MUSIC-CUBA: Salsa – Popular or Vulgar, Cubans’ Feet Don’t Care

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Sep 3 1996 (IPS) - The press calls it vulgar, some musicians consider it overly simplistic, and the Catholic Church deems it mediocre. But the controversy surrounding salsa music in Cuba has failed to dent its popularity.

While critics, singers, religious leaders and experts carry on their public debate, Cubans are dancing away the last nights of summer in city plazas to the tunes of their favourite salsa bands.

Ignoring August’s frequent downpours, hundreds flock nightly to a park on the Havana waterfront to dance, sing and enjoy, and leave their troubles – and thoughts – behind.

“Popular dance music, as its name indicates, is for dancing. People don’t go to a dance to think,” said Isaac Delgado, one of Cuba’s most popular salsa musicians.

Some local musicians explain the recent boom in tropical dance music in Cuba by the population’s need to escape their troubles during the severe economic crisis that has wracked the country since 1990.

Others see the salsa boom as part of a coherent process, following a more than decade-long rejection of the movement which combined musical elements from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia and the Dominican Republic with traditional Cuban music in the United States.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the salsa movement picked up steam in Cuba. Amateurs throughout the country began to compete with professionals. Cuban T.V. gave the programme “My Salsa” primetime airspace. It sponsored an annual music contest in which dozens of soloists and groups participate every year.

Just as the Nueva Trova was in style in the 1980s, salsa hit the big times in the 1990s, earning money in Cuba and the rest of Latin America, Europe and even Japan.

“The ‘danzon’ (a tropical rhythm) was called vulgar at first, as were the ‘son’ and the ‘guaracha’ later. If all that had been eliminated, there would be no popular Cuban music today,” musicologist Leonardo Acosta said in a recent debate on Cuban music.

A report in the weekly ‘Juventud Rebelde’, the publication of the Union of Young Communists, quoted Acosta, author of some of the most important studies on contemporary Cuban music, as saying that to call salsa vulgar was “excessively Puritan”. While some songs could be criticised, vulgarity was not the norm.

But with limited exceptions, salsa groups offer superficial lyrics that tend to abandon the tradition of combining rhythms with good lyrics.

Omar Vazquez, music critic of the official daily ‘Granma’, wrote that salsa turns any popular phrase into a song. The lyrics of some salsa musicians are aggressive towards women.

Vida Cristiana, Sunday publication of the Catholic Church, said the music created in Cuba is riddled with “lyrics that encourage superficiality, confrontation, apathy, non-thinking” which end up “penetrating and dulling the spirit.”

In one popular song, friends are invited to a party and offered — all in the same breath — women, a good band, rum, wine and beer.

Prostitutes appear as “witches” and gossiping is called “bembetear un poco” (based on ‘bemba’, thick lips) in songs nourished by street slang, which seem to forget what salsa musician Pachito Alonso said was the essence of Cuban music: “sensual, but fine.”

“To compose, one must have a gift, wit. Today we have many composers in Cuba. And many resort to the overly simplistic, the easy. Ninety percent of (the music), the mediocrity and the vulgar lyrics, does that,” said Adalbarto Alvarez, a singer, composer and head of an orchestra who is known as “the gentleman of the ‘son’.”

On the other side of the fence, Jose Luis Cortes, dubbed “El Tosco” (tosco means coarse, crude), known as the most vulgar of Cuban salsa musicians, says “new terms appear every day in popular speech, called crude by some, but which end up incorporated into the language.

“I sing for the people who get up at six in the morning to work in the port, on the docks, not for the intellectuals who criticise me,” El Tosco said in the debate written up in ‘Juventud Rebelde’, the country’s second leading newspaper.

State-run radio and T.V. stations are also the target of criticism. The committees they use to study songs before broadcast tend to select them according to criteria that have more to do with what subjects are allowed to be touched on in public than with artistic quality, critics say.

Meanwhile, the sounds of salsa continue to waft along on the warm breezes while Cubans, who seem to carry dance rhythms in their blood, take advantage of the last summer nights, leaving the controversy aside.

“I don’t care about anything when I’m dancing, and salsa is the best music for that,” said Carlos Gomez, a mechanical engineering student who heard about the controversy on the radio — and just kept right on dancing.