‘It's the sugar, the honey that you have’: learning to be natural through rumba in Cuba

Abstract

This article uses the technique of learning to be natural to consider how dance, rhythm and the body become forces of social differentiation. In Cuba, many Afro-Cuban cultural practices, such as rumba, have been subject to social and spatial exclusion. In this context, sites such as the home, the street and the family emerge as highly significant for the learning and performance of Afro-Cuban music and dance. Learning primarily from family members and through spaces such as the home, street and neighborhood contributes to ambiguous understandings of rhythmic responsiveness as both instinctive and learned, inside and outside the body, cultural and natural. Many rumba performers also deploy flexible understandings of rhythmic natures to assert the social and material significance of racial differentiation in a context where the implications of ‘race’ are often denied. Even at their most fixed, however, these understandings of bodily and rhythmic natures remain contingent on important people and places for their development. The practice of learning rhythmic responsiveness highlights that, although bodily trajectories are not predetermined, bodies develop differently through different places, practices and relations to others. Importantly, this also suggests that bodily materiality and its social significances are not endlessly pliable. By examining places and specific practices for learning to respond ‘naturally’ to rumba rhythms, the article argues that the body's variable openness and resistance to augmentation and development lends power to highly unnatural gender and racial categories.

Este artículo utiliza la técnica de ‘aprender a ser natural’ para considerar cómo el baile, el ritmo y el cuerpo se convierten en fuerzas de diferenciación social. En Cuba, muchas prácticas culturales afrocubanas, tales como la rumba, han estado sujetas a exclusión social y espacial. En este contexto, lugares como el hogar, la calle y la familia emergen como altamente significativos para aprender y ejecutar la música y la danza afrocubana. Aprender principalmente de los miembros de la familia y a través de espacios como el hogar, la calle y el barrio contribuye a formas ambiguas de entender la receptividad rítmica como instintiva y aprendida, dentro y fuera del cuerpo, cultural y natural. Muchos bailarines y bailarinas de rumba también tienen ideas flexibles de las naturalezas rítmicas para afirmar la importancia social y material de la diferenciación racial, en un contexto donde las implicancias de ‘raza’ son a menudo negadas. Incluso en sus versiones más rígidas, sin embargo, estas ideas de las naturalezas corpóreas y rítmicas permanecen supeditadas a las personas y lugares importantes para su desarrollo. La práctica del aprendizaje de la receptividad rítmica resalta que, aunque las trayectorias del cuerpo no están predeterminadas, éstos se desarrollan en forma diferente a través de distintos lugares, prácticas y relaciones con otros. Importantemente, esto también sugiere que la materialidad corporal y sus significancias sociales no son interminablemente maleables. Examinando lugares y prácticas específicas para aprender a responder en forma ‘natural’ a los ritmos de la rumba, propongo que la variable apertura y resistencia del cuerpo al aumento y el desarrollo le da fuerza a ciertas categorías raciales y de géneros que son altamente antinaturales.

Keywords:

• dance
• Cuba
• the body
• gender
• race

Keywords:

• baile
• Cuba
• el cuerpo
• género
• raza

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gillian Rose, Steve Pile, Beverly Mullings and three anonymous referees for their constructive comments on various drafts of this manuscript. The research for this article would not have been possible without the generous scholarly and financial support of the Geography Department of the Open University. In Cuba, I was helped along by many people including the architecture students of the Instituto Superior Politécnico José Antonio Echeverría in Havana, the staff at the Centro de Investigación y Desarollo de Música Cubana, my fellow dance students at El Instituto Superior del Arte, FolkCuba, and all of my research participants. Thank you.

Notes

 1. Quoted in and translated by Kutzinski (1993, 173).

 2. Names of all research participants have been changed in the interest of privacy and confidentiality.

 3. See, however, Eli Rodríguez (1994, 91) who argues that the Cuban population is ‘mono-ethnic’ but multi-racial. Eli Rodríguez and Gómez García (1989, 53) also argue, for instance, that rumba is a genuine product of Cuban soil and that determining distinct origins is not the important question. While I agree with their focus on the development of rumba music in Cuba, origins emerged as highly significant for the rumba performers I interviewed. I think it is worthwhile to examine contested notions of geographical and bodily ‘origins’ to further understand how flexible racial discourses work.

 4. On the importance of the home as a site of resistance for African-Americans see, hooks (1997). For recent work on the significance of the home in relation to Cuban women see Pertierra (2008). See also, Stanley Niaah (2007) on performance spaces important to dancehalls in Jamaica, the blues in the United States and Kwaito music in South Africa.

 5. Interviews with rumba performers, Havana, Cuba October 2005–May 2006.

 6. Sonjah Stanley Niaah's (2007, 201) work also identifies the street and certain locations as highly significant in the performance of American blues music. She also notes the significance of particular homes to the importance of South African Kwaito music and dance (2007, 206).

 7. Rumba performers and research participants regularly asserted the significance of ‘African’ origins to the formation and practice of rumba music in informal conversations, audio-recorded semi-structured interviews and dance lessons. My arguments and findings, therefore, differ from Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo's (2004, 102) work on Cuban rap.

 8. Interviews with rumba performers, Havana, Cuba October 2005–May 2006.

 9. Excerpt from fieldnotes of dance lesson with Alejandro, a famous rumba performer, at his home in Havana, 11 March 2006.

10. The rumbera's performance of volatile bodily boundaries also resonates with the mythical dancing mulata rumbera who appears in the poem opening this article. In Kutzinski's (1993, 163–97) book on the erotics of Cuban national identity, she argues that in Cuban music and poetry the mulata becomes a site of cultural and corporeal mixing; an imagined space through which different ‘races’ of men are ‘mixed’ and unified into a new Cuban ‘race’. While corporeal ‘mixing’ occurs in less predictable and homogenizing forms than ideologies of ‘mixing’ suggest (see Wade 2005), the idea of the mulata as one who naturally lacks bodily boundaries – and so is simultaneously powerful and vulnerable – reappears in Cuban music, poetry and politics (see Fernandez 1999; Paternostro 2000; Cabezas 2004; Fairley 2006; Stout 2008). It remains important, however, to extend interpretations of figures such as the mulata rumbera by examining embodied experiences of rumba dance as a form of display as the following section does in relation to Elena's experiences of performing the mythical rumbera.