Cuban rumba is an Afro-Cuban music and dance genre characterized by complex rhythms, call-and-response vocals, and expressive, often flirtatious movements, rooted in African and Spanish traditions.
Not to be confused with the rumba of ballroom dancing. That name arose in the United States in the 1920s as rhumba, for dance music based mainly on Cuban son and bolero; it is a different dance, rhythmically unrelated to the rumba on this page.
Rumba was born in the second half of the 19th century in the solares — the crowded tenement courtyards — and on the docks of Havana and Matanzas. After slavery was abolished in 1886, Afro-Cubans of Congo, Carabalí, and Yoruba descent lived there side by side with poor Spanish immigrants. In the evening, after work, people gathered to sing, play, and dance. There was no money for real drums, so they played on whatever was at hand: wooden packing crates (cajones) from the harbour, a drawer, a door, two spoons. The singing borrowed the Spanish décima; the rhythm, the call-and-response, and the movement came from Africa.
Out of these gatherings grew three styles. The slow, elegant yambú, the oldest; the flirtatious couple's dance guaguancó, with the playful vacunao; and the fast, acrobatic columbia, where a solo dancer challenges the lead drum, the quinto. Every rumba is a conversation: the singer improvises, the choir answers, the quinto comments, and the dancer replies with the body.
For a long time rumba was looked down on as the music of the poor, black neighbourhoods, and at times it was even banned. Groups such as Los Muñequitos de Matanzas (founded in 1952) and later Yoruba Andabo carried it from the courtyard to the stage. In 2016 UNESCO recognised Cuban rumba as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Rumba is still danced in Cuba's streets and courtyards today — and anyone dancing casino or timba carries a piece of it in their body. Read more in the history of rumba.
According to EcuRed, rumba arose in colonial times, during the expansion of the sugar industry, among free Black Cubans of Lucumí, Gangá, Arará and above all Bantu descent, among others. As early as the 18th and 19th centuries, men at the sugar mills danced fighting dances attributed to the Congos, the baile de maní: an early form of what was later called columbia. Erotic couple dances "of makuta or yuka" were possibly the basis of yambú and guaguancó. Fernando Ortiz saw the yuka drums as the probable direct ancestors of rumba; the Abakuá march and the music of the Congos also left their mark. See also Congos Bantu and Abakuá.