Cuban music is mainly a mixture of influences from both Africa and Spain. The Spanish conquistadors were the ones who introduced their own European styles into the area, and the slave trade from Africa left its mark as well. Getting a little deeper into this mixture, one can focus on the rhythms and melodies that help to show how these influences are at work. For instance, in Cuban music the drums are effectively talking to one another, which comes from the African tradition. Arabs from the Middle East spread into Africa and Spain thus serving as a further influence while simultaneously uniting these different cultures. Berber culture took root in Andalucia, Spain, and Rome and Germanic influences also shaped the history of the Iberian Peninsula. Afro-Cuban culture was a rich mix of Catholicism, African heritage and Spanish customs, and the music that poured out of that mix was based on this intersection of customs, culture and influences.
The intermixing of African beats and Spanish music is essentially what produced the Cuban style. The Spanish preferred the guitar: it was their favorite instrument as it was portable and could be played by the average person in the field. However, other instruments such as wind instruments and the violin were common as well. By the 19th and later in the 20th centuries these influences became more and more pronounced as the popularity of jazz and blues and swing in America grew. Cuban music is sometimes confused with the same styles that emerged in New Orleans and spread across the U.S., but really it is quite different. As Sublette (2007) points out, “Cuban music has something else: clave (a rhythmic key) and those undulating, repeating, melodic-rhythmic loops of fixed pitches called (with different shades of meaning) guajeo, montuno, or tumbao. These appear in American music, but in Cuban music they dominate, and they largely entered the American musical vocabulary from Cuba” (p. 159). Moreover, the blues was more of an Afro-American phenomenon: it was unique to the tradition of the African-American experience in the U.S. The Cuban experience was not the same, and as Sublette (2007) notes quite simply, “Cuban musicians don’t have the blues. They don’t feel those minute pitch distinctions that a blues musician makes automatically, and they tend to sound a little stiff playing against swing time” (p. 166). Cuban musicians are more upbeat, using multiple rhythms and melodies to channel a spirit that is neither oppressed nor constrained: it is dynamic, expressive, flowing, and rhythmic.