Chapter Sample from Wildman of Rhythm: the Life and Music of Benny Moré
Chapter 2
Rumba, Son, and the Orchestras
Son was disliked by the authorities from the moment it first appeared in Santiago de Cuba, in the easternmost provinces. Rock and roll carried its hint of sexuality and raciness, but for early son it wasn’t implied, it was clearly displayed. Son dancing uses a hip thrust and twisting that leaves little doubt what it stands for. Son and other badges of Africanness were frowned on by many powerful Cuban officials, but it was the Caribbean, after all, and while the whites may have controlled the laws, in the end they had little real influence over popular culture.
If the Africanized culture of New Orleans and São Paulo seeped into society from the bottom up, culture in Cuba went both ways: from the ballroom and the opera house downward, and from the cane fields and the porches of mountain bohíos upward to popular and then to symphonic music. Spanish lyric songs were carried by the first settlers, drums and polyrhythms came with the Africans, and French Creoles fleeing Haiti brought the ballroom contredanse. Similar to what happened in Louisiana and Brazil, these elements cooked in the hot climate to give birth, in the case of Cuba, to la danza, el danzón, the cha-cha, and many less formal styles.Historically the music of Cuba casts a giant shadow that covers all of Latin America, especially Mexico and the Caribbean. The edge of the shadow falls onto Louisiana, where Cuban rhythm colored early jazz and provided what Jelly Roll Morton called the Latin tinge. Later this influence reached much farther, 2,400 kilometers north to Manhattan and the Bronx, where so many Puerto Rican immigrants had settled. When Puerto Ricans arrived on the U.S. mainland, they added their own traditions to Cuban forms, and the style of music everyone played from the 1940s on would become what is now called salsa. Where Cuban musicians met big-band jazz, their tradition fascinated bebop musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, and the result of this next intermarriage was Latin jazz.
In 1928, the year Bartolo turned nine, President General Gerardo Machado officially outlawed the playing of the most important instruments in son music, bongo and conga drums, across the entire island. A former cattle thief and hero of the war of independence from Spain, the repressive Machado hoped to elevate Cuban popular music by surgically removing its threatening African elements. Thus he also outlawed comparsa, the exciting Carnival music that originated in Santiago de Cuba. The ban specifically targeted conga and bongo drums, and any religious drums of African origin, which in the past had been used to make war.
The next year the white mayor of Santiago followed suit to ban congas and bongos, and he outlawed the conga line—the wild and chaotic Carnival dance. The mayor of Santiago was Dr. Desiderio Arnaz, and he had been trying to suppress the conga lines from the city’s Carnival season since 1925. A Machado supporter right to the last minute, he would later help haul bags of gold coins to a waiting
airplane when Machado fled the country. Dr. Arnaz was the father of Desi Jr.,
who happened to find fame in American television partly by mimicking Afro-Cuban music. Ironically, the charismatic Desi, though not a particularly talented singer, would help introduce the conga line dance to the United States: his signature song was the afro-cha “Babalú ayé,” which in the Dahomeyan language is the name for the Yoruba god of sickness. Desi brought only his good looks to the song, since he was imitating the version that Miguelito Valdés had made famous in Cuba.
Machado’s culture-control laws forbade the playing in public of African instruments, although they allowed timbales, which look something like the drums used in European music. African instruments represented the everpresent menace of African culture and, as religious, liturgical tools, were often played by secret followers of the Palo or Santería religion like Bartolo and the other Congo members. Any drum played with the hand was now a target of federal and local law.
Oddly enough, General Machado didn’t exactly hate son and even had his own favorite group, Septeto Habanero, the most popular band of the 1920s. For them alone he was willing to suspend his ban on bongos. With the advent of 78 rpm records and radio, this group did as much for the future of son as Machado’s banning of drums in public. The Septeto formed the basis for son orchestration to which the blind bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez would later add congas for the first time. During Machado’s dictatorship, upperclass Cubans stuck to their danzón and jazz in the country clubs and society concerts, but everyone else went crazy for son. Eventually, white Cuba came aroundtoo, but not until racism had worsened through the 1930s. In that atmosphere, even international stars Josephine Baker and Joe Louis were refused hotel rooms in Havana.
In the end, and in spite of the ban, son flourished throughout Machado’s dictatorship and then exploded when he left power. The music bans functioned something like blue laws: periodically enforced but not really affecting what people did in the privacy of their own homes. In fact, by forcing drumming and Palo beliefs underground for all those years, Machado strengthened the African element of son by concentrating it among stubborn followers who were even more keen on its survival. The moment they could, the believers brought their bongos and conga drums right back out into public parks, plazas, courtyards, and front yards in the black neighborhoods of every city and town across the island. By the time Arsenio Rodríguez added conga drums as an afterthought to his band in 1942 and created the orchestration and format that led the way for Benny Moré, son was the biggest sensation to hit Cuba since the danzón. It was at this time that son was mistakenly named rhumba and began influencing composers like George Gershwin.
In the 1930s in the neighboring Dominican Republic, the equally repressive dictator General Rafael Trujillo took a lesson from his friend General Machado. More successfully applying the Machado method, he sought to mold merengue by likewise downplaying its African rhythmic elements and history. Like son and jazz, the music had organically emerged as a crosspollination of Hispanic melody and rhythms of former slaves, but merengue dancing with its rolling, below-the-belt hip thrust was considered a lascivious outrage by the white Dominican upper class. For the same reasons, an early form of merengue had been fully banned in Puerto Rico as far back as 1849. Naturally, the Dominican dictator’s favorite band was renamed the Orquesta Presidente Trujillo. General Trujillo succeeded in whitewashing merengue, and repressed all other forms of indigenous Dominican music so successfully that his approved brand of merengue became the national music of that island.
When Machado attempted to change popular culture and take away son from young boys like Bartolo, it was as if Calvin Coolidge had forbidden Louis Armstrong to play anything but waltzes instead of his “funky butt” blues, or if Dwight Eisenhower had called Elvis in 1954 and warned him he could only play pure hillbilly music from then on. Son and drum language were Bartolo’s birthright, and culture laws from Havana meant little out in the country. He still took his drum and dance lessons at the Casino de los Congos the nights when he could, or watched when younger boys were taught their lessons. He had long been able to take part in the groups that played in the informal but intense music parties at the country festivals called guateques, and he was already an improviser, a rumbero who knew all the rhythms of the rumba brava: the guaguancó, the yambú, and the columbia. He used milk cans to build a bongo set and practiced the rhythms constantly with his brother Teo and their friends. Three Kings Day and the feast of San Antonio were still a time when the Casino celebrated openly for days, and Bartolo and the other novices couldn’t unlearn all the firmas they knew—the pictograph drawings in chalk used for Palo ceremonies. Dictators come and go in Cuba, but Africa in the Americas, at least in Cuba, wasn’t about to disappear.
From Wildman of Rhythm: the Life and Music of Benny Moré, University Press of Florida, 2009.
©John Radanovich
Comment
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Comment by John Radanovich on March 4, 2010 at 7:16am -
Here is a clip of Benny's hometown, Santa Isabel de las Lajas, with a glimpse inside the Casino de los Congos where Afro-Cuban dance and Santeria ritual still take place. Lots and lots of great footage has surfaced in the past few years of Benny's Banda Gigante.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQio5h6vweI&feature=related
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Comment by Nico Daswani on March 3, 2010 at 9:45pm -
never knew Conga and drums had been outlawed, wow... The threads are really eye-opening and this history is so interesting. Looking forward to reading more chapters! Do you have any videos of Son and some of the ballroom contradance that you could add here in the Videos section? Thanks for sharing, John.
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