May 25: Guest Blogger Carl Lee #16: Cuba: The music never stops.

The latest in a series of guest posts from Carl Lee.

Carl wrote this post several weeks ago, and the situation in the country is now deteriorating due to a lack of energy reaching the country due to US sanctions yet again interfering with another country.

Cuba: The music never stops.

Watching the strangling of Cuba by the United States of America and the subsequent disintegration of key elements of the country: assailed by nationwide power outrages, food shortages, crumbling infrastructure and patients dying in hospitals starved of drugs and power is heart breaking. This is a nation that attempted to forge its own unique developmental path and found itself in the political and economic cross hairs of its global super power neighbour who already had ‘1898’ form in regime change on the Caribbean island. 

It still startles me that once, from 1762-63, Cuba was part of the British Empire, until it swapped back to it’s original colonial oppressor, Spain, in exchange for Florida. 

Don’t anybody tell Donald Trump.

It is over two decades since I visited Cuba and I still reflect on the depth and diversity of music that I encountered there from the cool piano jazz of tourist hotels, driving rhythms in an Havana bar where folk swapped instruments in a joyful celebration of talent and soul, and the incomparable Le Casa de la Trova in the heart of Trinidad where the band and dancing were like something out of a film set: think ‘Sinners’, but under a Caribbean blanket of stars and no vampires. 

You want an idea of that Cuba; down at heel but joyous, inter-generational, spontaneous, cultural and cool, very cool, then Daymé Arocena, the young Afro-Cuban jazz singer from Havana pretty much captures it for me.

 

So much music of such variety has sprung out of Cuba over the years that it is hard to know where to begin but colonialism is as good a place to start as any, because it was the combination of predominantly Spanish colonialists and the rhythms of the African slaves that are the two key elements that remain even today. 

The guitar, violins, piano and melody that were bought by the Spanish colliding with polyrhythmic percussion of Africa are at the core of the multitude of musical styles that Cuba has forged. 

The early fusions of this hybridity are still kept alive by groups such as Santiago de Cuba’s Chagui de la Maya with the call and response vocals reminiscent of songs sung by slaves as they toiled in sugar cane plantations.

 


Yet for all of Cuba’s deep historical musical roots it is also something the Cuban government invests a lot of resource and time in. It has invested in developing music education in schools - with music given equal standing to academic subjects and starting at a young age. This can involve up to eight hours a week over the full twelve years of formal education .

This education focuses on classical music as well traditional Cuba music. 

More gifted students are directed towards specialist schools as the video below shows.

Check out the gifted Gavilan twins:

Classical music is the starting point on the Cuban school music curriculum but then the multitude of Cuban musical styles starts to be explored: bolero, songo, guarancha, danzon, mambo, bata, son, guajira, rumba, pilon and tova. And that is just a selection. 

A personal favourite style of mine is Afro-Cuban jazz and currently one of the hottest acts are teenage young brothers Fabio and Diego Abreu whose talent is breath-taking and covers everything from mambo to old school jazz classics such as Duke Ellington’s ‘Take the A Train’ of which this superlative version is thoroughly ‘Cubanified’.

Of course Cuban musicians don’t just stay in Cuba. 

They break out periodically into the wider global musical consciousness. 

Perhaps most notable has been the Bueno Vista Social Club and their global hit ‘Chan Chan’, which has now become a standard in every tourist hotel in Havana as well as remixed and repackage across the World. And then there is even Cuban hip hop which I first discovered in 1998 when stumbling upon a car parked up on the beach in Trinidad with hip hop blasting out of the CD player whilst a crowd gathered around cracking beers and throwing down moves as the sea shimmered against the white sand and the sun beat down. 

A dictatorial communist regime it most certainly did not feel like in that moment, and to be fair it rarely did anywhere. Poor, yes, virtually no advertising and certainly ‘down at heel’ but surprisingly upbeat and super friendly. This was in the time of Fidel Castro: El Presidente. Orishas were perhaps the only hip hop act that translated outside of Cuba and they relocated to France where there sound seemed to resonate more than in the UK.

Yet as observed at the start, these are very troubled times for Cuba. The romance of Castro’s revolution and an alternative path to development, once under-pinned by education, health, art and music is unravelling. Investment is non-existent and a diaspora focused in Florida is circling ready to pick at the bones of the revolutionary dream as every institution of the state appears to be reeling. 

Yet even under these disintegrating conditions music survives. 

As the Irish percussionist and musicologist Ruaairi Glasheen observed in a recent visit to Cuba in February 2026 the drum “meant power, it meant resistance, the drum meant revolution and despite the hardship many in Cuba continue to face today these rhythms persist against all odds”. 

The music never stops.

Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.

Let's hope the music never stops.