DANZÓN VS. TWO STEPS | The Harvard Cubans

DANZÓN VS. TWO STEPS AND THE CULTURAL EXCHANGE

Author: Marial Iglesias Utset

Music and dance played an extraordinary role during the six weeks that the Cuban Teachers spent at Harvard in the summer of 1900. Twice a week between July 4 and August 15, the teachers gathered in the Harvard's Hemenway Gymnasium and spent the evening dancing and socializing with the Harvard students who served as their guides and instructors with other Harvard associates, and also with prominent members of the Cambridge community.

A ballroom is always a stage, a performative space where dance sets politics in motion. Dancing necessarily brings people together, moving in rhythmic affinity, in a coordinated way that creates the illusion of an accomplished unity. But, at the same time, the subtle array of gender, ethnic, and class differences that define (and divide) us as social beings, make themselves manifest through music, body language, hairstyles, and styles of clothing. Social relationships between the sexes or between members of different classes, nationalities, or ethnic groups, as well as shifts in the concepts of acceptable moral and social practices, are thoroughly staged on the floor of the ballroom, a mirror, or microcosm of culture at large.

The series of ten concerts given under the auspices of the Catholic societies of Boston and Cambridge for the teachers make a fascinating case study of the dance hall as a space for political negotiation and cultural exchange. The romantic descriptions of "petite senoritas, with alluring black eyes and languid air of perfect contentment gliding over the shining surface of the Hemenway Gymnasium floor, guided and escorted by Harvard boys,"(1) captured the imagination of the readers of the Cambridge and Boston newspapers. Boosted by the extensive coverage of the concerts and dances in the media, often accompanied by beautiful drawings of the occasions, the Harvard Cubans balls became the social sensation of the summer.

Upper-class Americans —some, members of the Boston elite whose surnames were engraved on the walls of Harvard's buildings— and Cubans of "all shades of complexion" and across the social spectrum —from rural teachers with the humblest origins to socialites from Havana, who frankly, under normal circumstances, would never have met in the same dance hall back in Cuba— intermingled on the dance floor in the Harvard Gymnasium. The pieces included in the music programs replicated the heterogeneity of the crowd: old fashion ballroom's classics like waltzes and quadrilles, alternated with brand new "modern" dances, like the American two-step, along with "typical" Cuban pieces like zapateo, contradanzas, habaneras, and danzones. A local band, the Rockett's, hired by the organizers, furnished the music at the concerts. Some of the Cuban teachers, talented amateur musicians themselves, joined the musicians on the stage, playing the piano, not just adding "local flavor" to the occasion, but displaying genuine musical cubania.

By the early 1890s, Americans were in love with the multi-strained "March and Two-Step." The two-step was a lively double-quick march, danced with a light leap in each step. Marches were integral to the musical life of the period, played, with significant variations, as much on the ballrooms as on parade grounds. There was something gay and optimistic about these fast pieces, in tune with the also fast-moving pace of the growing economy in the country. Before long, the two-step also assimilated the syncopated rhythms of the so-called "rag dances," emerging from Louisiana and the black enclaves of the Midwest. The combination was a killer: many pieces became wildly popular, and in just a few years, the ragtime march or two-step was as American as baseball or pumpkin pie.(2)

By contrast with the quick pace of the two-step, the quintessential Cuban piece, the danzón, was deliberately slow, sensual, almost voluptuous, but not explicitly so. When dancing, couples embraced, in a hip-to-hip position, with the man's arms around his female partner's waist. The choreography, with its rhythmical feints, advances, and retreats, played with the idea of the physical intimacy of the dance floor embrace, but avoiding vulgarity, staging a restrained sense of decorum that was part of the performance. "The Cubans seem to delight in the slow and short step dances, were grace and style in movement abound, rather than a breakneck speed dance," observed a journalist covering one of the dances for the Boston Herald.(3)

When commenting on the dances "native to Cuba," another columnist writing for the Cambridge Chronicle, also stressed the slow pace of the danzones and h abaneras: "These move slowly and languorously, as befits all exercise in a hot country, and gracefully and in truth majestically, as befits the proud blood of the race." Even the waltz —"national to every civilized country"— was danced by the Cubans "with the characteristically slow and easy dignity of their own dances, in charming contrast to the other American couples on the floor." The Cuban music -added the commentator- "sounds strange and almost discordant to the Northern ear for the rhythm of the dance is carried by a few bars repeated over and over."(4)

The Cambridge Chronicle' s writer perhaps did not have an appreciation for Cuban music. Still, he had a good ear indeed: the rhythm marked by "a few bars repeated over and over," in the tunes played at the Hemenway at Harvard, was without doubts the "clave," the rhythmic key that was the imprint of West African music on the music of Cuba.

During the previous century, not just in Cuba but elsewhere in the Caribbean, popular musicians, many of them black or mulattos, created new creole musical genres by improvising when playing European scores, slipping in West African rhythms and inflections. Hence, reinvigorated by the introduction of large numbers of Africans that kept swelling the workforces of Cuba's plantations until the late 1860s, the African musical tradition ended permeating almost every genre of music on the island. As early as 1837 the novelist and poet Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel (1797–1871) writing to his best friend, the abolitionist Domingo del Monte, lamented what he called the "Africanization" of the Cuban dances: "While watching our boys and girls at their waltzes and contradances, who can fail to be struck by how closely their movements mimic those of the blacks at their cabildos? Who can fail to see that the dancers' steps echo the drums of the Tangos? The victims of slavery -asserted Tanco- are taking revenge for the cruel treatment we have inflicted upon them: "by infecting us with customs and manners that are appropriate to the savages of Africa."(5)

Leaving aside the unconcealed racism of Felix Tanco (racism and abolitionism often went hand to hand in Cuba) he was right about the reach of African cultural "contagion": by the 1850s the Cuban danza or c ontradanza, a creolized version of the French contredanse, with a conspicuously African rhythm pattern; was so widespread across the country and the social spectrum that it was reported danced "in the most solemn function of the capital, as well as in the most indecent c hangüí [festive occasion] of the farthest corner of the Isle."(6)

The Cuban danzón is the direct successor to the c ontradanza in terms of both dance routine and music. Born in the 1870s in Matanzas, and initially played at the balls of the societies of color, the danzón was quickly adopted by white middle-class performers in Havana. Soon it was danced everywhere, even in the high society's fancy ballrooms. Inherited from the c ontradanza, the danzón's Afro-Caribbean tinge, -assert the musicologist Peter Manuel- "now became unmistakable and overwhelming, in the insistent cinquillos, and the sensually swaying hips of the dancers."(7)

As it happened with the two-step in America, the rapid ascent to the popularity of the danzón was dramatic. However, very soon, the closed-couple format increasingly adopted by the dance devotees exacerbated sexual and racial concerns, propelled in the 1880s by the fear of interracial mixing that the process of abolition of slavery in Cuba fostered. Moralists ranted against it, denouncing the music as rowdy and the dance as obscene. Supporters of the Spanish colonialism used the widespread popularity of a dance with African roots as a proof of the "savagery "of the Cubans, a condition that made then unfit for citizenship.

Nevertheless, in the end, the conservatives lost the battle: the d anzón, with its mix of European (white) and African (black) heritages, fitted perfectly with the discourse of racially inclusive nationhood promoted by the leaders of the independence movement in the 1890s. After all, a "nation for all" needed a "dance for all," too.(8) Therefore, in the late 1890s, the danzón, as played primarily by black and mulatto musicians like Miguel Faílde, Antonio "Papaíto" Torroella, and Raimundo Valenzuela, was accepted without reservation by the majority of Cubans, enjoyed by dancers of all classes and races.

In 1898 during the last days of the Spanish sovereignty, the unofficial "national air," the Bayamo anthem, was performed countless times throughout the island, in defiance of the authority of the retreating colonial government. Played at different tempos and with varying lyrics and musical arrangements, the "Bayamesa" had become a popular tune, frequently performed by the same musicians that played danzón at dance halls. An incident in October of 1898 illustrates the peculiar closeness between the danzón and the hymn, at a time when both were being turned into symbols of c ubania in the twilight of the colonial era. The owner of a small Havana café called "La Reina" was taken, along with his piano man, a black musician, to jail on the grounds of "upsetting public order" by playing loudly and repeatedly the patriotic anthem on the café's piano. They both swore at the court case that the tune played on the piano was not precisely the anthem, but the "melody of a d anzón with a very similar-sounding part to it."

Thus, when the last Spanish troops finally departed Cuba, on January 1 of 1899, both the d anzón a nd the Bayamo anthem played a crucial part in the celebrations organized everywhere in the island. On the first day of 1899, the Spanish flag over the Morro Castle in Havana was lowered, formally ending four centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Even though the flag raised in its place was the American and not the Cuban one, the habaneros anyway made the occasion a big f iesta. During the day, the Havana dwellers thronged the streets, screaming Viva Cuba Libre, and singing the B ayamesa loudly. At night the city's houses, decorated with Cuban flags, opened their doors for dancing parties with danzones that lasted until sunrise the next day. A popular sainete [one-act comedy] immortalized the occasion with the following "guaracha" verses sang at the opening of the first scene:

Party away Habaneros,

Domination is no more,

and the Spanish colors

must come down at midday.

In their place will go up

the American flag

but soon will it yield

to the Cuban.

Habaneros, party away!(9)

An émigré Cuban journalist, returning to Havana from the United States in early January of 1899 was a witness to the centrality of patriotic music in the nationalist celebrations. When he arrived, he was expecting to find a disheartened city full of U.S. flags, with American soldiers stationed in every corner. To his amazement, instead, the man related, "our beloved Cuban flag flew everywhere." "Were you to ask us what sound predominates at this unique hour; we would say that it is the sound of the Anthem of Bayamo." Without venturing out very far, in fact by not going any further than the balcony of the house in which he was writing his article, the writer could hear the strains of the anthem, interpreted differently, "according to the musical temperament of the person playing it," on seven or eight pianos at the same time.

Another traveler, this time the American George Kennan, a journalist commissioned by the Outlook magazine to write about the changes in Cuban society prompted by the U.S. military occupation, attended a Sunday mass followed by a dancing party in the eastern town of Baracoa on January 1, 1899. The religious ceremony by itself, modest and not that well attended, did not impress him at all, but the music played at it struck his attention the most. During the mass, a group of musicians, a band with a saxophone, a kettle-drum, a big brass horn, and a gourd rattle, executed "a series of slow, melancholy chants, interrupted and enlivened now and then by what sounded like a march from a comic opera." For two or three minutes at a time the voices "would sing dolefully to the accompaniment of saxophone and horn, and then the whole orchestra would dash suddenly into the quicker and more cheerful melody of the march, whose strongly marked time was accentuated by the measured throbs of the deep-toned kettle-drum and the sharp, staccato clicks of the gourd rattle."(10) It was after the service was over that Kennan realized that what he mistook for an opera-bouffe march were indeed the chords of Bayamesa, that probably did not sound that much like a solemn patriotic march when performed by a "charanga" band at the church.

When the mass was over, Kennan was invited to attend a party at the priest's house, joined by -according to his own words- "a crowd of interested spectators of both sexes, all ages, and all shades of chocolate brown."(11) The party was much livelier and better attended than the religious ceremony, and the same group of musicians changed roles: instead the solemn sacred music and patriotic marches played at the church; they shifted to dazzling waltz and “sabrosos danzones.”

Soon, -according to the narration of George Kennan- "the guitar, the kettle drum, the gourd rattle, and the scratch gourd struck up the queer, barbaric music of the Cuban danzon," The Afro-Caribbean tinge on the danzon did not go unnoticed by the American visitor: "Both in the music and in the movements of the "danzon" it is easy to trace the influence that the negro, in Cuba, has had over the Spaniard. The music especially, with its queer, broken time, the sharp, staccato click of its gourd rattle, the throbbing of its deep-toned guitar, and the rolling, muffled, intermittent thunder of its drum, is as unmistakably African as anything to be heard on the upper Nile or in a jungle on the banks of the Congo."(12)

Thomas Bentley Mott, an American officer that spend the winter of 1898-1899 in Havana was enthralled by the dance-mania that seemed to afflict the Cubans: "There are public balls every night many of which are given in the theatres after the performance is over, and which last until early morning." The danzón, "the national dance of the Cubans" according to Bentley, is "a species of very slow round dance with something of the mechanism of our two-step, but a couple will dance it for any length of time in the space of a square yard, and the steps are not six inches in length." The music, -he asserts- "has no regularly marked time, but is a sort of barbaric rhythm, accentuated by the wild notes of the cornet and drum (...)."(13)

However, Thomas Bentley noticed that not everyone in Havana danced the danzón the same way: "Almost nothing else is danced among the lower classes, and they seem passionately fond of this amusement. As rendered by these people the danzón is exceedingly vulgar, and if tried in a dance hall in New York the police would probably not be needed to put the couple out." In contrast, Bentley affirmed, "as done by well-bred Cubans this dance is graceful, wholly modest, and entirely suited to their tropical climate. The favorite dances, however, among the higher classes continue to be the waltz and two-step, which they dance exactly as we do, and quite as well."(14)

Some representatives of the Cuban “better classes” concurred with American officers like Bentley or visitors like Kennan about the “vulgar” characteristics of the danzon, due to the obvious presence, in the music and also in the way that it was danced, of African musical components.Although the inclusion of anthems (especially the "Bayamesa," by now the unofficial national anthem) was universally endorsed, because it demonstrated that the country had adapted to modern practice and because it showed a desire for independence and the fruits of citizenship, no such agreement existed regarding other ways of expressing the culture of popular music.

The music played to enliven celebrations was also the subject of disagreement and debate during this period. The differences between an elite culture that defended and celebrated the virtues of a "civilized" Cuba (formed in the image of the nations of the West) and the idea of cultural identity, and of how it manifested itself, held by the masses, were abundantly clear during these years a segment of the nationalist group believed it imperative to eradicate, or —if that proved impossible— to at least conceal from the eyes of the North Americans popular forms of cultural expression (such as certain types of African-influenced music and dance) which it considered "barbaric," "backward," and "unworthy of modern times."

Even in earlier times, during the colonial period, the more fanatical "modernizers" and "moralizers" had done battle, through the periodical press and by influencing legislation, to control the apparent creole desire to dance everywhere and at all hours. Dancing and idleness, cockfights and the lottery, were key ingredients in the discourse about a set of resolutely orientalist qualities which the elite proposed as the nub of the "deeply rooted" characteristics of the "masses," or of the racially mixed person "found in the population of the tropics." This discourse also had a blatantly racist aspect and was laden with sexist stereotypes, the aim of which was to trace a line separating the "correct" and "hygienic" practices and social etiquette of those "above" from the "barbaric"and "uncontrolled" ways in which the masses comported themselves.

Such a line between the upper and lower classes would block or at least regulate excessive contact and mixing which encounters like those on the dance floor or in the cockfighting pit furnished, sign of "backwardness" and "barbarism," and considered incompatible with the "modern ways" which the elites hoped to cultivate among those who aspired to become "citizens" of the future Cuban Republic.

In Ignacio Sarachaga's sainete (one-act musical play), ¡Arriba con el Himno!, the duel between the danzón and the two-step is clearly settled in favor of the first:

That flighty dance,
—as everyone knows—
is more worthy of a wake

than of a worldly hall.
Why, it's not just a horror,
it offends our patriotism:
so dance it, interventionists,
if that's what you want!

Because the Cuban who manages

to see our future,
need only choose
our Cuban dance!
As long as the danzón exists

and our orchestras wail

Not a sole will saddle us

with the weight of annexation!

Out with the American dance!

And long live our danzón.

The Two Steps" / "Where are you off to, Cubanita, /all drenched in sweat, / in the arms of that Yankee / running down the hall / dragged in a dizzying whirl / like a flower by the wind? Are you dancing? Falsehood! / (and pardon the expression) / to dance is not to be a martyr, / to dance is something better: / it's to move lightly / to the sounds of a danzón . . . / The two steps! What sort of dance is that?/ that's done at such breathless pace / half collision, half thrown elbows / toes stepped on, cries of pain, / with chest thrust out / and nerves all on edge / frenzied, delirious.

Footnotes:

1. THE BOSTON HERALD, July 7, 1900.

2. Ragtime dominated American popular music from the late 1890s until the late 1910s. Out of it came subsequent generations of popular song and jazz. See: History of Ragtime, Library of Congress, retrieved at https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200035811/. Jasen, David, and Gene Jones. That American Rag: The Story of Ragtime from Coast to Coast; New York: Schirmer, 2000.Berlin, Edward A. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, “Two-Stepping to Glory: Social Dance and the Rhetoric of Social Mobility”, Malnig Julie, Etnofoor, Vol. 10, No. 1⁄2.

3. BOSTON HERALD check date

4. “Second Ball Given Under Auspices of Catholic Societies”, CAMBRIDGE CHRONICLE, July 14, 1900.

6. Esteban Pichardo, Diccionario Provincial de Voces Cubanas, Habana, 1861, p.89

7. Peter Manuel, Creolizing the Contradance in the Caribbean, ed. Manuel Peter, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2009, p. 93. Also see: Carpentier, Alejo: La música en Cuba, Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana, 1979; Galán, Natalio: Cuba y sus sones, Pre-Textos, Artegraf S.A., Madrid, Spain, 1997.

8. Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore Danzón: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance, Oxford University Press, NYC, 2013, pp-98-106
Alejandro, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba, UNC Press, Chapel Hill & London, 2001, p.181-182.

9. Habaneros a gozar/Cesó la dominación/y el hispano pabellón/a las doce se ha de arriar. /En su lugar subirá la bandera americana;/pero pronto dejará/ ese puesto a la cubana/ ¡Habaneros, a gozar!. Ignacio Sarachaga: “¡Arriba con el Himno! Revista política, joco-seria y bailable en un acto, cinco cuadros y apoteosis final”, 1900, included in Rine Leal: Teatro Bufo. Antología, v. II, p. 284.

10. George Kennan, The Regeneration of Cuba: The Old Town of Baracoa, The Outlook, April 18, 1899, pp.817

11. Idem,p.817

12. George Kennan, The Regeneration of Cuba: The Old Town of Baracoa, The Outlook, April 18, 1899, p.818.

13. Bentley Mott, Thomas, “The Social Life of Havana”, Scribner’s Magazine, vol.27, February 1900, num.2,p. 14 Bentley Mott, Thomas, “The Social Life of Havana”, Scribner’s Magazine, vol.27, February 1900, num.2.