In Cuba, enslaved Africans were frequently new arrivals and fully in touch with their African cultural roots.” With the exception of the slave communities known as the Gullah and Geechee people, who live in isolated communities on islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia and have actively preserved and celebrated their West African cultural lineage, Sublette continued, “by 1865, at the end of the American Civil War, most American slaves were generations removed from their African ancestral roots.
Labor trumped the suppression of cultural mores.” The importation of fresh Africans was essential to the global demand.
“The transatlantic slave trade to Cuba was a machine, devouring and killing African laborers within 10 years due to the brutal labor requirements to meet the global demand for sugar. Ned Sublette, the author of the most extraordinary book on this subject, titled Cuba and Its Music From the First Drums to the Mambo, shared these critical observations about the cultural impact of Cuban slavery: The global demand for sugar from Cuban plantations necessitated the constant importation of African slaves as a labor force. This was due to the importance of cane sugar in the global economy. Through the agency of an active transatlantic slave trade which lasted in Cuba until the early 1860s, unbroken lineages to African music and culture existed and thrived. Unlike the U.S., Cuba was more advanced in 1900 in its musical evolution.” However, both are heavily based on European traditions (in respect to the musical form -hymns in the Western European tradition and the marches of military bands). In the U.S., there was no national awareness of what Black music was, other than spirituals and ‘coon-songs’ and ragtime. In the United States, both white and educated/elite Black society considered the blues as a bastardized musical form. In his formative period, he was uncertain of how seriously to pursue the raw African American musical traditions we now call ‘the blues.’ His instincts told him that the blues had musical value, but the prejudices of society (both white and Black) dissuaded him from pursuing it more seriously (until his visit to Havana in 1900 inspired him). Handy was a classically trained musician and composer but without formal conservatory training. Postcard print of Havana’s Obispo Street from 1910Ĭarlos Handy, in written correspondence, gave a quick primer of his grandfather’s background: I have also been guided by the reflections of Carlos Handy, grandson of W.C., who was born in Cuba and lived there in his early years. In this essay, I reference and have interviewed renowned Cuban musicologist Ned Sublette. These topics are the subject of more than a half century of expansive, detailed historical treatises and books. The transformation, reconfiguration, and integration of these differing yet overlapping traditions (music, storytelling, and spirituality) led to a synthesis that is at the heart of what made Handy’s sojourn in Havana, Cuba, so catalyzing. In their various ethnic and tribal permutations along the western coast of Africa (Benin, Dahomey, Togo, Ivory Coast, and Portuguese West Africa ), these traditions further morphed in the diaspora. These traditions reveal a collective cultural legacy that survived the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade and the attempted suppression of this heritage in the New World African diaspora. The oral singing tradition of African slaves shows important intersections and through lines with the cultural mores of West African communal singing for celebrations, harvest, hunting, and burial. The resulting epochal publication, Slave Songs of The United States (1867), documents a culture extant since the 1700s, a culture of songs that convey sorrow, joy, and determination. Handy’s blues revelation equals the critical work of the 1850s abolitionists William Francis Allen, Lucy McKim Garrison, and Charles Pickard Ware, who traveled to the South before and during the American Civil War to notate the oral singing traditions of slaves.
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