Dancing and Being: Timba Music, Contested Spaces, and the Performance of Identity in Cuba.

Abstract

It makes sense to study Cuban culture through music because in Cuba music is everywhere, as elemental as water and air. The Cuban musical form called timba is interesting to examine because of the moment of its birth, development and boom, a time of transformation and social crisis in which the Cuban phrase “seguimos en combate” (we are still at war) is particularly poignant, as well as because of the complex system of social relations that exists around the music. Along with the typical characteristics of Cuban son, timba has combined new sounds, instruments, new sections in the classic son format of introduction-body-montuno and, perhaps most significantly, has assumed a different attitude in conceiving and performing popular dance music. I contend that timba was born as a maroon music in the face of challenges posed by a radically changing Cuban society in crisis throughout the decade of the 1990s, in which it has been necessary for certain Cubans¬¬blacks and mulatos especially––to reaffirm their identity, presence, and importance in their own terms inside the culture and social structure of Cuba. The aggressive sounds, marginal themes, vulgar, coded lyrics and the at times eccentric or “ghetto” self representations are but affirmations of identity that intend not to destroy Cuban society but rather to find a just position within it, as has been the case for blacks and mulatos in Cuba since colonial times. Dancing and being––creating, dancing timba music as well as performing the self according to specific strategies in various spaces––Afrocubans extend an historical identity into the future which is in dialogue and tension with wider Cuban society.