Looking at the period from the late 19th C to mid twentieth C, Cuban music was particularly integrated into Mexican popular culture.
Emerging technologies in the early 20th century – radio, recording, film, transportation – engendered an emerging Pan-Latin culture that encompassed Latam, the Gulf of Mexico and Spanish speaking Caribbean, including significant outposts in North America.
A flow of music and artists based in transcendently African forms of music, dance, and performance were propelled by the push of racism and pull of the emerging entertainment industry, as they created compelling forms that persisted into modern North American popular music in the 1960s and 70s and have been felt globally.
Some themes related to Cuban Music in the Gulf of Mexico region in the late 19th through mid 20th centuries:
- Emerging technologies in the early 20th century – radio, recording, film, transportation
- Their impact on national cultures in the countries surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, (and how those cultures were felt internationally)
- That there was an emerging Pan-Latin culture that encompassed Latam, the Gulf of Mexico and Spanish speaking Caribbean, and NY and LA, especially focused on music and film, with flow of music and artists
- Development of specifically Pan Latin American culture and Communications
- Push of racism /Pull of emerging of entertainment industry
- Transcendence of African Art – especially music, dance, and performance
- Persistence of African rhythmic keys into 1960s, 70s modern popular music
Part 1 running time: 28:31
Part 2 running time: 24:49
Part 3 running time: 19:05
Part 4 running time: 15:46
Part 5 running time: 27:53
Lecture Transcription:
Setting the scene geographically, we’ll be talking about Cuba and Mexico in the late 19th through mid 20th centuries, and peripherally about Latin America writ larger, in which I’ll include the Spanish Caribbean and its’ North American mainland center of New York City.
Ned Sublette, the brilliant scholar and author of the tour de force “Cuba and its Music” has pointed out, while Cuba is popularly thought of as part of the Caribbean, its capital and main port of Havana is actually on Gulf of Mexico.
As for Havana’s place in the Spanish Colonial geo-polity, Sublette says “Adjacent to the gulf stream, the main current for returning to Europe, Havana was designated by Spain in 1558 as the only port permitted to engage in commerce. At that point, with Sevilla as the Royal monopoly port in Spain and Havana the Royal monopoly port in the New World, Sevilla and Havana were twins joined by the umbilicus of naval commerce.”
Sublette and others have done extensive, fascinating work on the deep connections between Havana and New Orleans, also on the Gulf of Mexico, especially as it relates to the development of Jazz, Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll, the African-American led musics that continue to have global impact.
The Distance from New Orleans to Havana is 670 mi, and the trip by sea took somewhere around 7-10 days.
When I was traveling in Merida, Yucatan years ago, someone commented to me that during the Henequen boom in the early 20th century, the rich of Merida used to send their laundry to on barges to Havana. Really?
It turns out that the Distance from Merida to Havana is only 486 miles. Looking further west to Veracruz, the key port of entry into Mexico, the distance is 928 mi.
Mexico – which still today has by far the largest population in the Spanish speaking Americas, was so big, so rich and so important to Spain that they called it New Spain.
As Sublette notes “As the mines of New Spain (that is, Mexico) began producing gold and silver, Havana’s nearby large, protected deepwater bay was of central importance. Mexico lacked a first-rate natural port; Veracruz, the best contender, located across the Caribbean from Havana, “was marred by series of Islets described by mariners as a pocket full of holes”. Havana essentially served as Mexico’s port. The close collaboration with Caribbean Mexico would be a permanent feature of Havana’s economy, with implications for the development of music.”
Neo-Africa in the Americas
Cuba was one of the first Spanish colonies to begin importing Africans in the early 1500s, and was nearly the last in the hemisphere to end the slave trade (1865) and to abolish slavery (1886). After 1808, imports of Africans to the United States was illegal (though clandestine importation did continue), but thirty years later, the trade in Cuba was thriving, and an estimated 165,000 Africans were imported from 1835-1840.
Though Africans of many different nations were imported to the Americas South and North, following Sublette’s scholarship, the two main layers were generally the Kongo/Angolans and the Yoruba of what is roughly today Nigeria and Benin.
Kongo/Angolans refers to a diverse group of Bantu-related peoples, coming from an enormous area that stretches from Cameroon down to Angola, and includes the Central African Republic and Congo (the region is somewhere near a third of the size of the United States). Ned Sublette notes that Kikongo-derived words like ngombe (cattle) and ngubá (peanut) remain in use in Cuba to this day; in the Southern United States we are familiar with the term “goober” for peanut. The presence of an ‘mb’ or ‘ng’ in a word, especially as related to Afro-Latin music, is generally associated with Kongo culture. Thus terms such as mambo, samba, cumbia, merengue, charanga, bomba, tango. Conga. Rumba.
As for the Yoruba, from the 1820s to the 1860s an estimated 275,000 were brought to Cuba. And while Sublette notes that without the Kongo/Angolans there would be no Brazil, period, so large is their contribution, the Yoruba presence there is also overwhelming. Since at least the 18th century, ships sailed between Salvador, Bahia and Lagos, Nigeria several times a year carrying clothes, fruits, shells, and other items necessary to practice the Yoruba religion. Or as Yedda Pessoa de Castro has it in “Towards a Comparative Approach of Bantuisms in Iberoamerica,” “This type of trade was destined to meet the demand of the local population as it concerned the products necessary to maintain african religious cults or used in the candomblé houses condemned by the press of that epoch as noisy cults frequented by persons of all classes (ital in cited work).” The Salvador-Lagos line was shut down by the British, colonial masters of Nigeria, after a 1903 cholera outbreak.
Here it is instructive to note the difference between Catholic South and Protestant North America for Africans. Except for New Orleans, with its famous Congo Square, African languages, drums and dances were generally outlawed in British North America. In Latin America, in contrast, the Catholic church considered Africans to be human and capable of salvation through the Catholic faith. Especially in situations like Cuba’s where Europeans were massively outnumbered by Africans, the church was content to make sure that Africans were baptized at birth and read the last rites at death, even as they preserved their African languages, drums and dances in between.
The carnaval and three kings day were central to the continuing transmission of African culture. The three day period leading up to lent on the Catholic calendar was “when slaves and free africans danced in the streets all day.” In colonial times, Africans elected kings and danced in the streets of Cartagena, Colombia and in Mexico in front of Melchior/Baltazar, the Black king from the Christian Epiphany story.
A comparsa, described by Alejo Carpentier as an “itinerant ballet”, was a group of 30 or more Afro-Cuban dancers, singers, percussionists and horn players that paraded together through the streets during the annual carnavales. The great Cuban musicologist Fernando Ortiz wrote of the carnaval comparsas “in monstrous costumes that marched double file down the street to a rhythm that their leader beat on a frying pan. Periodically, the leader would accelerate the rhythm” and the members of the comparsa would begin “leaping, dancing, climbing up the window grills,” and trying to startle the women who watched the street from inside. Some groups carried a large effigy of a scorpion or a snake that they ritually “killed” at intervals.” The immolation of the snake and the “snake dance” is related to the Dahomeyan snake cult (from modern day Benin).
By the late 19th C, Cuba’s heavily African-influenced creole culture – with some important fertilization from Haiti, then known as Saint Domingue – had created the first buds of what would become the worldwide phenomena of Afro-Latin music – among them the danzon, the rumba complex, son and guaracha, and bolero.
Let’s look a little more deeply into Cuban music, starting with the Danzon.
The Danzon is an Africanized dance music based on European chamber music. It takes its name from the French Contredanse. It doesn’t sound like it today, but many contemporary commentarists railed against its licentiousness and African barbarism, and it was and is still danced by Afro-Cubans, as well as in a milieu of whiter men of means, dancing with mulatas understood to be of lower social classes. The Danzon took off in Cuba starting in the 1880s, where its heyday lasted into the 1920s.
Here is a lovely Danzon recorded by one it’s great Modern exponents, Israel Cachao Lopez. Note the ending where the syncopation stands out – this was the particularly African part, called the montuno, where dancers would really dig in, and is a key antecedent of later forms like son montuno and mambo, which make up big parts of what we know as Salsa music.
Meanwhile another stew was cooking especially in the Eastern part of Cuba. This blended key ingredients such as:
- the Congolese/Angolan percussion-based Rumba complex – guaguanco, yambú, and Columbia
- Yoruba talking drum liturgies
- Elements of guitar-led Canary Islander music and the Spanish language
to create the Cuban Son and its antecedent form, Changui.
Once the Son arrived to Havana by the beginning of the 20th century, it combined with Spanish guitar-led theater revue music and would eventually sound like this:
Rumba
In the 1930s, my Russian-born great-grandfather would come home every day after work and lower the shades while sitting alone in the front room. Then he would put on tefilin, the ritual phylacteries of the orthodox Israelite, and recite the evening prayers. After kissing the boxes with their sacred inscriptions inside and returning them to their shelf, he would bend over to pick up the box that contained his dancing shoes…because Grampa Louie loved to Rhumba.
He wasn’t alone. Ever since the Don Azpiazu’s Cuban Orchestra debuted Moises Simón’s “El Manicero” (The Peanut Vendor) in New York in 1930 (and shortly thereafter in Paris), the world was consumed with “rhumba” fever. For the record, “rhumba” was the US recording industry’s name for any and all cuban dance rhythms, including the son, the rumba, the guaracha and even the bolero.
A central figure here is Ernesto Lecuona, a child prodigy and a master pianist/composer who composed over 600 works, including popular standards like “Malagueña” and “Andalucia”. He is considered one of the most important Latin musical figures of the early 20th century. At a time when no self-respecting elite musician would be caught dead playing a Cuban song, let along an Afro-Cuban song, Lecuona went directly to Afro Cuban folklore for his material. His famous 1912 composition “La Comparsa” presented a what would later be called a Conga, Tango-Conga or Afro for piano, something no one seems to have previously done.
Lecuona met Rita Montaner, a beautiful singer with a three octave range at the Conservatory in Guanabacoa, near Havana. By the late 1920s, Montaner had toured Paris and was a huge star known simply as “Rita de Cuba.” She played various North American cities as part of the Shubert follies, appearing in a prestigious concert at the Plaza hotel, and singing at the Apollo Theater with up and coming bandleader Xavier Cugat. By 1933 she was in Mexico as that country’s radio, film and recording industries were just getting started.
In 1928 it was Rita who first recorded El Manicero the song that would conquer the world by 1933.
The recent advent and popularization of the radio helped spread the “rhumba” far and near, as did cheaper record players playing 78rpm records. If horse/used car salesmen like Grampa Louie loved the Rhumba, so did the avant garde: surrealist movement intellectuals in Paris were early supporters of what is in essence Afro-Cuban Jazz. According to Professor Timothy Brennan, Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, had an extensive collection of “rhumba” records, and surrealist figures Robert Desnos and Nino Frank loved Latin American art and music.
By 1940, over 90 percent of American homes owned at least one radio. Before the television, people used to pull up the rug after dinner and dance. So great was the North American passion for dancing that by 1946 Arthur and Kathryn Murray had over 200 studios in major cities throughout the United States, and a business that grossed $2 million in 1941 was grossing over $12 million by 1946. According to Ralph Giordano’s “Social Dancing in America: A History and Reference”, in 1939, a Los Angeles Jitterbug contest attracted over 100,000. “Dancing was so popular that over 2,000 war production plants nationwide had facilities for dancing during lunch or breaks.”
With respect to Cuban music, tourism to Cuba was also an important factor: the first international airline service ever offered from the United States (1920) was Aeromarine Airways “flying boat” flights to Cuba. In 1927, Panamerican Airlines began regular flights to Havana. Throughout the period, Havana continued to be an important port for passenger ship travelers: before transatlantic airplane travel (1939), boats passed through Havana on the way to and from New York City and other key ports. While Cuban music was impacting popular music in the US, the impact of US culture on Cuba was mixed at best. Langston Hughes, who visited Cuba at this time, stated that tourism to the island from the US, especially by southerners (many came with the army, others worked for US corporations in Cuba) resulted in many of the hotels that catered to US tourists suddenly not allowing Cuban mulattos to enter. The same was true for many nightclubs. According to documents relating to the involvement of the North American Mafia in Cuba, bordellos with black and mulata prostitutes were established in Havana to look exactly like antebellum southern plantations.
Enter Cugie
Before Tito Puente (or Pérez Prado) was the Mambo King, Xavier Cugat was King of the Rhumba. Xavier Cugat was born in Catalonia, Spain in 1900, and in 1905 his parents immigrated to Cuba. In 1915 his family immigrated to the United States. This was the decade of the Tango craze in the US and Europe. Cugat, trained on the violin, founded his first band, The Gigolos, in 1921. The early Tango King moved to Los Angeles in 1927, where he worked as a caricaturist and cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times. Hollywood was where Cugat would get his big break, and he was soon leading the Tango band at the Ambassador Hotel’s Coconut Grove Club, where Charlie Chaplin and other stars would stop by to dance. As the first Latin dance orchestra in Hollywood, Cugat was ready when the Talkies began. When Rita Montaner toured North America she sang with Cugat.
By 1932 he is already in Manhattan, fronting his own Xavier Cugat orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. By the mid-1930s Cugat’s watered-down Cuban and Latin music with English lyrics made him one of the biggest bandleaders in the country. The big band swing era got underway on December 1, 1934 on the weekly NBC radio program “Let’s Dance,” broadcast live from studio 8H in radio city. The bands included were Benny Goodman… and Xavier Cugat. By 1936 he was a regular in Hollywood movies, which consistently included Cuban and Latin musical numbers throughout the period.
Latin music was hot in New York in the 1930s, and Cugat sold millions of recordings for Columbia records. Latin dance clubs had their own listing in The New Yorker magazine’s “Goings On About Town” section. The music that Cugat and other society bandleaders recorded is generally considered to have been “crossover dreck”, but was massively popular in its time. One modern reviewer described Cugat’s recording of the song “Babalú” this way: “Xavier Cugat takes a hymn to Chango and turns it into a Looney Tunes soundtrack. You can almost see the cartoon cannibals dancing around the cauldron of boiling missionaries during his silly nonsensical “rap.”” High society clubs that presented Cugat-type fare, such as the Waldorf Astoria, Taft Hotel or Stork Club in Manhattan were, as a rule, segregated, and that included musicians – only white musicians were allowed to perform.
The Conga King
“One, two, three, kick.” In 1933 Desi Arnaz Jr. moved from Santiago de Cuba, in Cuba’s Oriente province, to Miami, Florida.
According to Wikipedia: “Desi Arnaz was born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III in Santiago de Cuba to Desiderio Alberto Arnaz (1894-1973) and Dolores de Acha (1896-1988). His father was Santiago’s youngest mayor and then served in the Cuban House of Representatives. His mother, Dolores Acha y de Socias, was one of the most beautiful and prominent women in Latin America, and her father, Alberto, was one of the three original founders of the Bacardi Rum Company. The family owned three ranches, a palatial home and a vacation mansion on a private island in Santiago Bay, Cuba. The 1933 revolution, led by Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the American-backed President Gerardo Machado, landed his father – one of Machado’s inner circle – in jail for six months, and stripped his family of its wealth and power… Arnaz and his parents then fled to Miami, Florida.”
Hundreds of hotels and resorts were built in the 1930s in Miami Beach, giving the city its still distinct Art Deco district. This area, along with New York and Chicago, became a center for Latin music nightlife. According to Josephine Powell, Desi Arnaz Jr. began playing “foxtrots with a rumba beat” in Miami, and at some point caught the eye of Xavier Cugat. Cugat, who was known never to miss a novelty or marketing opportunity, saw a doozy in the handsome, light-skinned, Conga-beating Arnaz.
He was proved right. Arnaz was a huge hit, becoming “Mr. Conga” while fronting Cugat’s orchestra. The “Conga” rhythm is a watered-down version of a Cuban carnaval rhythm played by the comparsa and it was a national smash. White-led Big Bands got in on the actions, and Black Bands did too: in 1938 Cab Calloway recorded “The Congo-Conga”, and in 1940 “Goin’ Conga”.
Arnaz became a broadway star, acting alongside Puerto Rican dancer and singer Diosa Costello in the musical “Too Many Girls”. “Too Many Girls”, in which Desi Arnaz appeared as a conga-playing Argentine student, was made into a movie in 1940. It was the first of many for Arnaz, who enjoyed a brief boom of “Latin” musicals in Hollywood. RKO Pictures’ offerings were particularly influential, notably Too Many Girls (1940),
Cugat had so many engagements that he made two Xavier Cugat orchestras, with Arnaz leading one while Cugat led the other. There was Arnaz, conga drum strapped to his shoulder, leading the socialites of Miami and New York (and the world over) snaking through the concert halls, hands on shoulders, “One, two, three, kick”, doing the Conga line.
Repression of Everything Afro-Cuban
In the first three decades of the 20th century and beginning immediately after the war of independence from Spain, some 700,000 Spanish and Canary Islanders immigrated to Cuba. Dr. Cristobal Diaz Ayala provides an answer to this seeming contradiction: “It’s the only case in the world where something like that happened, that after the end of a war, where normally the group that loses the war is kicked out of the country, in this case the Spaniards began arriving to Cuba the following year in greater numbers than were leaving. In the first 30 years of the Republic Spanish immigration to Cuba was greater than in the whole previous century. Why? To whiten Cuba.” Many of these immigrants were the first to leave when the “blacks and reds” took over during the Cuban revolution of 1959, but others did not wait so long. Like Xavier Cugat’s family, for instance.
According to Professor John Chasteen, after Independence the cultural models of Europe and the United States were paramount in the Cuban elite mind. Chasteen notes that “U.S. occupation and subsequent U.S. tutelage constantly reminded the Havana elite of their need to banish “savagery” and “backwardness”, and demonstrate “progress” and “civilization”. It simply would not do, any longer, to have Kokoríkamos climbing window grills and comparsas of “Africans” symbolically immolating giant snakes in the streets.”
Neo-African practices were thus in the crosshairs, especially Afro-Cuban religious practice. Ned Sublette has made the startling point that “Santería”, the syncretization of Yoruba religion with Catholicism, or rather the disguising of Yoruba religion as Catholicism, occurred after the end of slavery.
As Cristobal Diaz Ayala told it to Sublette: “Something curious happens: that in the colonial period, Ned, the black people had more freedom to play their drums than they had after Cuba was a republic.” Neo-African music was suspect. According to Larry Crook: “For the white upper class, the rumba was little more than a barbarian expression of an inferior and primitive culture and was intimately tied to such things as drinking, rowdy and licentious behavior, and crime. The negative associations were taken to such a point that a study of criminology in Cuba, first written in 1906, included a chapter on the rumba.”
The reaction was predictable. So it was that the magnificent comparsas that danced their Neo-African choreographies in lavish costumes throughout Havana were banned. The ban lasted from 1913 to 1937. Yoruba dances were banned starting in 1920. Jordi Pujol notes that a notice in the Diario de la Habana of September 5, 1921 stated that “the Chief of Police reminds all that you must comply with the ordinance of April 5, 1919, which prohibits the playing of drums and other instruments of African origin, and the movements and phrases that accompany them.” In 1925 the mayor of Santiago de Cuba banned the “conga dance” and bongo and conga playing in the upcoming carnavales. The mayor’s name was Dr. Desiderio Arnaz.
…his son was Desi Arnaz Jr.
While the real rumba was outlawed and its practitioners hauled off to jail for playing the bongo, Cugat and Arnaz made millions playing “rhumbas” at society clubs in New York City, Hollywood, and Miami Beach.
In Ishmael Reed’s classic novel Mumbo Jumbo, an infectious African derived dance/epidemic called Jes Grew emerges from New Orleans that, rather than causing sickness, causes those it infects to have uncontrollable spells of dancing and joy.
Remember the Cuban carnaval comparsas and the Neo-Africans dancing the “snake dance” in the streets of Colonial Cuba?
A decade after Africans dancing in the streets was banned in Cuba, conga-crazy North Americans, Europeans and people all over the globe were doing an homage to the Dahomeyan snake cult.
Bruca Maniguá
| Yo son Carabalí, Negro de nación. Sin la libertad, No puedo vivir. Mundele acabá, Con mi corazón. Tanto maltratá, Cuerpo ta fuiri. Yenyere bruca maniguá Ah Eh! | I am Carabalí, Negro born in Africa. Without liberty, I can’t live. The white man has finished My heart. So much abuse, He’s killed my body. The bush doctor is casting a spell (on the white man) |
– Bruca Maniguá by Arsenio Rodriguez (sung by Miguelito Valdés with La Orquesta Casino de la Playa, 1937)
Arsenio Rodriguez was born in 1911 to a family of fifteen in the rural interior of Matanzas province. Arsenio’s family were descended of Kongos, and his grandfather taught him the Palo Monte religion. According to the most popular story, a young Arsenio – it’s not clear at exactly what age, seven, eight, or twelve – poked a mule in the rear with a stick, and received a violent kick to the head. The boy lost his left eye immediately, and the use of his right as well. Arsenio seems to have dedicated himself to music after that point, to the benefit of dancers the world over: known later as El Ciego Maravilloso (The Blind Marvel), Arsenio would go on to be called “the father of the Son Montuno” and indeed, “the father of Salsa Music.”
Miguelito Valdés was born to a Spanish father and Mexican (Yucatec Indian) mother and raised in the tough neighborhood of Cayo Hueso in Havana. Cayo Hueso, near the Havana docks, is one of the neighborhoods known as a Cuna de Rumberos – cradle of rumberos – for its proximity to the wharves and its population of dockworkers who banged out rumbas on wooden shipping crates. The Valdes family appear to have been santeros, practicioners of the Yoruba-based Afro-Cuban religion. Miguelito was a handsome “mulato claro” or light mulatto – as he grew, his color would open doors to him that remained shut for many of his friends, something that seemed to cause him much anger in his life.
Miguelito left school at 11 to work as an automobile mechanic. In classic poor hustler style, he became an amateur boxer, winning the amateur welterweight belt in 1929. He was known as the “singing boxer” because he sang his answers when interviewed on the radio. He sang with a number of Son groups, and then in 1937 he and six other members of the Orquesta Los Hermanos Castro left to form an orquesta as a cooperative in which all members would have a stake. The band, which would become the most influential in Latin America in the late 1930s, was called Orquesta Casino de la Playa.
Miguelito and Arsenio had been friends since at least the early ‘30s. In 1937 Miguelito Valdés took a number of Arsenio’s compositions to Casino de la Playa, who recorded “Bruca Manigua” at session for RCA Victor. The RCA sessions, which included numbers like “Dolor cobarde” and “Cachita” proved such a massive success that Diaz Ayala says they “changed the history of Popular Music in the Caribbean.”
Sublette tells the story of the song’s recording in his masterwork “Cuba and its Music.” Describing a marathon recording session by RCA records between June 15 and 17, 1937, Sublette says:
“RCA producer Daniel Des Foldes and Engineer Fred A. Lynch recorded until they ran out of blank wax masters, for a total of 141 recordings, mostly in single takes, by 24 different groups.”
…“On the last day of the session, the penultimate group to record was Casino de la Playa, and no doubt the dwindling number of wax masters was a factor in limiting them to six numbers.
Sublette concludes by adding that those six numbers are the beginning of the modern tradition of Cuban dance music.
Casino de la Playa had an hour long show on radio CMQ Havana, a 50,000 watt radio station that was audible around the Caribbean and Southern United States at night, broadcasting Miguelito’s voice all over the region.
With respect to “Bruca Manigua”, within the same year of the song’s recording by Casino de la Playa it was recorded again by Xavier Cugat in the United States; Cugat’s all-white orchestra played the song – about an African’s lament and a curse on the white man – to all-white audiences at the Waldorf Astoria. But then, as Sublette astutely points out, this was the age of Surrealism.
“Bruca Manigua” has a relaxed tempo, built on a rhythm that Arsenio at the time called “canto congo” (or Congo song) and which on Casino de la Playa’s record, with an arrangement by Sacasas, was called an “Afro-Son.” On other records an afro might be labeled a “Rumba Lament”, “Afro Lament” or just “Afro.”
Casino de la Playa embarked on their first tour of the Caribbean in 1937, and by 1938 “Cachita”, “Dolor Cobarde”, “Bruca Manigua” and new hits like Miguelito’s composition “Rumba Rumbero” were getting daily play on the radio, and were in constant rotation at youthful social gatherings throughout the region. The Orquesta recorded nearly 200 78rpm sides for RCA Victor between 1937 and 1940, among them yet more massive hits like “Babalú” and composer Chano Pozo’s “Blen Blen Blen”.
Here is rumba rumbero – hear the bongo fills by Ramon Castro, they were positively transgressive in this era, certainly to hear on the radio
Miguelito’s 1939 Casino de la Playa recording of the Margarita Lecuona composition “Babalú (Ayé), would be forever associated with Miguelito Valdés throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, where he was soon – and is still – known as “Mr. Babalú.”
Yucatan, Veracruz and Cuba, movements of Rebel Mayans, Danzon, the Bolero and Guayaberas
Now that we’ve set the stage in Cuba, let’s go back to Mexico.
Mexico’s massive Yucatán Peninsula separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean.
Containing multiple centers of Ancient Mayan civilization, by the early 19th century most of Yucatan was a backwater to the dynamic center of New Spain – renamed Mexico upon independence in 1822 – centered in Mexico City.
Plantation agriculture took hold, especially of the henequen plant, native to the Yucatán, which was used to make rope for sailing, twine, and sacks for world trade. Out of the Yucatan’s haciendas came 90% of the sacks and rope consumed internationally. Both were essential to the Second Industrial Revolution and the Great Powers’ Naval arms races as the world prepared for World War I.
An exclusive group of about twenty families, known as the divine caste, controlled the henequen industry, which transformed Yucatán into Mexico’s wealthiest and most industrialized state in the early 20th century. During Yucatan’s Gilded Age, which lasted roughly between 1870 and 1920, Yucatecan henequen accounted for nearly twenty percent of Mexico’s total exports.
The Golden Caste and other wealthy landowners built large mansions in Mérida, the state capital, and the city boasted more millionaires per capita than any other city in the world. This was the context in which wealthy Mexicans had barges of clothing laundered in nearby Cuba.
In 1847, Yucatan exploded in one of the longest-running insurgencies of the nineteenth century, called The Caste War of Yucatán. Lasting until 1901, the Caste War was a revolt of native Maya people of the Yucatán Peninsula against the Hispanic populations. The first decade of the war saw the sale of Maya captives as slaves to Cuba to work in the Sugar Mills and as personal servants to wealthy Hispanic Yucatecos fleeing the Caste War.
Indeed, the forced passage of Native peoples in the Americas and Caribbean – especially those on the losing end of insurgencies against Colonial Powers – took place throughout the colonial period, and is an understudied part of our region’s history.
According to Jason M. Yaremko’s “Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515-1900”
“The Mesoamerican presence in late colonial Cuba contributed its own diversity, as indígenas from central and south Mexico, transported as forzados or forced labor, arrived in Havana destined for hard labor in the fortifications of the colony….
In their passages to Cuba, the Mayas of Yucatan traveled as slaves and then indentured laborers; but Mayas also came of their own volition…
Maya longevity, however, appears to have prevailed: Maya migration predominated in continuity and duration; Mayas represented the most enduring Mesoamerican presence in Cuba”
Recall that Miguelito Valdes, one of the key protagonists in this story’s mother was Yucatec.
Due to the close geographical proximity and shared language, there was also a constant flow of Cubans to Yucatan, with emigrants going to Mérida as well as the port of Campeche. This was especially marked during the Cuban “ten years war” of 1868-78 that was a prelude to independence against Spanish authorities.
I’ve been to Merida, it’s wonderful, and you can buy particularly lovely guayaberas there. Guayaberas are traditional cotton shirts with four front pockets and two vertical stripes of pleating and embroidery. They are found throughout Spanish Colonial possessions, including in the Phillippines. Historical evidence suggests that the garment emerged in Cuba, but it has been prominently made in Merida since at least the late 19th or early 20th centuries
Another critical movement of peoples central to this story was the entry of Africans to both the Yucatán peninsula and the Port of Veracruz, which was licensed in the trafficking of Africans. As early as the end of the 16th C the African population was so large that travel to Mexico city was often slowed or stopped entirely by bands of marauding maroons. This is where the Mexican Son Jarocho, which is likely of an earlier colonial era genesis, comes from. The most famous Son Jarocho is “La Bamba”, which is African in form and in name, as words with “MB” and “NG” are generally seen as Congolese or Angolan cognates.
The port of Campeche, located 100 miles or so down the coast from Merida, was also licensed to traffic in Africans. There is still an Afro-Mexican presence, including distinct communities, along the coast down to Oaxaca today. These would be the regions that were predisposed to ingest African-heavy Cuban musics – the Bolero, Guaracha and Danzon, and make them their own.
When I was in Merida I heard a beautiful song played on Marimba – a Cuban Danzon, in form – dedicated to the town of Champoton, which is about an hour south of Campeche.
Cuban musics enter Veracruz – and Latin America
Cuban musics were certainly present in the port of Veracruz since colonial times. Cuban Teatro Bufo, a popular theater revue and variety show that included comedy and song are documented in Veracruz as early as the late 1860s. Not only did Teatro Bufo present early forms of the guitar-led guaracha, but as an entertainment form it presaged Mexican films that generally included complete musical numbers with a band, even if they had nothing to do with the plot of the movie. As Sublette points out, it’s thanks to this tradition that some of the fantastic recording artists of the 30s and 40s are able to seen visually at all.
Ned Sublette notes that “the Bolero had entered Mexico via the Yucatán at the end of the 19th century, almost as soon as it appeared in Cuba, and became part of the musical language there at once.”
Indeed the queen of the Mexican Bolero, Tona la Negra – whose nickname speaks for itself – was from Veracruz. Her fame was stratospheric in Latin America, where her only competition was first Rita Montaner, and later another Cuban, Olga Guillot or “Olga de Cuba”
Although downtempo, the Bolero always preserves African percussion key of the 2/3 clave and uses Cuban percussion instruments, including maracas, bongoses and often the tumbadora.
In March 1928, a Cuban Son group – Son Cuba de Marianao – landed in Veracruz for a tour, starting a decades long love affair with the Son that has continued to this day in Mexico. The excellent Mexican Son, Guaracha and Mambo musicians and groups that integrated Cuban musicians and backed Cuban singers in the vibrant 1940s and 50s Cabaret scene generally all had their origins in Veracruz.
Interestingly, similar seeds were being sown at the same time throughout Latin America. Puerto Rico had so many connections to the Cuban Son that some musical nationalists argue that its development was essentially conjoined. The Dominican Republic, though known popularly for the merengue, had a strong Son scene that only started to fade in the late 1970s.
Colombia got an early introduction to the Son thanks to Cuban sugar mill workers who, per an article on the local Sexteto Tabalá “came not only their skill in the field, but their mastery of the son, a style of music originally played with the Spanish vocals and guitar matched by African rhythms.”
Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru were enthralled with the Cuban Son and all developed vibrant and fascinating Mambo and salsa scenes in the 50s-70s. Colombia, which would go on to boast the Salsa Capital of the world in Cali (Salsa being the modern expression of the Son, Guaracha and Mambo), Venezuela. When Casino de la Playa exploded on the scene in 1937, they played for Emisora Fuentes in Cartagena, and were mobbed in Barranquilla, both on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. They played huge shows in Caracas as well, whose own mass media came to rival Mexico’s from the ‘50s through the Petro boom of the 1980s
As noted earlier, the Danzon took off in Cuba from the 1880s, where its’ heyday lasted into the 1920s. It was established in Veracruz in the decade following the turn of the century, and from there went on to conquer Mexico City, where the famous Salon Mexico would open in 1920 as the cathedral of Danzon. Key figures in this culture included Cuban timbaleros such as Acerina (Consejo Valiente Robert), whose Danzonera orchestra played the Salon Mexico for 30 years, long after the Danzon had faded in Havana.
The Salon Mexico was the leading dance venue in the capital city, and as one historian has it:
“It was a place to dance and, it was said, smelled of sweat. There was one entrance, but three doors off of it, where patrons sorted themselves by what kind of music and dances they wanted, waltz, foxtrot, pasodoble, tango and danzón. It was a rare venue where rich, middle class, and poor all attended.”
In 1932 Aaron Copland, the “Dean of American Composers” traveled to Mexico City with his friend the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. Soon after, he composed the piece “Salón México.”
As he noted in his autobiography:
I remember reading about it for the first time in a tourist guide book: “Harlem-type nightclub for the people, grand Cuban orchestra. Three halls: one for people dressed in your way, one for people dressed in overalls but shod, and one for the barefoot.” When I got there, I also found a sign on the wall which said: “Please don’t throw lighted cigarette butts on the floor so the ladies don’t burn their feet.”
…In some inexplicable way, while milling about in those crowded halls, one really felt a live contact with the Mexican people — the atomic sense one sometimes gets in far-off places, of suddenly knowing the essence of a people — their humanity, their separate shyness, their dignity and unique charm.
Acerina and his Danzonera played Thursday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Entrance was One peso for men, 10 centavos for women. The hall had murals, now lost, by Diego Rivera, Salvador Novo, Dolores Olmedo, and others. It finally closed in 1960.
The Mexican Radio and Film industries exploded on the scene in the early 1930s. A key figure was Emilio Azcarraga Vidaurreta, a Ford car dealer and RCA Victor phonograph and record seller. As Sublette has it “In 1930 with support from RCA he started radio station XEW in Mexico City. Heard across long distances at night on a clear channel frequency it was the best equipped station in Mexico.”
Similar processes were in motion across Latin America with the diffusion of more affordable radio, phonograph equipment and 78rpm records. In Cartagena Colombia, for instance, Antonio Fuentes started both the radio station Emisora Fuentes and record label Discos Fuentes, still in existence, to record local Porros, Cumbias, Guarachas and Boleros.
With the coming of sound films into Mexico in the early 1930s, Azcarraga bought theaters and began investing in production. His radio and film empire turned into a Mexican star making machinery, helping Mexican radio and movies create a Mexican national culture that was simultaneously exported throughout Latin America into a Pan Latin culture. Soon Mexican – and Cuban – singers and movie stars were household names throughout Latin America.
By the 1940s Mexico City was one of the intellectual capitals of the Spanish-speaking world, and its films had won prestigious international awards. In 1936, Alla en el Rancho grande became Mexico’s first international hit, winning the prize for best photography at the Venice film festival.
Cubans in in Mexico and Abroad in the 40s and 50s
Cubans like Lecuona and Montaner who had toured Mexico in the ‘30s brought back word to their fellow artists about the Aztec capital’s frothy nightlife, and powerful radio and film industries. In addition, Mexican artists of regional projection like Tito Guizar and Jorge Negrete toured Cuba in the ‘30s and ‘40s to adoring fans who knew them from the Rancheras they performed on film and radio, and recorded on 78 rpm records. Indeed, Miguelito Valdes says that the touring Mexican tenor and early Hollywood film star Jose Mojica inspired him to begin singing.
The upshot is that a whole generation of excellent Cuban musicians moved to Mexico during the Epoca de Oro (Golden Age) of the Danzon and Son, which coincided with that of the Radio, Recording and Film industries in Mexico in the 1940s and ‘50s. Most of them were Afro-Cubans, and some were destined to impact regional and even global popular culture. On any given evening they performed at Nightclubs and Cabarets like Rio Rosa, El Patio and Waikiki, personalities like Artist Diego Rivera, Composer Agustín Lara, Mexican and Hollywood movie stars and Internationally known athletes would be in attendance.
I’ll also note that there was an entire itinerant entertainment circuit that Latin American musicians traveled in the 40s and 50s, of which Mexico was just one particularly gilded stop. The biggest included Havana of course, with its Mafia-gambling fueled nightlife, San Juan Puerto Rico, New York City (and to some extent, Los Angeles), Panama City and the port of Colon, Caracas Venezuela and Lima Peru. With respect to Panama, even well into the ‘70s, the dominant Salsa label Fania records sent young artists to Panama to try their luck, knowing if they were a hit there, they would be loved in barrios across Latin America. Musicians also played Colombia’s Coast cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla, as well as Buenos Aires Argentina and Montevideo Uruguay.
Various pushes and pulls brought Cuban musicians to the Latin American countries and the US from the ‘30s through the ‘60s. The endless nightlife of New York City, Mexico City, Panama City and Colón (thanks to large populations of US servicemen and Canal employees) and Caracas offered excellent, well-paid opportunities for Cuban musicians. When composer and singer Marcelino Guerra came to NY in 1943, he noted he was paid $10 for his first dance, while he had recently been paid $1.25 for his last dance in Havana for six hours work. This at a time when the average working man made $25 a week.
This was especially true in NY, which included the opportunity (for light skinned musicians) to play lucrative gigs for White society in addition to the growing Latin population. So Anselmo Sacasas and Miguelito Valdes, the star pianist/arranger and singer respectively of Orquesta Casino de la Playa, both left for NY in the early ‘40s. We will look at Valdes’ trajectory a bit later – Sacasas had a successful career playing the sort of society clubs Walter Winchell could be found at, later retiring to Puerto Rico.
Another impetus to sojourn in or move to Latin American cities involved the sheer numbers of excellent musicians in Havana. Competition was fierce, the talent was just too deep, and there were only so many choice gigs. Many Cuban musicians who made it outside of Cuba had been ignored on the island.
Racism also pushed Cuban musicians – Havana’s color line was as bad as in any US state, exacerbated by large numbers of US tourists and Yankee casino managers who insisted on anti-black racism. Many musicians commented on racism as a factor in their decision to immigrate, including Machito bandleader Mario Bauza, who was relieved to be able to live in a Harlem where blackness was normal, and Miguelito Valdes, who was sickened that some of his best friends and creative partners – like the genius Arsenio Rodriguez, and Casino’s bongocero Ramon Castro – were not able to appear on stage with him because of their color. This was even more of a pull for Mexico, where race was a much more nuanced experience.
The first musician in the AfroCuban canon who moved to Mexico wasn’t even Cuban – in 1932, prominent Puerto Rican composer and musician Rafael Hernández (“Lamento Borincano”) who had lived in El Barrio in New York for many years moved to Mexico, where he directed an orchestra and enrolled in Mexico’s National Music Conservatory. Hernández acted in and arranged scores for Mexican film, leaving in 1947 for his native Puerto Rico.
Zoot Suited Singer Kiko Mendive “El Muneco de Chocolate” (The Chocolate Doll) came to Mexico in 1941 with a traveling Cuban revue and stayed when it dissolved. He would have Success on radio and in movies, and told all that would listen back in Havana of the opportunities to be had. Interestingly, Mendive later moved to Venezuela in the 1960s, where he had a successful career as a TV comedian. A slew of influential singing personalities followed him, including Casino de la Playa’s excellent Guarachero Orlando “Cascarita” Guerra, Francisco Fellove, Vincentico Valdes and Yeyo Estrada. Rumbero and composer Silvestre Mendez arrived in México in 1946 with his three Tumbadoras (an innovation at the time), staying in a hotel in close proximity to the big 3 radio stations XEW, XEQ and XEB.
Equally influential musicians (especially percussionists and horn players) who moved to Mexico during this time included Ramón “Manos de Seda” “El Electrico del Bongo” Castro (So good he had two nicknames – “Slik hands” and “The Electric Bongo player”, Congueros Modesto Durán and Chocolate Diaz Mena, and the great trumpet player Oscar “Florecita” Velasco. Google any of these names and you’re sure to find a brilliant music project they collaborated on.
In addition to the Danzon leader Acerina, important bandleaders also moved to Mexico including Humberto Cané, bass player who later played with the internationally reknowned Trio Los Panchos, Mariano Mercerón and Damaso Pérez Prado. Merceron, from Cuba’s musical hotbed Oriente province, was one of the hottest Jazzband leaders in Cuba in the very early ‘40s. “Subway” Harry Sepulveda, whose deep knowledge of AfroCuban music is unrivaled, told me that when Machito’s AfroCubans opened at the La Conga room in Manhattan in 1940, Merceron’s tunes made up almost their whole book.
Damaso Perez Prado was a little known composer in Cuba who played piano for Casino de la Playa after Miguelito, Sacasas and Ramon Castro left. His compositions were little appreciated, and when he came to New York in 1946, local musicians had to join together to buy him a warm jacket. He sold stacks of arrangements ($2 apiece) to a trio we’ll meet again later – Miguelito Valdés, Desi Arnaz y and Xavier Cugat.
Once in Mexico, the genius VP of RCA Víctor in México Mariano Rivera Conde did two things: recorded Perez Prado’s original compositions, and put him together with an up and coming singer named Bartolome “Beny” Moré. Beny another classic example of an unknown in his native Cuba who just could not break through in the Havana of the early ‘40s, so while on tour in Mexico City in 1945 with Conjunto Matamoros, decided to stay and try his luck.
Beny, who was a huge hit at the Carnavales in Panama City in 1948 and 49, erupted with a volcanic slew of hits he recorded one after another with a string of Mexican and Cuban-led Orchestras. These have all become absolute classics of the AfroCuban canon, including “La Culebra”, “Bonito Y Sabroso”, “Donde Estabas Tú” and Silvestre Mendez’s composition “Yiri Yiri Bon” (All with Mexican Bandleader Rafael De Paz’s Orquesta), and then “Pachito E’Che” and “Babarabatiri” with Pérez Prado’s Orquesta.
The Orquesta Perez Prado put together included a Cuban percussion section with Modesto Durán on tumbador and Ramoncito Castro on bongóses, and in 1950 recorded “Mambo Nº 5” and “Qué rico el mambo” for RCA Victor, which turned popular music on its ear. The strident, dissonant arrangements that were unwelcome in Cuba turned out to be globe conquering. As Sublette has it “The Perez Prado of the late 1940s became a major phenomenon in international pop music with a bold pyromaniacal sound that set a generation of dancers on fire and had a global reach.” His fame – and nickname “El Rey del Mambo”, still controversial to this day in Cuban music circles – had everything to do with Mexican film industry’s Star making machine as well, as he or his music appeared in 18 movies in 1950.
In a sign of the mounting Mambo Fever in the US – and the developing strength of the Latin population in California – Perez Prado played Los Angeles in 1951, continuing up north to play Sweet’s Ballroom in Oakland.
Many more Cuban musicians and composers moved to Mexico, those mentioned previously are just the cream of the crop. But not only musicians moved – lots of dancers accompanied them in Cuban revues, and just as Cuban composers brought their cutting edge compositions and arrangements, dancers brought choreographies and fashion and hair designs. Rumbero Silvestre Mendez taught famed Mexican American Exotic dancer Tongolele how to dance the authentic barrio Rumba. Musicians also brought Cuban made instruments – tumbadoras, bongoses and maracas which were always hard to come by as local artisans did not know how to make them. This was the era before screws kept drum heads taut, so drummers had to heat their drum heads with a small sterno-type fire before playing.
Cuban Beisbol players and boxers were also common in this milieu. The Mexican League competed with Major League Baseball for Cuba’s excellent talent until the mid 1940s, when the MLB ruled that anyone that played professionally in Mexico could not play in the Majors. Some of these Athletes became doormen at the swanky Mexico City clubs. Luis Barranco, a dancer with Conjunto Casino who toured Mexico said: “we went to stay we went to eat in a house where are there were ball players… the best food and she was from Veracruz, but married to a Cuban ball player, but all of us ate there. Ramoncito (Castro) was there, Miguelito Valdés and a lot of famous Mexican artists as well.
The Mexican entertainment industry was so robust that it supported other standout Latin American artists to settle in the Capital as well. Panama’s Gay Crooners were one of a number of Panamanian acts to call Mexico home, along with Colombian Porro and Cumbia singer Luis Carlos Meyer, who recorded the first Cumbia outside of Colombia. Meyer was the first in a string of Cumbiamberos – some of them real heavyweights, like the Cubans – who moved to Mexico from the ‘50s through the Sonidero boom of the 70s, including Lucho Argain, singer and leader of la Sonora Dinamita, and accordionist/bandleaders Andres Landero, Gildardo Montoya, Aniceto Molina and Lucho Campillo.
Another group of talented performers moved to Mexico whose fames is even today likely greater than the top musicians – these were the actress/dancers who starred in the mid 40s to early 50s Cabaretera or Rumbera films. Perhaps the most famous was Ninón Sevilla, who arrived in México in 1946, but others who remain icons in Mexico to this day included Rosa Carmina, Amalia Aguilar and Maria Antonieta Pons, who turned down offers to perform in Hollywood to stay in Mexico City. The Cabaretera films, which are vehicle through which we have visualizations of many of the excellent musicians discussed, were described by Sublette as “Lurid, twitchy, erotic melodramas with complicated storylines that invariably took place in and around a seamy cabaret…The music in the cabaretera films was mostly Afro-Cuban congas Rumbas Danzones and of course the now pan Latin Bolero.”
Other Cuban emigrants of the period included Fidel Castro and his co-conspirators, who found refuge from the Batista regime in Mexico in 1953. It is from Mexico’s shores in 1956 that they set off on the diesel-powered yacht Granma for their eventually successful rebellion in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
Ironically, political developments would be a push a few years later after the Cuban Revolution, leading artists of regional stature like Olga Guillot, Celia Cruz and La Sonora Matancera to emigrate first to Mexico and later to NY and Latin America. Some of this was based on political preference, but it was also true that Revolutionary Cuba almost immediately effectively killed Havana’s nightlife, while suppressing AfroCuban religious practices. While touring Matanzas province, I was shown a wooden “Rumba bench” worn with hand prints that doubled as a chair if asked, and was used to perform AfroCuban religious ceremonies after authorities confiscated drums.
Mexico was the first Latin American country to get television in 1950, opening new opportunities for Cuban actors and musicians. As a Coda to this rich chapter of Cubans in Mexico, while some musicians like Mendive moved on to greener pastures like Venezuela, Mariano Merceron stayed, as did musicians with significant stature like Francisco Fellove, Silvestre Mendez and Damaso Perez Prado. All died on Mexican soil.
Beny More returned to Cuba a star in 1952, and recorded more untouchable sides with his own Conjunto Gigante. Still regarded as the greatest Cuban singer ever, and the most versatile for his command of both the Bolero and uptempo mambos and guarachas, Moré was unable to control his alcoholism and sadly drank himself to death in 1963.
Ricky Ricardo and the real Mr. Babalú
When we last left Miguelito Valdes, his 1939 recording of the Margarita Lecuona composition “Babalú (Ayé) had just been released. In his book “Mambo Kingdom,” well regarded NY Latin music historian Max Salazar said of the recording “New York Latinos bought every available copy. A young, handsome Cuban living in New York named Desi Arnaz capitalized on the hit recording by singing it everywhere he appeared during the following year. It helped his Show business career immensely. By early 1940, the “Babalu” mania had not subsided. Someone wrote to Valdes from New York City that Arnaz was the hottest Latin artist in the city and was headed for Hollywood because of the popular Cuban conga rhythm and the impact “Babalu” had in all Hispanic communities.”
Babalu-Ayé is the Yoruba Orisha of the afflicted, and is associated with Saint Lazarus. He appears depicted as a old man with open sores which are licked by dogs that follow him.
In form, both “Babalú” and “Bruca Manigua” are Afros, a slow, dramatic but bouncy rumba lament. In Miguelito Valdés’ Afros, he sang in character as an Afro-Cuban “Negro de Nación”, using Yoruba or Congo terms in the dialect of the first generation brought from Africa.
Miguelito is a fascinating figure who was able to present the Afro Cuban themes and rhythms he had grown up with in an authentic manner to audiences that would not have been thought to be open to such content. He had the ability to be passionate and heartfelt, while at times clowning just to the edge of what could be called “tomming”. But he never crossed that line. Many black musicians of the era – most of them close friends of his, some since childhood – have commented on this special role of his, and for the dignity with which he executed it, presenting their music to white people “while dressed in a tuxedo.”
Miguelito and pianist/arranger Anselmo Sacasas, the two biggest stars of Casino de la Playa, moved to New York City in 1940.
The heavily Puerto Rican and growing Hispanic population exploded from roughly 165,000 in 1940 (2.2%) to 633,000 in 1960 (9.4%), and they were key consumers (and contributors to new forms of) of AfroCuban music. Of NY Latin people in El Barrio, Salazar says “Harlem Latinos had their music. Thick 10 inch 78 RPM records were played through a megaphone shaped horn that extended from an RCA Victrola that had no electricity. The Victrola’s spring drove the turntable to hear a recording at its proper speed the spring had to be wound tightly. the turntable spring was rewound with a crank after each Played. Phonograph needles were sold in packets of 25 for five cents. They had to be changed after every two plays because the needle tips quickly became blunt and dull. The retail price of one two sided 78 rpm record was $1, or about $18 today.”
The liner notes from Miguelito’s 1942 “Bim Bam Boom” album on Decca (with Machito and his Afro-Cubans, contained 4 two-sided 78 records for $2.50) narrate Miguelito’s arrival:
“Miguelito Valdes, a new and vibrant personality in the American entertainment world, has in his two short years in this country captured the favor and imagination of the public as few artists before him have done…
Night appearances, records and star roles on radio shows brought him to the attention of American theatrical people and he made his first trip to this country in April 1940. A few days after his arrival he was signed to appear at the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf Astoria. He remains here for two years, his stay punctuated by theater appearances in our largest cities, engagements in America’s finest hotel supper clubs and a 78 week appearance on the Camel Rumba review in a stellar role.”
The notes add
“His artful interpretations of his native Cuban music filled with the savage rhythms of Africa’s jungles in the hauntingly beautiful melodies of storied Spain, as well as songs from other Latin American countries have endeared him to record buyers in the friendly nations to the south for many years….
He is presented here with by Decca, in eight selections which range from the typical Pregon to the savage and blood-tingling beat of the Afro Cuban rhythm.”
In describing the new sensation to English speaking audiences, the author says “Savage is the word for Miguelito.”
Interestingly, the liner notes are available in Spanish as “Notas Biograficas en Espanol”, and they don’t mention anything about Africa’s Jungles, Natives, Savages or blood-tingling beats. There’s a topic for a thesis!
Valdes performed five shows a day at the Paramount theater for two weeks with Cugat, and as the notes report, sang every night at the Waldorf Astoria Starlight Room. The Cugat orchestra worked six days a week, filled two or three engagements per day, and recorded every month with RCA.
Miguelito recorded a new version of “Babalu” with Cugat, and it was cugat’s best seller ever. He traveled to LA with Cugat, who helped him get a singing cameo in the Rita Hayworth Fred Astaire vehicle “You were never Lovelier”, and they played swanky clubs like Hollywood’s Mocambo
Opened in 1941, the nightclub’s Latin American-themed decor cost $100,000 (equivalent to $2M in 2023). Along the walls were glass cages holding live cockatoos, macaws, seagulls, pigeons, and parrots. With big band music, the club became one of the most popular dance-till-dawn spots in town. In 1943, when Frank Sinatra became a solo act, he made his Los Angeles debut at the Mocambo.
Valdes then had a public argument and breakup with Cugat over remuneration that was widely reported on in the Spanish language press. Now represented by the William Morris Agency, Valdés’ likeness appeared on the April 1942 cover of Billboard magazine and he was subsequently booked at important Latin music venues across the country.
At the height of his popularity, Valdes moved to Mexico City. He performed on radio station XEW, with whom he had secured a lucrative contract, in the theatrical review “Follies del Chato Guerra,” and with famed composer/pianist Agustín Lara at the Teatro Esperanza. He also appeared with Actor and Comedian Germán Valdés, better known as Tin Tan, in the cabaret “El Patio,” and during his two years living in the Mexican capital, he appeared in 12 films.
In 1945, he relocated to Los Angeles, where he made a reprise of his famous rendition of “Babalú Ayé” in the Hollywood film Pan-Americana. Per Max Salazar, “By now exposure in the 12 motion pictures had made him the most talked about most popular Hispanic musician in the United States. His Seeco recordings with Nora Morales and his Orchestra and la Sonora Matancera contributed to his popularity. South American heads of state had honored him with deals and proclamations, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista gave him a medal.”
Miguelito remained the most popular Latin singer during the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, the critical period before the Mambo exploded in NYC. In 1951-52 he toured Latin America as far away as Uruguay with stops in Colombia and Panama, and again in 1955 when he added Lima Peru and Madrid Spain to the itinerary. In 1954 he appeared at the world famous Tropicana with Olga Guillot, who he helped break into the NY scene in the late 1940s. Starting in the late 50s he moved back to Mexico City under contract to the Hilton Hotels chain, where he stayed until 1964 before moving back to LA for good.
An interesting aside on Miguelito is that it he who sponsored his boyhood friend Luciano “Chano” Pozo to come to the US in 1947. Chano was one of the hottest Cuban composers of the time, and his hits “Blen blen blen” and “Nagüe” (which loosely translates as “homie” in Cuban Abakuá slang) became calling cards for Miguelito and Machito of the AfroCubans.
Miguelito asked Machito’s bandleader Mario Bauza to get Chano some gigs, and Bauza connected him with Dizzy Gillespie, with whom Bauza had played in Cab Calloway’s Orchestra. And that’s how Cubop, and Latin Jazz, were born. It was with Dizzy’s Big Band that Chano composed the world famous “Manteca” (slang for Cannabis) and “Tin Tin Deo” and together they played Carnegie Hall.
In 1948, Pozo – who was a rough customer – entered the Rio Cafe on 111th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem to listen to Manteca on the jukebox. A numbers runner and cannabis dealer (who was a decorated WWII vet) named Eusebio “Cabito” (Little Corporal) Muñoz entered, and Pozo started a fight, demanding his money back for some bad herb Cabito sold him. Muñoz took out a revolver and ended Pozo’s life. He was 33 years old. Miguelito accompanied the body back to Cuba for burial.
Desi Arnaz, meanwhile, married the actress Lucille Ball, and did a theater tour of the Midwest playing “Babalu” in Milwaukee and Omaha. Arnaz’s act has been called a parody of Miguelito’s, down to the mussed up hair. In this clip you can both appreciate his performing skills and recognize the show has been orchestrated for an audience that responds to the “savage and blood-tingling beat of the African Jungle.” But while Miguelito had drummed in the Comparsas in Havana, Arnaz clearly has not – no Cuban percussionist would hit the drums with open hands as Arnaz does, Cubans play “tapao” (with a closed hand). According to Max Salazar, Cubans thought Arnaz was a “poor performer, but with charisma and business acumen.”
Arnaz and Ball created a TV pilot called “I Love Lucy” in which Arnaz, as Ricky Ricardo, runs the club Tropicana (the club’s main stage was a copy of the Mocambo room) where in episode 6 he performs “Babalu.” The show, which debuted on October 15, 1951, is by some measures the most successful in the history of television. In April 1952, in the middle of the show’s first season, Arbitron’s estimated viewership was 30 million out of a total population of 157 million. Through savvy contract negotiations, Arnaz and Ball owned the syndication rights to the show.
Arnaz and Valdes were apparently friends, with Valdés providing his song “Rumba Rumbero” for the 1949 film Holiday in Havana starring Arnaz. As reported on the internet, Hollywood legend has it that they would take turns showing up unannounced at each other’s nightclub performances and wait patiently in the audience for “Babalú” to begin, then try to out-do each other in a mock competition. In the late ‘60s, Arnaz is said to have helped Valdes get his own show on local TV in the NY area, which is warmly remembered by Nuevayorkinos of that era.
Both “Bruca Manigua” and “Babalu” were seminal entries in the AfroCuban canon that was becoming one of the few default musical identities across Latin America and Latin communities in the US. Mariachi music remained Mexican, Tango Argentinian, but Cuban Rumba, Guaracha, Mambo, Cha Cha Cha and eventually Salsa, which is a marketing catchall term that comprises all of these, is identified with and danced throughout Latin America to this day.
Both songs were Afros, as is Beny More’s enchanting “Mata Siguaraya”
But not only did these songs enter the Pan-Latin music canon – they also impacted North America popular music.
Like the Son clave (“The Bo Diddley Beat”) and Cha Cha Cha figures are an uncredited part of early Rock and Roll (See Sublette’s fantastic article “The Kingsmen and the Cha-Cha-Chá”), the Afro was present in Rock and Roll and R&B .
Listen to Ray Charles’ “Unchain My Heart”
It’s a speeded up Afro.
Once you start listening for it, you’ll be surprised where you hear it. It’s part of the “latin beat” the Funk Brothers discuss in the documentary “Standing in the Shadows of Motown”, as played by drummer (and with bassist James Jamerson, founder of the Motown Sound) Benny Benjamin.
This is Benjamin on Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)”
Available bios of the Alabama-born Benjamin, whose nickname was “Papa Zita,” are spare as to his connection to Latin music, sometimes noting that his influences included “Buddy Rich and Tito Puente.” I don’t know… Papa Zita sounds like “Papacito,” a common term of endearment for a man, and I smell an untold backstory here. You don’t get a nickname like that without hanging out with Cubans or Puerto Ricans …
Now listen to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”, and listen to the bassline, after the intro:
Note that key members of Santana’s group included Cuban-born percussionist Armando Peraza, who was part of the AfroCuban Jazz scene in NYC in the late ’40s
Recommended Reading:
John Charles Chasteen “National Rhythms, African Roots: the Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance”
Timothy Brennan “Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz”
Alejo Carpentier “Music in Cuba” With an introduction by Professor Timothy Brennan
Max Salazar “Mambo Kingdom: Latin Music in New York”
Ned Sublette “Cuba and its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo”
Ned Sublette “The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square”
Gonzalo Martre, Silvestre Mendez “Rumberos de Ayer: Musicos Cubanos en Mexico (1930-50)”
Ricardo Oropesa “Miguelito Valdes, Mr. Babalu: La Voz del Tambor”
Lavin, Jimenez et al, “Los Tiempos del Salon Mexico”
Agradecimiento especial a Ricardo Oropesa, Harry Sepulveda, Ned Sublette y Professor Bryan Wagner, Fernando Martinez