havana music and most Cuban music is son. It appears to have come from a mix of African drumming and Spanish songs. Though these two were first fused in Oriente Province, by 1910 son was the street music of black Havana, bongos and maracas marking its distinct and infectious beat. The use of the word “son” was by then already quite well established. The earliest mention of it is in a song called “Son de Ma Teodora,” by a black Dominican named Teodora Ginés, which is thought to have been written in 1580.
African music, dancing, religion—any expressions of African culture—were feared by both local and foreign white people. In truth, they feared the black people who had been wronged—a fear that, as José Martí pointed out, was rooted in their own racism. A January 29, 1879 Harper’s Weekly article on a black festival in Havana described the street dancing as “giving the beholder a feeling of being transported beyond all limits of civilization, into the country of gorillas and monkeys of all descriptions.”
And so music was suppressed. When son first emerged in the streets of Havana, in the early twentieth century, it was shut down by the police, as were most forms of African culture. Son groups, conjuntos, caught playing on the street, as was the tradition, had their instruments confiscated. In 1919, soldiers in eastern Havana, in Guanabacoa, were arrested for immorality because they were dancing to son. But a rhythm cannot be banned. Son was unstoppably appealing. It took over Havana, and so it has remained. By the late 1920s conjuntos were gaining wide recognition, especially a group known as the Sexteto Habanero.
Son was played with a square bongo, maracas, vocals, and a botijo. The botijo, which also turned up on other Caribbean islands, was an earthenware jug with a hole at the top and a second off to the side, originally used to transport kerosene from Spain to the islands. In the nineteenth century, people turned them into musical instruments by filling them with water to various heights, depending on how deep a sound was desired. The jug was blown into, usually through the top hole, to provide deep vibrating notes. In the 1920s, son groups gradually replaced the botijo with a double bass. Both tres and guitar were added. The Sexteto Habanero added a cornet and became the Septeto Habanero. The group’s players changed over the years, but it stayed together until its ninetieth-anniversary album in 2010.
Son spread with the growth of radio, which, like the railroad, the telegraph, film, and television, developed earlier in Cuba than in most of the world. By 1933 Cuba had sixty-two radio stations, most of them in Havana and backed by Americans; this was more than any country in Latin America had. The Americans who created these stations imagined them playing classical music, which had a following in Cuba, home to world-class musicians and composers. But popular music, especially son, took over the airwaves.
The rhythm of son consumed daily life in Havana. Street vendors, pregoneros, called out to customers with chants in the rhythm of son. These chants were then turned into a type of son songs known as son pregón. Moises Simons, a Cuban Basque, wrote a son that was the call of a peanut vendor, “El Manisero,” peanut vendors being among the more popular of the many street vendors found in Havana.
In 1928, Columbia Records was the first to record “El Manisero,” with Rita Montaner, and though there have been at least 160 recordings of it since, no one ever did it better that she did. She was also filmed performing it. “Mani, mani, mani,” she would sing out, holding the notes for a full four beats each while her upturned face showed an expression between pleading and ecstasy. Even if you didn’t understand Spanish—and she had many fans who didn’t—you would imagine from her voice and face that this song was about something far more emotional than selling peanuts. And then, in a rapid staccato voice, like the soft taps on a bongo skin, she would sing, “Si te quieres por el pico divertir, cómprame un cucuruchito de mani.” “Peanuts, peanuts, peanuts . . . If you want a little treat, buy from me a little packet of peanuts.” That was all, but she looked and sounded as if she were in love, possibly with Havana.
A bigger hit was the 1930 Victor Records recording of “El Manisero” with Don Azpiazú and his Havana Casino Orchestra. The orchestra included Mario Bauzá on the saxophone. Bauzá was an Habanero who went on to create Afro-Cuban jazz, which changed the face of New York jazz.
The Azpiazú recording was the first 78-rpm single of Cuban music to sell more than a million copies. Ap
parently the producers did not like the term son pregón, as it was correctly labeled on the Havana sheet music, or even the term “son”—they called the music “rhumba.” This word had not previously existed, unless it was a misspelling of “rumba,” a sensual dance between a man and a woman created by free blacks in Havana in the 1860s, from the threads of memories of traditional African dance. Obviously this is not what “El Manisero” is. But the word caught on, and ever since, this typically Havana music has become known throughout the world as rhumba, with few outside of Cuba familiar with the real term, son.
•
A Cuban anthropologist once told me that if you listen to an impatient Habanero tapping his fingers on a table or countertop, invariably he will be tapping out son. I have not been able to verify this, but what I have noticed is that people in Havana walk to son.
Anaïs Nin, a Parisian with a Cuban father, observed in her diary in 1922, when she was only nineteen and son was first gripping Havana, that Habaneras and Habaneros have a special way of walking:
In the walk of the people about the streets is reflected a peculiar indolence. It is a slow dragging step, a deliberate swinging movement, a gliding, serpentlike motion . . .
If you happen to hear son on a Havana street, which happens quite often, look at the people walking by and see how perfectly in step they are.
•
The people of Havana don’t talk the way other Spanish speakers do. This is due to the influence of African languages. For a long time, most Cuban authorities on the subject denied the African nature of Havana dialect. That was because the intellectual class, which was mostly white, tended to treat African influences as merely unfortunate deviations in Cuban culture. Enthusiasts of white music, such as guajiras and criollas—country ballads in slow 6/8 time—they usually regarded the upbeat son as a degeneration of Cuban music. But then much of this thinking changed, mostly because of the work of a white Habanero, Fernando Ortiz.
Born in Havana in 1881, Ortiz founded the Cuban Academy of Language in 1926 and the Society of Afro-Cuban Studies in 1937. He wrote more than a dozen books, on everything from language to music to hurricanes. Ortiz insisted that Cuba was not Spanish or African or Taino, but a composite of all these groups struggling with one another to create a new culture. He called the process “transculturation.” Transculturation, he wrote, was the result of a variety of cultures “torn from [their] native moorings, faced with the problem of disadjustment and readjustment of deculturation and acculturation.” In this context, it became pointless to argue about what was or was not African. It was Cuban, and Cuban absorbs some African. To some today, this may not seem like a startling idea, but to Cubans of that time it represented a new way of looking at themselves.
Latin Americans generally speak differently than Spaniards. They abbreviate things. “Come here,” venga acá, becomes ven acá, and “over there,” para allá, becomes p’allá (“pie-ya”). In the Caribbean, s’s and r’s tend to disappear. Como estás, “How are you,” becomes Como’ta. Ustedes, “they,” becomes utedi.
The disappearance of r’s and s’s seems to be the influence of African languages. In Haitian Creole, which is a fusion of French and various African languages, there are few r’s or s’s. Where there is an r in French, there is often a w in Creole. Gros, meaning “big,” is gwo in Creole.
While the dropping of r’s and s’s happens throughout Cuba, as well as in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, it is particularly strong in Havana. I have always liked the way Habaneros call me by my last name, pronouncing it “Koo-lan-key.”
Foreigners, even from Spanish-speaking countries, are often frustrated by the way Spanish is spoken in Havana. They always were. In 1859, Richard Henry Dana wrote:
I yield to no one in my admiration of Spanish as a spoken language . . . but I do not like it as spoken by the common people of Cuba, in the streets. Their voices and intonations are thin and eager, very rapid, too much in the lips, and withal, giving an impression of the passionate and the childish combined, and it strikes me that the tendency here is to enfeeble the language, and take from it the openness of the vowels and the strength of the harder consonants.
Much of this holds true today, although it is not clear whether Dana was referring to the speech of whites or blacks. At that time, the transculturation process was not yet complete, and whites and blacks spoke completely differently. This was the era of Cecilia Valdés, and in the novel, black speech is much more abbreviated than white speech. Blacks address a white woman as “seña,” for señora and a white man as “seño,” for señor. Those particular abbreviated terms have disappeared, possibly because they were associated with slavery.
Today, Habaneros of different backgrounds do not speak different dialects. They all speak a language infused with many influences, some of them clearly African. Ortiz identifies twelve hundred African terms commonly used in Cuban Spanish. The speech is just as rapid as Dana complained it was, with the words formed in the back of the throat and seem to roll down the tongue with growing speed and desperation until they finally slide out of the mouth, with many parts swallowed whole. Before a vowel, the s is dropped; it is replaced with an aspirated h so that más o menos, “more or less,” is pronounced máhomeno. Some neighborhoods have their own accent, especially those known for their traditionally black culture, such as Cayo Hueso, in Centro Habana. Singer Celia Cruz had a Cayo Hueso accent, an accent with a cachet in Havana culture, just as a Brooklyn accent is the one for which New York is famous.
Every time Fidel Castro spoke, it was clear to everyone in Havana that he was not an Habanero. He spoke slowly, the syllables rolling rather than bouncing, with big breaks between phrases. This may have lacked cultural charm, but it was appreciated by foreign correspondents, even Spanish ones, because he was the one Cuban in Havana whom foreigners could understand.
•
Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance poet, had learned Spanish during his visits to his estranged father in Mexico. In 1930, he traveled to Cuba and wrote a letter to Jamaican Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, very excited that he had found in Havana a young poet named Nicolás Guillén, who had “created a small sensation down there with his poems in Cuban Negro dialect with the rhythms of the native music.” This was thrilling to Hughes because he had been writing black poetry in the rhythms of blues and jazz. Guillén had been writing in son. Hughes wanted to translate some of the work but found it difficult to find an English equivalent for the black slang and to keep to the rhythm of son. He strongly encouraged young Guillén to keep striving in the direction he was working. Soon after Hughes left, Guillén established a reputation as one of Cuba’s most important poets with Motivos de Son, eight poems in the language of black Havana in the rhythm of son. García Lorca, traveling to Cuba in 1930, the year Motivos de Son was published, said that he was going to “the land of Nicolás Guillén.”
Guillén shocked blacks and whites by writing about the African features of black people—hair, noses, and lips. He was a dedicated Communist, and his poetry was the music of protest—but, to paraphrase Che, protest with son:
Cuba, palmar vendido,
sueño descuartizado,
duro mapa de azúcar y de olvido . . .
Two slow whole notes followed by rapid lines, like the son of the peanut vendor:
Cuba: sold-out palm grove,
drawn and quartered dream,
tough map of sugar and neglect . . .
Hughes was right: Guillén is hard to translate, to put in another language and still keep it black, Habanero, and son. That is why he has never been as well known in other languages as in the Spanish-speaking world. In 1948, Hughes finally took on the task of publishing a small edition of a book of his translations of Guillén, avoiding the ones with the heaviest dialect. He substitutes Harlem slang for the slang of black Havana, but they are probably the best English translations of Guillén ever done. Here is Hughes’s translation of that great Havana motif, sweat, in �
��Wash Woman”:
Under the explosive sun
of the bright noon-day
washing,
a black woman
bites her song of mamey.
Odor and sweat of the arm pits:
and on the line of her singing,
strung along,
white clothes hang
with her song.
•
If you are walking around Havana looking in windows and who can resist this in a city of open windows; you are likely to see—especially in neighborhoods like Cayo Hueso, Regla, and Guanabacoa, known for their black culture—a doll, placed on a prominent perch with a large, quality cigar and a glass of rum. Sometimes you will see an adult sharing a drink or a smoke with his doll. Often the best seat in the living room will be occupied by one or several dolls. Most any kind of doll will work—some large, some small, black, white, or Asian. One afternoon in Guanabacoa, instead of a doll I saw the only couch in the living room occupied by a large, yellow inflatable bear, smiling ridiculously at his Cohiba cigar.
There are some other curious things to notice around town: bright-colored flags over doorways and windows, men wearing beads of the same bright colors as the flags, a circle with crossed arrows drawn on a wall, filled paper bags placed in the deep crevices at the roots of silk-cotton trees or the bases of royal palms, where bananas are also left. An Habanero pouring from a bottle of rum often splashes a few drops on the ground.
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