An Introduction to Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba:
The Cabrera-Tarafa Collection of Afro-Cuban Music, ca. 1956
by David Font-Navarrete and Martin Tsang
In the mid-1950s, Lydia Cabrera and Josefina Tarafa recorded hours of Afro-Cuban ritual music in Matanzas and Havana. The result was Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba (Music of the African Cults in Cuba), a boxed set of phonograph LPs printed in Cuba and distributed privately in a single limited edition circa 1956.
The collection consists of 14 LP discs containing over 11 hours of audio recordings, along with liner notes and photos. Given its scope and quality, the collection is arguably the single most robust multimedia archive of Afro-Cuban musical traditions in the mid-20th century.
It remains unclear in which year the recordings were made, when the discs were pressed, and how many copies of the boxed set were produced, and only a few institutions hold complete physical editions of the original LP boxed set in their repositories.
Built in the open access Manifold platform, this website offers a platform for collaborative research on the Música de los cultos collection. It introduces a few of the individual priest-artists featured in the collection, offering composite multimedia portraits that juxtapose clips of audio from Música de los cultos with photographs by Tarafa and fragments of text from the liner notes by Cabrera, as well as other seminal publications — most notably, El Monte (1954) and La laguna sagrada (1973) — and previously unpublished materials.
By placing the Música de los cultos collection into a broad context of traditions in the historical Afro-Atlantic (aka the Black Atlantic), this site is also meant to offer an initial window into the collection’s multifaceted scope and significance.
The original box set of the Música de los cultos collection archived at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève. Special thanks to Madeleine Leclair.
This website is published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. It was created in the open access Manifold platform, and it is hosted by the City University of New York.
Record label from one of the original LP discs in the Música de los cultos collection archived at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève. Special thanks to Madeleine Leclair.
The audio recordings — the only ones Cabrera produced in her long career — are saturated by the musical and linguistic virtuosity of priest-artists for which Cabrera became an archival medium, and the sounds themselves are arguably the pinnacle of her life-long efforts to produce “material for specialists which has not passed through the dangerous filter of interpretation” (2023).
The liner notes to Música de los cultos make it clear that the collection is the product of a conscious effort by Cabrera and Tarafa to document the most authentic, Afro-centric sounds they could document in rural mid-20th century Cuba. In this documentary sense, the collection is a vital counterpart to other compendiums of Afro-Cuban sacred musical traditions like Cult Music of Cuba (1949) and Antología de la música afrocubana (1981).
Cabrera’s ideal — a transparent, respectful document of the genius of Afro-Cuban liturgical traditions — is best served by audio recordings, the sounds floating in the air, in “real-time medium,” conveying exponentially more information and nuance than any text ever could. But Cabrera’s liner notes are a fundamental primer and guide to the audio recorded by Tarafa, and they offer essential context for the recordings.
It offers previously unpublished archival material from the original Música de los cultos collection, along with new annotated translations and a variety of related research-based materials.
Like the Música de los cultos collection, the research on this website is a work in progress that is grounded in both research and art.[1] In an effort to extend the usual scope of both private and institutional collections (“beyond the archive”), this website is also meant to offer an open, collaborative, and community-centered model for studying Cabrera and Tarafa’s collection.
Lydia Cabrera (left, rear) and Josefina Tarafa (right, front), ca. 1956. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami.
The Música de los cultos collection includes an extraordinary variety of musical and liturgical traditions including Palo, Arará, and Gangá, each associated with more-or-less distinct African lineages in Cuba. However, the initial iteration of this site is much more narrowly focused on a few examples of the Lucumí/Yoruba traditions which predominate in the collection.
The next section presents an archival PDF version of the original Spanish-language liner notes to collection, along with an annotated English-language translation of Lydia Cabrera’s text.
Digitized liner notes from the three-volume anthology of selections from the collection curated and annotated by Morton Marks for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (“ca. 1957 [...] from the historic recordings of Lydia Cabrera and Josefina Tarafa”) ( 2001a, 2001b, and 2003) are available online as free PDF documents from the Folkways website. Likewise, the liner notes to The Yoruba/Dahomean Collection: Orishas Across the Ocean, a 1998 album produced by the Library of Congress which includes selections from Música de los cultos, are also available from Smithsonian Folkways, along with a number of liner notes to a number of other closely-related albums. See the Resources page below for more information and links. ↑