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Afro-Latin Americans

The Bearers   Winter 2018, Volume XVIII,

Number 2
by Ned Sublette | Jan 5, 2018

Read English Version Leer Versión en Español

Musicians of Ojundegara, Musicians of Ojundegara. Photo by Ned Sublette.

Viñales’s spectacular natural beauty makes it one of Cuba’s busiest tourist attractions, but tourists don’t
come to this mango grove, and the bus driver who brought us wasn’t happy about taking the beat-up road
that leads here. Plus, it’s raining. No matter, there’ll be a party.

As we arrive, we see the piglet, roasting on a spit. Someone opens a bottle of rum. We—my Cuban colleague,
musicologist/producer Caridad Diez and I, along with 27 travelers from the United States—are in the only
part of Cuba (that we know of ) where traditional Congo tambores yuka are still played in family and
community celebrations, summoning the neighbors from over the hillside with drum calls to Oestas that
don’t stop the same day they start.

When sugar was creating fantastic wealth across a wide swath of western Cuba in the 19th century, these
drums were ubiquitous. When work stopped long enough for a dance, the drummers brought out tambores
yuka. Rumberos say that the yuka is behind the 19th-century style of rumba called the yambú, still danced
widely today—or, as Diosdado Ramos, director of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, put it, “slow down the baile
yuka a little and you have the yambú.”

DiYerent Cuban drums are classiOable by the way the drumhead is rigged to the shell. These tambores yuka
are hollowed-out avocado tree trunks with the heads nailed on; they’re Congo (which I will spell here with
a “c” instead of the anthropologists ‘“k”), from Central Africa.

Over the years in Cuba, I’ve seen ceremonies, or recreations of ceremonies by practitioners, from Ove
diYerent African naciones. The most visible is the Yoruba (or Lucumí, or Ifá, or Regla de Ocha, or santería),
with its beads, its color codes of dress, its white-clad Orst-year initiates on every street in Havana, its
exportation to countries around the world, and above all its spectacular, formalized repertoire of music. And
there’s also Carabalí (including the Abakuá secret society for men in Havana, Matanzas, and Cárdenas, but
also other groups); Arará (from present-day Benin, especially the city-states of Ardra and Ouidah); and
Gangá (Sierra Leone). And massively, there is Congo, which I think of as the base layer of Afro-Cuban
culture since perhaps the 1580s.

All over Cuba, people continue ancestral musical and spiritual practices, most commonly through the eYorts
of particular families, maintaining and transforming them in turn. Prudencio Rivera, the director of Grupo
Tambores Yuka and a truck driver by day, is one of those people the Consejo Nacional de Casas de Cultura
calls portadores— bearers, who take charge of the tradition for a time and pass it on the next generation.

As we watch, the drummers lay the drums on the ground and make a small Ore in order to tune them, as
described by Anselmo Suárez Romero in his 1838 Cuban novel Francisco:

Then it was necessary to heat up the drums; for that reason they had lit the bonDre,
with which the skin that covers the broader end of the drum acquires its sonority,
and springs to the touch, and the sound resonates better in the hollow cylinder of
the drum’s body; it is the tuning key of the instrument; without Game it doesn’t get
heard, it doesn’t reach far away to farms all around; it doesn’t thump, it doesn’t give
pleasure, it doesn’t make anyone leap.

Then they begin to play, continuing a tradition that Swedish writer Frederika Bremer described during her
1850 visit to Cuba:

The music consisted, besides the singing, of drums. Three drummers stood beside
the tree-trunk beating with their hands, their Dsts, their thumbs, and drumsticks
upon skin stretched over hollowed tree-stems. They made as much noise as
possible, but always keeping time and tune most correctly.

The group has the typical African three-drum conOguration, with two drums playing an ostinato while a
third comments. Congo songs tend to be highly repetitive–indeed, the origins of groove-based pop music
the world over have much to do with Congo musical tradition–and, perhaps because Congo has been a part
of Cuba for so long, Congo songs and even religious ritual tend to incorporate more Spanish than the other
African traditions of Cuba.

The singers repeat the line over and over: El rey del Congo tiene que vení’, el rey del Congo. The Congo king has
to come, the Congo king.

I’d heard about tambores yuka for years, but I’d never actually seen them.

***

In the Congo religion, called palo in Cuba, there are two worlds, the land of the living and the land of dead,
which are in constant contact, separated by a watery barrier called kalunga. On a Cuban sugar plantation,
where the labor force was systematically worked to death and replaced with fresh arrivals from the other
side of the water, the border between living and dead was a familiar one, with two-way communication.

Fernando Ortiz tells us of a Congo instrument called kinfuiti that communicates with the dead. I didn’t
think I’d ever see one in real life, but that was before I went to the little town of Quiebra Hacha—also in
western Cuba, in Artemisa—to see the group Ta Makuende Yaya. Cuban musicologist Sonia Pérez Cassola,
who’s worked with the group for years, calls the kinfuiti el tambor de los muertos— the drum of the dead,
whose call reaches to the other side of the kalunga line. It’s a friction drum. That is, instead of percussing
the drumhead, a wand attached to the drumhead is stroked with wet hands—an organological cousin of the
Brazilian cuica or the Venezuela furro. It makes a sustained low-register push-pull: grunk GRUNK, grunk
GRUNK…

The group performs for us in a video projection room that serves as the town’s movie theater. They’re
Congo-identiOed, but they also play songs addressed to the Yoruba deities (called orishas) that don’t sound
much like the orisha music I’ve previously heard. These are understood to be distinct traditions, but they
overlap and cross in all kinds of ways, all over Cuba. After the performance, we walk down the road to a
small temple originally founded by the enslaved, and rebuilt by the community, dedicated to San Antonio, or
St. Anthony, whose name denotes Congo.

Throughout the history of transatlantic slavery the Congo were identiOed with Catholicism; the kingdom
was Orst Catholicized in 1491—yes, the year before Columbus—when missionaries came to Mbanza-Kongo
(in present-day northern Angola). Nzinga a Nkuwu, the manikongo, or king, immediately and enthusiastically
accepted baptism as Rei João I, and converted his entire kingdom, which adopted the new power objects and
symbols while continuing traditional practice. So the much discussed syncretization began before the
Middle Passage, and was carried to all parts of the Americas; all up and down the hemisphere, Congos were
assumed to be Catholic.

***

In the center of the island, Sagua la Grande was once a wealthy river port for sugar, as the town’s elegant
architecture makes clear. It’s bristling with African religion: the Congo cabildo, Kunalumbo, was founded in
1809. There’s a strong Yoruba presence in Sagua, and there’s even a Gangá society.

The Kunalumbo house is small but well kept—a dedicated space, a testament to perseverance. Its interior
walls are painted with cosmograms and historical narrative, proudly noting a 1950 performance there by
Orquesta Aragón— one of the grand names of Cuban dance music, a wute-and-violins charanga founded in
Cienfuegos in 1939. When they played Kunalumbo, Aragón hadn’t made a record yet, but their career soon
got a boost with the help of their hometown friend Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré.

A black guajiro, the oldest of eighteen children, Moré grew up in the south central part of the island, in a
little town not far from Cienfuegos that the world knows about primarily through his song extolling it:
Santa Isabel de las Lajas. Beginning his career as a strolling singer in the dockside taverns of Old Havana,
Moré became a singing star during an extended stay in Mexico with the Conjunto Matamoros, in which he
sang with Francisco “Compay Segundo” Repilado, and changed his professional name to Benny (or Beny)
Moré. After appearing in Mexican movies and on hit records with Pérez Prado, he returned to Cuba in 1950.
After starting his Banda Gigante, “El Benny” began his reign as Cuba’s most loved singer, the one who sang
all the Cuban genres to everyone’s satisfaction. He was powerful enough to insist booking agents stop
locking the provincial Aragón out of the Havana market.

Benny grew up in Lajas, where he lived next door to the Casino de los Congos, a mutual aid society founded
by his African- born great-great-grandfather, Ta Ramón Gunda Moré. From his earliest years, he had free
run of the place, a young Congo prince dancing to tambores makuta, drums that have long since disappeared
from daily Cuban musical life. I’d never seen tambores makuta outside of a museum before. But the Casino
de los Congos still exists in Lajas, in its own house now as then, and the tambores makuta that Benny heard
as a child are still there. Its members perform a solemn ceremony, advancing with the Cuban wag around the
perimeter of the house.

An hour later, we’re down the road in Palmira, a center of santeros and babalaos in the Yoruba tradition.
Palmira was the site of Benny’s last concert; after a short life with too much cheap rotgut, he vomited blood
before singing a show there and died in the hospital in Havana on February 19, 1963 at the age of 43. In
Palmira, we visited the leader of the group Obacosó, who guarded a set of three two- headed cylindrical
drums I’d never seen before: tambores de guerra, or war drums, consecrated to Changó, the orisha of drums
and thunder. (Ethnomusicologist Amanda Villepastour has sent me a photo of a similar set in Jovellanos.)

The next day, in Trinidad, the group Leyenda Folk played for us tambores trinitarios—sawed-oY little drums
with a powerful crack. That made three kinds of drums I’d never seen before in less than 48 hours, and I’ve
been doing this since 1990. Cuba is inexhaustible.

In Jovellanos, in Matanzas province, the group Ojundegara, centered on the Baró family, maintains its Arará
heritage, singing in Fon to the fodduces who are more or less counterparts to the Yoruba orishas. In front of
Ojundegara’s house. there is a monument that matches a counterpart erected in the modern nation of Benin
following a visit the group made there in 1991. 150 years wasn’t that long ago: one of Ojundegara’s members,
Patricio Pastor Baró Céspedes, who died in July 2016 at the age of 89, was the son of Esteban Baró Tossú,
brought in slavery as a child from Dahomey ca. 1866.

After 1850, Cuba was the last place in the Americas importing Africans. The Onal decades of slavery were
peak years for the introduction of kidnapped Yoruba, who were brought where the sugar mills were at that
time: western Cuba, particularly Matanzas province.

Everyone agrees that Matanzas, the port city and “Athens of Cuba” on the north coast, was and is the great
crossroads and transmitter of Afro- Cuban religion. With time, the Yoruba religion moved farther east,
coming to Oriente (eastern Cuba) only in the 20th century.Fundamento (the activating element in the Yoruba
batá drums) came to Camagüey in the middle of the island only in 1980, I was told by Ángel Echemendía, the
erudite director of the Conjunto Folklórico in Camagüey, and, according to Abelardo Luardet Luaces, only
came to Santiago de Cuba in 1986.

So there’s a layer of Congo that covers the country, and a Yoruba power in the west that moved east. People
often are initiated in more than one Afro-Cuban system. In eastern Cuba, which was not 19th-century
sugarland, people generally become rayado (initiated in palo, evidenced by permanent skin scratches) before
making santo (Yoruba).

And there’s another factor: the lwa live in Cuba too. There is plenty of vodú (or vodou, or voodoo) in Oriente,
and other parts of Cuba, if you look.

***

There’s no way to understand the history of mountainous Oriente—or, for that matter, of the Cuban
revolutions that have blown from east to west—without taking into account St. Domingue/Haiti, whose
mountains are visible from high points in Oriente.

There are three Domingan-descended societies called tumbas francesas (in Santiago de Cuba, Guantánamo,
and a rural one in the foothills of the Sierra Cristal, near Sagua de Tánamo). Acknowledged by UNESCO as
Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, their wardrobe references French salon wear of the late
18th century. They dance contradanza as well as African dances, but the music is entirely drums and voices.

The rural tumba francesa of mountainous Bejuco was so isolated that Cuban scholars learned about it only in
1976, but it’s recognizably the same set of instruments and rhythms as its urban counterparts. Its story is a
key to understanding all kinds of movements and migrations in post-Haitian Cuba. In Guantánamo,
meanwhile, the beautifully dressed Santa Catalina de Ricci (or Pompadour) society is regal in its
headquarters. The last time I saw them was at a world music festival in Havana in March, where their
slamming battery of drummers jammed memorably with a group from the island of Reúnion; such is Cuba.

After a performance by the Tumba Francesa La Caridad de Oriente, the Santiago group, some years ago,
one of the group’s elders asked me if I was satisOed. When I made an a|rmative response, she smiled and
said, “you know, it’s not only we the living who are dancing here.” Meaning, the dead were dancing with
them.

But though spirit is everywhere, tumba francesa is not vodú (or vodou, or voodoo). There is indeed vodú in
Cuba, much of it courtesy of the large number of Haitian cane-cutters brought to Cuba in the 20th century,
when sugar had expanded to eastern Cuba during the pre-revolutionary neocolonial republic. Many
remained, becoming a Kreyol-speaking minority.

In his surprise worldwide hit “Chan Chan,” Compay Segundo commemorated a line of railroad stops in
eastern Cuba: “De Alto Cedro voy para Marcané / Llego a Cueto voy para Mayarí.” “From Alto Cedro I go to
Marcané / I get to Cueto and go on to Mayarí.” I haven’t stopped in Alto Cedro, but I took a group to visit
Cueto, where there’s a statue of Compay, no tourists to speak of, and something that doesn’t appear in Buena
Vista Social Club: vodú.

In Cueto, a group of schoolgirls in a community project sing songs in Kreyol before we visit the house of a
recently deceased powerful mambo (female vodú ritual expert). Family members salute the lwa, but one
woman fails to get far enough away before the drums begin, and she’s “mounted,” or “ridden,” by the spirits.

In Guantánamo, we visit the home of the houngan (ritual expert) Francisco; in his humble back patio, the
vodú group Los Cossía rehearse. But vodú doesn’t only exist in pockets of Oriente; it’s in central Cuba, too.
It’s strong in Camagüey. There’s vodú in Ciego de Ávila; when I ask Ariel “Goma” Gallardo Ruiz, director of
the group Rumbávila, if vodú came to central Cuba overland from the east, he said, “it also entered by north
and south”—that is, straight into central Cuba via Haitian sugar workers during the rst half of the 20th
century when there was a demand for cane-cutters. I show Goma a video of a vodou ceremony from New
York the week previously, and he identi ed it at once. “That looks like a ceremony for Erzulie,” he says.
Pause. “We do it diYerently.”

***

The Cuban sugar industry has been downsized, but it still exists, and wherever there are still centrales (sugar
mills), they’re important nuclei of culture. In the small central Cuban town of Primero de Enero, home of the
Violeta mill, a community project plays vodú drums and dances, and then its directors take us to the Casa de
las Flores, an extensive orchid garden. Down the road in Baraguá, members of the group La Cinta oYer their
guests black cake (a delicious rum cake, panatela in Spanish) and plays Anglo-Antillean music handed down
by cane-cutting ancestors from the English-speaking islands. It’s 90 degrees or so and there’s no fan, but
they deliver an intense, impeccable, high-energy performance with stilts, a maypole, a hobbyhorse, and
propulsive drumming.

In Colón, in Matanzas province, Eneida Villegas Zulueta takes us into her community, largely Yoruba-
descended, that lives in the very barracones (barracks) where their ancestors were enslaved at the infamous
Julián Zulueta’s Central Álava. She shows us the works of their community project Tras las Huellas de
Nuestros Ancestros (in the footsteps of our ancestors), whose members have created their own museum out
of artifacts conserved in their households since slavery days. After visiting a ring of magniOcent casa templos
(house temples), we hear not one but two bembés (sacred party for the gods) back-to-back: one with children
dancing the orishas, one with adults.

In Güines, home of the Amistad sugar mill, Luis Pedroso Sotolongo guards the Cabildo Briyumba Congo,
which boasts the largest prenda I’ve ever seen. (They have a larger one, but you have to have a limpieza, or
cleaning, before you can see it.) Even though Luis performs Yoruba divination in front of it, this is straight-
up Congo. A prenda (the Kikongo word is nganga) is the center of the palero’s practice—a large iron pot
containing all sorts of power elements, signiOcantly including human remains, but also various natural
elements, including sticks of diYerent kinds of wood.

Briyumba Congo’s prenda is made from a former sugar cauldron, making the connection explicit. There are
also other prendas in the room, and there is a wooden chair that dates from the early 20th century, when the
police would bust up rumbas and ceremonies, requiring the camou age of drums as household items; no sir,
no drums here, I’m just sitting in my chair. Luis’s chair is really a big box drum, all of its parts giving
diYerent tones as he slams out a rhythm on the sides while sitting in it.

Around the corner from Briyumba Congo, in the barrio of Leguina, is the Catholic chapel of Santa Bárbara,
which is the center of one of the biggest processions in Cuba for that saint (famously syncretized with the
orisha Changó), whose day is December 4. And there’s the community project called Patio de Tata Güines,
named for Arístides Soto, whose professional name, Tata Güines, was a Congo shoutout to his home town.
The Patio is in the solar (multiple apartments around a central patio) where Soto grew up, across the street
from the house where the great Arsenio Rodríguez lived.

For all his fame, Arsenio, who brought black consciousness to Cuban popular music beginning in the 1930s,
is still an understudied gure. Though he’s mostly known for his musical innovations, the texts of his songs
contain a world of lore and deserve a scholarly edition. Sitting in the Cabildo Briyumba Congo, I ask Luis
something I’ve always wondered: what does Arsenio’s “No hay yaya sin guayacán” – there is no yaya without
guayacán – mean?

Luis smiles, and points to a smaller prenda alongside the big one.

“This is yaya” – he points to one stick of wood sticking up out of the prenda, then to another – “and this is
guayacán.” If you don’t have both, neither will be eYective.

If you want to know about Arsenio’s lyrics, go across the street from where he grew up, and ask.

The author acknowledges the help of Caridad Diez, Orlando Vergés Martínez, Doris Céspedes, Sonia Pérez Cassola,
Eneida Villegas Zulueta, Teresita Baró, Elivania Lamothe, Queli Figueroa Quiala, Rodulfo Vaillaint, Ben Socolov,
Constance Sublette, and many others.

Ned Sublette is the author of four books including Cuba and Its Music: From the First
Drums to the Mambo, and (with Constance Sublette) The American Slave Coast: A
History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. He is a Fellow of the Committee on
Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center, and is an adjunct
at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU. His Postmambo Cuban
Music Seminars take people to Cuba. Info: postmambo@gmail.com

Ned Sublette es autor de cuatro libros que incluyen a Cuba and its Music: From the
Subscribe
First Drums to the Mambo; y (con Constance Sublette) The American Slave Coast: A to the
Newsletter
History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. Es miembro del Comité Sobre la Globalización
y el Cambio Social en el Graduate Center de CUNY, y es miembro adjunto en el
Instituto Clive Davis de Música Grabada en NYU.

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