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Notes
The deity that animates and consecrates the batá drums is known as Añá, often understood to be a road or avatar of Ochún, the most feminized of the orichas in the pantheon of Afro‐Cuban Santería.
Becker's argument is fully in line with Lakoff's and Johnson's (Citation1980, p. 19) work on metaphors here: ‘no metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis.’
The formal abolition of slavery came in February 1880 with the passage of the ley de patronato (the ‘patronage’ law). This law, however, was meant to provide a transition (beneficial to slaveholders) between the previous period of slave labor and the coming era of paid labor. As a result, the law obliged all ‘emancipated’ slaves to continue working for their former masters until 1886.
Arsenio Rodríguez, the famous blind bandleader of Havana, was born in Matanzas and moved to Havana when he was about 20 years old. Rodríguez was Arcaño's main competition on the big band circuit, and the two competed for everything from gigs to drummers.
Antonio Arcaño, while technically Afro‐Cuban, was very light‐skinned and often passed for white. The ‘blackness’ of the music, then, was not necessarily connected to the people who played it, but rather the memorial geography of what it represented — that is, colonial Matanzas and its sugar plantations. Perhaps as a result of his lighter skin color, Antonio Arcaño and his band continued to enjoy access to the more exclusive (and whiter) clubs, while Arsenio's music remained popular mainly in working‐class Afro‐Cuban establishments (see Garcia Citation2003).