Cuban Tobacco

From Countries Quest, "Spanish Rule, Prosperity and Plunder": Cuba’s strategic location in the Caribbean made it become an important port and military base. The Spanish organized a shipping system that transported European goods to the Americas and returned American wealth and resources to Spain. Cuba was an important part of this system. It guarded the sea channels through which the treasure ships passed twice a year. Havana harbor served as a base for refitting the treasure fleets before the return voyage to Spain.

This concentration of Spanish treasure drew the attention of other European powers. The French attacked Havana in 1555, only two years after it had been named the new capital of Cuba. King Charles I of Spain immediately established a naval base. He built several imposing fortresses to guard the mouth of Havana’s harbor and stationed between 400 and 1,000 soldiers to defend Cuba’s coasts. Suddenly Cuba began attracting settlers who served as military personnel, built ships, provided food, and constructed buildings. However, little of the riches that passed through Havana Harbor reached the Cuban population, who remained poor, with very little economic security.

The Spanish military presence was focused around Havana in the west, leaving eastern Cuba open to French and English raids. Eastern Cuba also emerged as a center of illegal trade in Cuban tobacco, cattle, and sugar. Many Spanish colonists regularly broke the law to trade with foreign merchants because they disliked the official Spanish policy. This policy decreed that only Spanish merchants could trade with the colony, keeping import prices high and reducing profits on Cuban exports.

In the 17th century Cuba began importing African slaves. The slaves replaced the rapidly disappearing indigenous people as laborers in copper mines and on sugar plantations. By 1650 African slaves numbered 5,000, compared to an indigenous population of 2,000. Under Cuban law slaves could buy their freedom, and eventually the Cuban population contained a high number of free blacks and mulattoes.

The arrival of slaves resulted in one of the most notable characteristics of Cuba’s heritage: a racially mixed population. During the first two centuries of Spanish settlement, few European women settled in Cuba. Spanish men married or had relationships with indigenous and African women. Cuba’s classes and races blended, producing a mixture of religions, music, language, foods, and customs that combined three cultures into a new Cuban culture.

In the early 18th century, Spain introduced a series of administrative reforms in its colonies designed to modernize colonial institutions. The first reform focused on the tobacco trade, creating a tobacco monopoly in Cuba that set prices, regulated production, and sold products abroad. The monopoly kept most of the profits for itself, and its policies provoked three armed rebellions among Cuban tobacco growers between 1717 and 1723. The last uprising resulted in a compromise, which allowed Cuban growers to sell two-thirds of their crops outside the monopoly.

Another attempt at reform centered on sugar production. The royal company established in 1740 made high profits from the sugar trade. However, its wealth created inflation within Cuba, driving small farmers and people not involved in sugar to near ruin. Sugar output expanded, and by 1760 those with influence in the sugar monopoly became Cuba’s new elite.

During the 18th century, Cuba began developing its own cultural and social institutions. Cubans built seminaries—schools for training priests—and founded other schools, including the University of Havana, established in 1728. Access to higher learning and the arts was not restricted to the elite class. Slaves who had purchased their freedom began forming associations that paid for education and medical treatment for their members. Some blacks were able to advance into the middle class as well, but the owners of large sugar plantations continued to dominate the economy, and most wealth went to Spaniards and white Creoles (Spaniards born in Cuba).



Some of the Spanish policies that had hampered Creole hopes for economic advancement ended abruptly as a result of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which pitted France and Spain against the British. In 1762 Havana was attacked and held by the British. Though the British occupation lasted only ten months, it opened Cuba’s economy to free trade with Britain and her colonies. When the British pulled out of Cuba at the end of the war, Spain relaxed its trade policy and permitted Spanish colonies to trade among themselves. This increased Havana’s importance to both Spain and the other Spanish colonies. (source: Countries Quest )

History of Cuban Cigars

History of Cuban Cigars

The tobacco plant, historians concur, came to Cuba from South America somewhere between 3000 and 2000 B.C., where it became an integral part of the cultural life of the island's Indian natives.

Believed to have medicinal qualities, the raw leaves were twisted and smoked for centuries before Columbus sailed to the New World. The cigar's introduction to Europe and the rest of the world would soon follow.

Although royal European leaders, including King Phillip II of Spain, condemned the plant as evil, Cuban tobacco gained popularity. Spain soon realized the commercial value of the plant and, during the late 16th century, began playing a pivotal role in its manufacturing and distribution throughout Europe.

Initially tobacco was only distributed as a raw material through Spanish royal offices, assuring Spaniards an unimpeded flow of tax money. In 1717, King Felipe V cemented the royal monopoly of Cuban tobacco, known simply as the "Tobacco Monopoly," and Cubans were relegated to growing tobacco solely for Spain. During this period, distributing tobacco seeds to a non-Spanish colony was punishable by death.

But cigar cultivation was already deeply rooted in Cuba, resulting in the development of planting, curing and rolling skills that would make Cuban's experts in the field-it's a culture that has defied reproduction elsewhere. Tobacco became Cuba's top agricultural product during the 18th century, quickly permeating Cuban culture and society.

In 1817, King Ferdinand VII issued a royal decree allowing the free trade of tobacco from Cuba to the rest of the world, albeit through Spanish ports. It was the birth of the modern Cuban cigar industry.

Cigar cultivation and production has changed very little since then.

Today a majority of Cuban tobacco is grown in the Pinar del Rio province, in the western section of the island. The singular microclimate and rich soil of this area lends Cuban tobacco its unique flavor, which experts say is the finest in the world. (source: Only Cuban Cigars)

Mi Tierra, " My Homeland " by Gloria Estefan

LYRICS: In English

English

"About my homeland"

Of my beautiful homeland, of my saintly homeland,

I hear that cry of the drums and the timpani.

And this song that a brother sings,

Who lives far away from his homeland,

And the memory of it makes him mourn.

A song that lives in tune

Of his sorrow, of his own weeping,

and he listens to it and grieves.

The land that you ache for,

The land that he gives,

The land that makes you sigh

If you don’t see it often.

The land where he was born;

You can not forget,

Because he has your origins

And he leaves that behind.

They follow the songs, and the sadness

And each night with the moon

He follows the sound of a sad song.

And each keeps silent as he follows it to my town.

He groans and laments,

He is nostalgic.

And this song that he follows in tune,

Runs in the blood,

And brings more strength to the heart

(http://lyricstranslate.com)

Mi Tierra, " My Homeland " by Gloria Estefan

Greener Grass: Cuba, Baseball and the United States

GREENER GRASS: Cuba, Baseball and the United States, by Aaron Woolf, Rudolph Callegari and Nancy Roth

The passion for the sport on both sides of the Straits of Florida was evident in 1999, when a historic two-game series pitted the Baltimore Orioles against the Cuban National Team. For the first time in 40 years, a major league team played in Havana, and the Cuban team traveled to Baltimore. In packed stadiums, cowbells and fans, and protesters and conga drums provided a backbeat for the series. But, behind the excitement lay a complex history of competition and cooperation that stretches back to baseball’s 19th century origins.

Greener Grass: Cuba, Baseball and the United States highlights the defection of Cuban pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, who was signed by the New York Yankees in 1998.

By looking at more than a century of baseball history, Greener Grass: Cuba, Baseball and the United States illustrates the ways in which the game has served as a common ground and a test of strength between politically estranged countries. It also reveals how the sport can be seen as a microcosm that reflects divergent national identities, as well as underlying tensions of race, democracy, and opportunity.

Featured interviews include Tommy Lasorda of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who was a former player in the Cuban Professional League; Wilfredo Sanchez, Cuba’s all-time hits leader; Rudolfo Fernandez, former coach of the Almendares and Habana baseball clubs in Cuba and star player for The New York Cubans in the Negro Leagues; and many others.

PBS, Greener Grass

CUBA'S TIN PAN ALLEY 1947

Life Magazine reported, "Cuba's Tin Pan Alley: From Havana's shabbiest cabarets and voodoo lodges pours an endless flood of sultry rhythms, which are danced to all over the world, by: Winthrop Sargent 6 October 1947:

In 1930, on the heels of the stock-market crash, a wailing, bombilating Cuban tune called The Peanut Vendor hit Broadway and set America's feet and hips squirming in the intricacies of a new dance-the rumba. The significance of this event in the history of U.S. mores at first seemed slight. Prognosticators noted the trend, attributed it to depression-frayed nerves and gave it a year or so to peter out. But in the course of a decade the rhumba had not only shown that it was here to stay, it had become the basis of a huge American industry. Latin-American dance bands equipped with maracas and bongos elbowed U.S. jazz bands in nightclubs and ballrooms from New York to San Francisco. Rumba specialists like Xavier Cugat made fortunes in Afro-Latin rhythm. In one year (1946) Americans paid Arthur Murray nearly $14 million to teach them the dance. Rumba enthusiasts still account for more than 60% of his enormous business.

The Peanut Vendor, which started it all, was followed by a steady stream of similar Cuban song hits, which began nosing the conventional American fox trots from their top positions on Tin Pan Alley's best-seller lists. Small Cuban farmers neglected sugar cane and tobacco to raise gourds that could be manufactured into maracas. Music began to rival sugar, cigars and rum as one of Cuba's leading exports, and the American man in the street, buying it in vast quantities every time he got near a juke box, became its leading consumer. Of all the popular music played today over the U.S. air waves, on juke boxes and in Hollywood movies, approximately 20% is Latin-American, and nearly all of that 20% comes from the small island of Cuba.

Though Cubans are gratified by this increasing demand, they are quick to point out that there is nothing new about their trade in musical exports. Economically Cuba may be just another so-called banana republic. Politically it may be a hotbed of tropical instability. But musically it has rivaled New York as the popular musical capital of the Western Hemisphere for nearly a hundred years. Little Cuba's amazing influence on the world's popular music started in the early 19th Century when an itinerant Spaniard named Sebastian Yradier settled in Havana, listened to the languid, cajoling tunes of the natives and wrote a tune called El Areglito. El Areglito became the first habanera.

Imported to Spain, the habanera became a standard feature of Spanish folk music, and a generation later Georges Bizet wrote one that would up as the most popular tune in France's most popular opera, Carmen. Yradier followed up El Areglito with the old Cuban favorite La Paloma, which was commissioned by Mexico's Emperor Maximilian and has served as a model for Latin-American tunes for three generations. Somewhere in the 19th Century, according to scholars, Cubans also invented the tango, which they exported to Argentina, giving the Argentinians what has since become their most characteristic form of national folk music. The rumba and the conga came later. But these are merely the most notable of Cuba's recent musical contributions to the world. For home consumption Cubans produce a clattering assortment of sons, guarachas, danzons, puntos and boleros that still keep the hot Havana nights in a continuous uproar of melody. The curious thing about all this Cuban music is that there is nothing generically Cuban about it. Its music is written and played in a hybrid musical language that is part Spanish and part African Negro. Its melodies usually echo the sultry songs that were brought to Cuba from Latin and Moorish Spain. Its rhythms are descended from the tom-tom beats of the African jungle.

Afro-Cuban Pérez Prado: Birth of the Mambo

Mambo Mexicano

In 1947, Prado left Cuba for reasons that are not completely clear. In his unpublished biography of Prado, Michael Mcdonald-Ross quotes Rosendo Ruiz-Quevedo as saying that Prado's incorporation of North American jazz into the mambo was fiercely resisted by certain elements of the Cuban musical establishment. Especially enraged was Fernando Castro, the local agent of the Southern Music Publishing Company and Peer International which had a monopoly of Cuban music publishing at the time. Mcdonald-Ross wrote, "Castro denounced Prado by stating that he was adulterating Cuban music with jazz. As a result, Prado's arranging assignments ended and, unable to continue to work in Cuba, he left, eventually to settle in Mexico." When Prado left Cuba in 1947, he embarking on tours which took him first to Buenos Aires, Argentina, then to Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Mcdonald-Ross called these tours "unrewarding," but other accounts say that he won the adulation of teenage dance fans, causing traffic jams and near riots wherever he played.

In 1948, Prado settled in Mexico City which, along with Vera Cruz, was a popular destination for expatriate Cubans. There he formed his own band and established himself as a regular performer at the Club 1-2-3, reputedly a hang-out for the idle rich, becoming known as the "Glenn Miller of Mexico." [A couple of years later, during his first tour of the United States, he would be retitled the "Stan Kenton of Mexico."] Prado soon became a popular choice as musical director for many Mexican films and also became a movie actor (often playing himself), where he mugged and cavorted across the set in a zoot-suit.

Between 1947 and 1949, Prado recorded at least 24 songs in with vocalist and fellow Cuban Beny Moré (1919-1963) which were released as 78 rpm singles.[3] Moré arrived from Cuba with the Matamoros Trio and when the Trio returned home, he opted to stay in Mexico City to sing with Prado's orchestra. The songs that the orchestra recorded on RCA's Mexicana label proved to be so popular that in 1949 Prado signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, proper, for international release. His first recording for them was cut in Mexico City on December 12, 1949, and resulted in "Qué rico el mambo" and "Mambo No. 5" being released on two sides of a 78. This record, with its scorching brass and persuasive percussion, took the Americas by storm and the mambo craze was formally launched.[4]

In Dance Magazine, Robert Farris Thompson, Jr., wrote, "Mambo was soon the toast of Mexico City. To group after group, rich and poor, illiterate and collegiate, special Mambos were dedicated. One wave was for the working class: the 'Fireman Mambo,' the 'Filling Station Mambo,' the 'Newsboy Mambo,' etc. Another covered the educational scene: the 'Normal School Mambo,' the 'Mexico University Mambo,' and the 'Polytechnical Institute Mambo.' The sports world was saluted: ('[Mambo] del Futbol'); rich girls were whistled at ('La Nina Popoff'); the GIs of the 65th USA Infantry were given tribute ('Mambo del 65'). It was as if Harvard undergraduates, New York garment workers, [and] bank clerks everywhere turned on the radios to hear Sinatra singing jazzy songs about them. The Mexicans' response was sensational."

It was also common for dancers to act out spontaneous pantomimes to the theme of the song being played. For example, while dancing to the "Telephone Operator's Mambo," a woman might mimic working at a switchboard on her partner's chest, while dancers to the "Taxi Drivers Mambo" might imitate driving a cab.

In April, 1951, Newsweek reported that in Peru the dance had driven it's practitioners to such wild exuberance that Cardinal Juan Gualberto Guevara of Lima denied absolution to anyone who danced "al compas del mambo." That year, Perez Prado composed a song entitled "Al compas del mambo" in response.

Mambo Americano

Anglo listeners in New York and Southern California first heard Prado's singles on Latino radio stations. The songs soon crossed-over to mainstream pop broadcasts and in 1950 Prado scored moderate hits in the US with his early sides. While vacationing in Mexico, arranger Sonny Burke heard "Qué rico el mambo" and covered it as a single called "Mambo Jambo." It became a hit and Prado decided to profit from its success by launching his own tour of the US. He had well-disciplined and thoroughly rehearsed musicians and a simple formula - keep the tunes clean and punchy and include plenty of the shrill horns and bright percussion that the public loved.

His arrival was presaged by Barry Ulanov. Writing in the December, 1950, issue of Metronom

e, Ulanov declared, "The swingingest jazz band in this country right now ain't - it's in Mexico. And furthermore it isn't a jazz band; it blows mambo. Five trumpets, one trombone, four saxophones, five rhythm, one of which is the piano played by its leader, Perez Prado, it out jumps anything around..."

Prado's first appearance in the States was an engagement in New York City at the Puerto Rico Theater in the Bronx during April and May, 1951, where he was hired as a singer. Because of a dispute over rules with Musicians Union Local 802, he was required to perform as a solo act without his orchestra. By May, the union problems were resolved and he and the band played a one-night benefit for the Mexican Youth Center at the Ashland Auditorium in Chicago. In August, they played an eight city tour of the West Coast, including stops at the Zenda Ballroom in Los Angeles, Pasadena's Civic Auditorium, and Sweet's Ballroom in Oakland. Despite stiff admissions of (at the time) $1.25 - $1.85, each hall was packed with up to 3,500 "Mambonicks" and hundreds more were turned away. The bands at the shows were made up of American musicians, many of Latin origin, who were quickly recruited and rigorously rehearsed for only a few days beforehand. They all agreed later that Prado's musical book, much of it in a scrawled manuscript, gave them a tough time.

The tour continued back across the country to New York and then looped through the South on its return to Los Angeles. On the night of October 26, tragedy struck when the bus Prado and his band were riding in overturned near Ft. Worth, Texas, and Delia Romero, a singer and dancer, was killed. There were other serious injuries among the musicians, including Mongo Santamaria, who had just joined the Prado Orchestra. He suffered a broken hip and almost had to have both of his legs amputated. Prado, who sustained cuts and bruises, performed with the aid of crutches for the next few months.

In New York, his popularity grew over the years and Prado moved progressively downtown, first to the Palladium Ballroom on 53rd Street, then (in 1954) to an extended appearance at the chic Starlight Roof of Park Avenue's Waldof-Astoria Hotel.

(source: http://www.laventure.net/tourist/prez_bio2.htm)

MAMBO DOCUMENTARY - Yves Billon

Cuban Rumba's African Slave Roots

This had its origin with the African Negro slaves imported into Cuba, whose dances emphasized the movements of the body rather than the feet. The tune was considered less important than the complex cross rhythms, being provided by a percussion of pots, spoons, bottles, etc. (Raffe, 1964, 431).

It evolved in Havanna in the 19th century by combination with the Contradanza (Sadie, 1980, 5/86). The name 'Rumba' possibly derives from the term 'rumboso orquestra' which was used for a dance band in 1807 (Sadie, 1980, 5/88), although in Spanish, the word 'rumbo' means 'route', 'rumba' means 'heap pile', and 'rhum' is of course an intoxicating liquor popular in the Caribbean (Smith, 1971, 502), any of which might have been used descriptively when the dance was being formed. The name has also been claimed to be derived from the Spanish word for 'Carousel' (Morris, 1969, 1134).

The rural form of the Rumba in Cuba was described as a pantomime of barnyard animals, and was an exhibition rather than a participation dance (Ellfeldt, 1974, 59). The maintenance of steady level shoulders while dancing was possibly derived from the way the slaves moved while carrying heavy burdens (Rust, 1969, 105). The step called the 'Cucaracha' was stomping on cockroaches. The 'Spot Turn' was walking around the rim of a cartwheel (Rust, 1969, 105). The popular Rumba tune 'La Paloma' was known in Cuba in 1866 (Sadie, 1980, 10/530).

The Rumba was introduced into the U.S.A. in the 1930's as a composite of this rural Rumba with the Guaracha, the Son, and the Cuban Bolero (unrelated to the Spanish Bolero) (Ellfeldt, 1974, 59). It was particularly popularised in 1935 by George Raft, who played the part of a suave dancer who wins the heart of an heiress through dance, in the movie 'Rumba', although the male dancing was done mainly by Frank Veloz.

The British dance teacher Pierre Margolie visited Havanna in 1947 and decided that the Rumba was danced with the break step on beat 2 of the bar, rather than on beat 1 as in the American Rumba. This is not entirely true, as the 'beat' of the music is traditionally determined by the rhythm of the Claves (two sticks being hit together). The Claves are hit on half-beats numbers 1,4,7 in the first bar of a two-bar phrase, and half-beats 3,5 of the second bar. Counting full beats, these correspond to beat 1, the half beat before 3, and beat 4 of the first bar, and beats 2 and 3 of the second bar. Ideally one might dance 5 steps over the two bars to match the Clave beats. But instead it was decided to dance only on one of the bars of the Clave sequence. The American Rumba is danced on the first bar Clave beat. Pierre decided to use the second bar, stepping on beats 2 and 3, and he added an extra step on beat 4 for no obvious reason. He brought this back to Britain, together with many steps he learned from Pepe Rivera in Havanna. These steps together with dancing the break on beat 2 rather than beat 1, after many years of heated debate in the 1940's and 1950's, became part of the standard International Cuban Rumba. (Lavelle, 1975, 1).

With only a transfer of weight from one foot to the other on beat 1 of each bar, and the absence of an actual step on this beat, the dance has developed a very sensual character. Beat 1 is a strong beat of the music, but all that moves on that beat are the hips, so the music emphasises the dancing of the hips. This together with the slow tempo of the music (116 beats/minute) makes the dance very romantic. Steps are actually taken on beats 2, 3, and 4. Weight tranfer and turns are performed on the intervening half beats. Again, as in the Samba, the weight is kept forward, with forward steps taken toe-flat, and with minimal movement of the upper torso throughout. (source: History of Latin American Dancing)

Fundamentals of Rumba