Cuban Music History is a deep and fascinating world. Without any doubt, music has a main influence in the personality of the Cubans. It is said that in the island people talk singing, dance when they walk and express their feelings with a song lyrics.

Indigenous population left us a little or almost nothing regarding their life and manners. The Spanish conqueror exterminated our first inhabitants’ traditions in no more than fifty years. Ships used by Colon were already a cultural sample of Spain. Africans were brought to Cuba to replace the small native labor force from many regions of the African continent, with their own cultural manners.

At the beginning of the 16th century, there was a remarkable density and variety of African cultural elements (congos, yorubas, carabalies, arara rhythms) in Cuba together with romances, puntos, zapateos, tonadillas, with religious songs of both trends.

In the 17th century appears the punto guajiro, Cuban folk or peasant music, as an expression of the emerging criollo. The first music actually composed on Cuban soil, such as the works of Esteban Salas (1725-1803), and Juan Paris (1795-1845), is mostly sacred and vocal, with some elements of chamber and symphonic music. It is a music totally rooted in European musical traditions. There were also creolized guarachas and typical conjuntos with very famous sones and claves were well known. While aristocracy was dancing in luxurious saloon balls, black people-and not only them-, were dancing rhythmical and exotic dances, moving their bodies in a very contagious way. Havana was a fleet meeting port and there was a strong fusion of histories, races, rhythms and music.

After black Revolution French people, arrived from Haiti and they brought minuet, rigodon and contradanza. This last one, with some Cuban elements, is considered the beginning of the variety of a creolized music genre. Black people that came with their owners brought the cinquillo from their culture, main rhythm element in the Cuban music. In Oriente, the cinquillo with the rhythm regularity and symmetry of African percussion, gathered with the contradanza, and made it different from the one in Havana.