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Beyond the Archive: The Cabrera-Tarafa Collection of Afro-Cuban Music, circa 1956: Music of the African Cults in Cuba (Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba)

Beyond the Archive: The Cabrera-Tarafa Collection of Afro-Cuban Music, circa 1956
Music of the African Cults in Cuba (Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba)
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  1. Beyond the Archive: The Cabrera-Tarafa Collection of Afro-Cuban Music, circa 1956
  2. An Introduction to the Collection
  3. Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba (Music of the African Cults in Cuba): The Liner Notes
    1. Oro. Marcos Portillo Domínguez [Até Borá] and ensemble.
    2. Rezos. Fernando Hernández, Inés Sotomayor, and Domingo Hernández.
    3. “Guarachitas” para los Orishas (Instrumental Batá Drumming). Miguel Santa Cruz, Gustavo Díaz, and Juan González.
    4. Songs for Osain. Cándido Martínez, Baba orisha from Havana.
    5. Oro. Inés Sotomayor and Ensemble.
    6. Oro de Tambores (Batá Drum Instrumental Oro). Miguel Santa Cruz, Gustavo Díaz, and Juan González.
    7. Oro (Batá Drums with Chorus). Cándido Martínez, Antonio Alberiche, chorus, and the Batá drums of Miguel Santa Cruz and Juan González.
    8. Moforibale. Palo Gangá Ñongobá. Cantos de Palo. Congo Musunde and Gangá. Florinda Pastor, Agustín Diago, and ensemble.
    9. Oro. Silvino Baró, M. Catalá, S. Rodríguez, R. Viart.
    10. Mayimbi. Toque de Palo. Silvino Baró, Martín Catalá, Sergio Rodríguez, and Rodolfo Viart.
    11. Canto Lucumí. Silvino Baró, Martín Catalá, Sergio Rodríguez, and Rodolfo Viart.
    12. Cantos Arará. Silvino Baró, Martín Catalá, Sergio Rodríguez, and Rodolfo Viart.
    13. Rezos. Petronila Hernández.
    14. Babaluayé. A. Alberiche.
    15. Bembé & Tambores (Instrumental Drumming). Domingo Hernández, Marcelo Carreras, Ángel Rolando, and Domingo Hernández, hijo. Tambores and guataca.
    16. Oro. Alberto Yenkins (Yin) and ensemble.
    17. Itutu. Fernando Hernández and ensemble.
    18. Oro. Cándido Mártinez and ensemble.
    19. Congo and Gangá Songs. Florinda Diago and family.
    20. About This Site.

Music of African Cults in Cuba

(Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba)

Original notes by Lydia Cabrera.

Audio recording and photography by Josefina Tarafa.[1]

Melgarez. Near present-day Pedro Betancourt, Matanzas, Cuba, circa 1956. Photo by Josefina Tarafa.


Photo of percussionsist, including a man playing a drum and another playing a metal hoe blade with an iron nail, along with a woman dancing, and other individuals in the background.

Francisquilla Ibáñez (right) and unidentified individuals. Near present-day Pedro Betancourt, Matanzas, Cuba, circa 1956. Photo by Josefina Tarafa.


A very short time after the Discovery, according to the recollections of (Royal) Historian Antonio de Herrera, “Among the first decrees for the good governance in the far-flung provinces during the Conquest of the (West) Indies, it was prohibited to take slaves, whether male or female, white or Black or loro or mulato, and especially not those who might be.”[2] Nonetheless, the introduction of African slaves in the Spanish colonies — in Santo Domingo, Hispaniola — began a century before other European colonies, and it ended in Cuba later than any other, at the end of the 19th century.

With the blessing of the Protector of the Indians, Fray[3] Bartolomé de las Casas, the Emperor Charles V inaugurated the [transatlantic slave] trade in 1516 with four-thousand Black people taken to Jamaica, La Española, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Intended as replacements for the Indians, of “such little spirit and strength,” Black people were not supposed to become ladinos, which referred to those who had remained in the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, nor were they supposed to become “gelofes” (yolofes), who were “proud and troublesome” and appear in many 16th-century protocols. Rather, they were from Guinea, Mina, Cabo Verde, Angola.[4]

As time went on, the importation of Africans in Cuba would increase in proportion to the demands of the island’s agricultural industry.[5] It was bound, since the planting of the first harvests, to the farming of sugar cane, which began slowly sometime during the late 17th century, then gradually developed into the most basic industry on the island. Thanks to new freedoms, the 18th century is characterized as the dawn of economic prosperity in Cuba, which led to a considerable increase of Africans—brazos africanos (African arms [meaning bodies of laborers]), “cargas de ebano” (“ebony cargo”) or “piezas de Guinea” (“[gold] pieces from Guinea”)—which entered the country legally, then clandestinely. In the 19th century, despite signed treaties (the first in 1814) between Spain and England, who already demanded the radical philanthropic abolition of the slave trade, as well as abolitionist and separatist campaigns in the middle of the century (notably, 1868), African slaves were considered—mistakenly or greedily—indispensable to Cuba’s essential industry, and they continued to arrive in large numbers, as contraband, in slave ships which mocked the English pursuing them.

Slaves were not declared free in Cuba until 1880.

Africans were imported without interruption from the earliest days of the colony, and they have been a perennial presence in Cuban life ever since. Nonetheless, it is an undisputed fact that the regime of slavery — always hateful and unjustifiable — was more humane and more tolerable in Spanish territories. The laws were more humane, and the coexistence between siervos y amos was more humane, all of which explains not only miscegenation (mestizaje) of the Cuban population, since it is well known that the Spanish had no racial prejudices, but also the extraordinary, vital persistence of the former slaves’ religious cults.

The religious practices of slaves were always thoroughly tolerated.[6] They were fundamental aspects of their lives. And it is no exaggeration to say these religious practices continue to be — as they were in the past — a basic, existential element in the lives of living descendants of Africans.

Due largely to that conspicuous tolerance, if one stirs up dusty old papers and memories, they can immediately discern for themselves that what Roger Bastide calls “Black fidelity” to the traditions and faiths of their ancestors is more intact here in Cuba than any other country with a history of slavery. In order to discover it, one does not need to venture into the island’s interior, where Black people are more numerous and live farther away from the flattening influence of urban centers. This is confirmed by even the most cursory survey taken in the heart of the capital, or wherever one might least expect it. The influx of Yorubas (Nagos) — known in Cuba as Lucumís[7] — since the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, as well as the superiority of their culture, made them predominant among the ethnic groups subjected to the slave trade, despite the fact that other groups — including the Bantús — were just as numerous. Their music and dances are inseparable from rituals; their religious is polytheistic, with a rich mythology, including the pantheon of their gods — orishas — venerated by the majority of the Cuban people, and their language, which is still spoken today by their descendants.

The olorishas, the priests of the Lucumí cult (or Regla Lucumí) are much more accessible than the Bakono, the priests of the Regla Arará, now few in number and excessively reserved, or the Padres Nkisis and Padres Nganga from the Congo cults, also known generically as Mayomberos or Paleros, often considered dangerous sorcerers (brujos peligrosos). Therefore, the majority of liturgical drumming and chanting we have been able to record are Lucumí.

The music of the slaves, particularly the Lucumí, is preserved more purely in the province of Matanzas, around its old and bountiful sugar plantations, in its capital [Ciudad Matanzas], and the city of Cárdenas. Matanzas is known as “Africa in miniature,” although Havana is also seething with ile orishas or Casas de Santos (temples).

We have enjoyed the good fortune to encounter priests and priestesses of the Regla Lucumí from the towns of Corral Falso (Pedro Betancourt), Jovellanos or Bemba, Perico, and Agramonte. They gave us permission to record their songs, and a warm welcome which we probably would not have been able to expect at the temples in Havana, which were less interesting for our objectives. They are elderly Babá orishas like Domingo Hernández and Alberto Yin, and Iyalochas like Inés Sotomayor, who provided us everything we needed to carry out this work.[9] They allowed Ms. Josefina Tarafa, whose tenacious and generous collaboration made these recordings possible, to install her Ampex 600 among them as they intoned their chants and beat their drums in the open air. Like photographic cameras, these sorcerous machines which record all of the sounds on the earth and the human voice, keeping them locked away at the mercy of their owners, are not to their liking, nor their gods’.[10] But a mutual friendliness and trust in our good and respectful intentions smoothed over any such obstacles, allowing us to offer Africanists on the other side of the ocean and anyone with an interest in the ethnology of music this series of rhythms as they endure in Cuba.

The technicians Mr. Oduardo Zapullo and Ing. Benito Bolle, from Rome, who took great pains to transfer the magnetic tapes to discs, will find our recognition in these lines.

L.C.


Translation by David Font-Navarrete.

Annotation by David Font-Navarrete [DF-N], et al.

    DF-N: The term berberiscos de casta de moros refers to people of Berber and/or Moorish ancestry, and more literally to a hierarchical caste system embedded in the Spanish colonial enterprise. ↑


DF-N: “Fray” meaning Brother, as in a monk or clergyman.

DF-N: This is the first of numerous references in the liner notes to distinct African linguistic, regional, and/or “ethnic” identities in Cuba. See also: Abimbola and Miller; et al.

DF-N: Cabrera alludes to: 1) the modern Cuban agriculture (most prominently, industrial sugar plantations); 2) Black labor; and 3) the family fortunes of the three women who produced the Música de los cultos collection (Josefina Tarafa, María Teresa de Rojas, and Lydia Cabrera). The recordings are a byproduct of the colonial plantation economy of the 19th century that Shaw describes as a “prison industrial labor camp” (2021).

The Central Cuba sugar refinery is mentioned in the liner notes below, was founded in 1920 and owned by the Tarafa family until the 1959 Cuban revolution. It is also pictured in a photo by Pierre Fatumbi Verger. Undoubtedly, while the Música de los cultos collection is the product of a rare sort of luxury and privilege afforded to Cabrera and Tarafa, their work to document Afro-Cuban traditions was a subversive act, elevating Black Cubans and their traditions to the august level of the Greek and Roman “cults” of ancient antiquity and (more obliquely) Catholicism — foundational elements (fundamento) at the heart of both the Cuban colonial enterprise and the Jim Crowe-style racially segregated republican era that followed. More fundamentally, perhaps, Cabrera and Tarafa’s “work” was a leisurely, consummately cosmopolitan labor of love, a luxury afforded them by paradoxical social positions whose coordinates included: i) renegade eccentricities and ii) advocacy for Afro-Cuban tradition, both of which iii) subverted numerous cultural norms, and iv) insisted on a (relatively) dignified cultural space for Black humanity and divinity. The entire enterprise of the Música de los cultos collection — including the high-tech, state-of-the-art multimedia gear masterfully employed by Tarafa and Verger in the middle of a rural agricultural community descended from enslaved Cubans — was a direct consequence of the Tarafa family’s wealth. It was, thereby, arguably a direct inheritance, descended to Tarafa via the white colonial bourgeoisie’s consummately unholy role in the transatlantic slave trade. In Cabrera's La laguna sagrada de San Joaquín (1973), Cabrera offers a brief description of the Tarafa family. Reckoning with exile and dissociation with the time and place of her “work” on Afro-Cuban traditions, numerous passages in La laguna sagrada refer to the legacy of slave labor in both direct and subtle, sometimes intimate ways. Indeed, we can listen to large sections of Música de los cultos as a soundtrack to La laguna sagrada (Font-Navarrete 2022, 2023). ↑


DF-N: As historical analysis of slavery in Cuba, this passage of Cabrera’s text is an unfortunate, anachronistic distraction. Her claims that “the Spanish had no racial prejudices” and that “the religious practices of slaves were thoroughly tolerated” are especially egregious. Immediately preceding its “discovery” of Cuba and transatlantic trade of African captives, the Spanish crown’s “reconquest” and Inquisition — against Moors, Jews, et al — were based on both racial and religious formulations. Likewise, the idea that any dimension of enslaved people’s lives was “absolutely tolerated” is as absurd as it is offensive. However, as a document of a prevalent historical narrative, the passage offers important insight into the way Cabrera and countless other Cubans framed the roles of race and religion in their nation’s history. In retrospect, this historical narrative, which remains popular among Cabrera’s compatriots nearly seventy years later, can be read as a perversely ironic argument in praise of the putative virtues of Cuban slavery: compared to slavery elsewhere (most notably, in the nearby U.S. South), Cuban slavery was relatively benign (“more humane,” Cabrera repeats). According to this abhorrent historical distortion, it would follow that Cuba’s white-minority, slavery-based colonial regime and its “conspicuous tolerance” — rather than its horrific, recent brutality — deserve credit for the uniquely “intact” state of Black culture on the island. [See Helg, et al.] ↑


DF-N: Colonial-era “Lukumi / Lucumí” identity is enshrined in Afro-Cuban musical liturgy, particularly in various tratados (musical treatises) dedicated to the orisha Shangó. See also Betancourt 2018, Font-Navarrete 2022, Law 1997, Ramos 2003, et al.] ↑


DF-N: [...] ↑


DF-N: [...] ↑


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