“La Cuba de Ayer/La Cuba de Hoy”

Abstract

Shortly before Cuban music entered a period of profound creativity—the decades of Dámaso Pérez Prado, Israel “Cachao” López, Arsenio Rodríguez, Barbarito Diez, Celina y Reutilio, and Beny Moré, among many others—Cuban musicologist Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes issued the following challenge: “We must have the investigating spirit and the mental freshness and curiosity to be able to dig into the mystery of our musical past, un-earthing information and recovering data which serves as a basis for the rectification of errors or to perpetuate unquestionable premises” (quoted in Grenet 1939). This chapter attempts to act on this injunction, though not along the lines that Sánchez de Fuentes intended.¹ Specifically this chapter explores one aspect of Cuba’s “mysterious” musical past, in order to trace the connections between the modern appropriation and reworking of traditional tropes to reinforce the militant antirevolutionary nationalism prevalent in the U.S. exile community since 1959.