Zoom in
Foto: Ladyrene Pérez.
Zoom in
Foto: Ladyrene Pérez.

How to baptize rumba? How to enclose it in a narrow definition? Is it a set of rhythms and melodies, is it a party? It's all that and more. Rumba is expansion, freedom, joy.
Rumba, in its rich range of modalities, has been a genre that has maintained its hegemony and validity over many others of the rich arsenal of Cuban music, reason for which it has just been declared an Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
Like jazz, samba, flamenco or calypso, Cuban rumba has been part of the cultural legacy of the planet for many years. He has walked the world in its primary and traditional forms and in the most stylized and commercial. The social chronicle of “the poor of the Earth”, a folkloric print of lively authenticity, the cajón rumba, which is born in the plots and corners, in the heat of a place or a simple meeting of people of the neighborhood, is a hallmark of the identity of the Cuban nation.
Everything fits in it, both in the pure street rumba that is danced to the clash of cod boxes and spoons, like the one that is executed with orchestra-type jazz band to give entrance in its democratic scope to all the social layers.
The rumba is intelligent because it assumes a second nature when fulfilling a social function, because it breaks down suburban and religious barriers to settle in the capital cities, because it is placed with total authority in the cosmopolitan area without ceasing to be the daughter of rusticity, because it assumes the chronicle of daily life, narrates adventures of the social being, because as few musical genres and dances go from generation to generation to be thus in its indelible perpetuity and freshness, because from the oppression of slavery arose as a myth of liberation and was the main source of innovation and rupture of old paradigms.
Rumba does not grow old, its vitality is constant. It is so Cuban that nothing has been able to tamper it. It transcended its dark marginality to place itself in the place where the light erases all the borders.