Tag: Cuba

On Rasta continuum in Cuba

On By Jah BillahIn Dub Culture DepartmentLeave a comment

#rasta #style #Cuba

Real versus fake Rastas

Not unlike in many other Rasta communities around the world some of the more conservative religious brethren have introduced a view and language of authenticity with regards to what it means to be a Rasta. Framed in a discourse of cultural purity, they speak of so-called "real" and "unreal or “fake" Rastas.
But, given the myriad of ways people in Cuba identify with and express Rastafari, who can be considered a “real” Rasta?
The aim of my research has precisely been to go beyond fixed ideas of what constitutes a Rasta and instead look at how and why people define themselves as such and what processes go into making that
identity. Apart from this all-inclusive approach, the movement’s own fragmented entrance into Cuba and the many ways in which it has been appropriated have led to the wide array of definitions and expressions of the movement.

Although I have grouped certain main characteristics together and created certain "types" of Rastas for analytical purposes, in actuality every individual has his/her own idiosyncratic understanding and way of manifesting Rastafari.
Ulf Hannerz’s views on the social organisation of culture are particularly helpful in understanding Rastafari’s heterogeneous character in Cuba:

The social organisation of culture always depends both on the communicative flow and on the differentiation of experiences and interests in society. In the complex society, the latter differentiation is by definition considerable. It also tends to have a more uneven communicative flow - that is, different messages reach different people. The combined effect of both the uneven flow of communications and the diversity of experiences and interests is a differentiation of perspectives among the members of the society.

Rastafari in Cuba has been localised in just such a fashion. In an almost consumer-like attitude towards culture, individuals have selectively chosen, imitated and modified Rasta elements as well as mixed and matched them with other cultural practices. Whilst some have thus consciously hybridised different cultural elements together, others have kept them consciously apart by way of “cultural crossing” or “milieu-moving". Others yet again have adopted what Swidler (1986) has referred to as a “toolkit” attitude towards culture, in which people engage in their everyday activities by “selecting certain cultural elements (both such tacit culture as attitudes and styles and, sometimes, such explicit cultural materials as rituals and beliefs) and investing them with particular meanings in concrete life circumstances“.
In illustrating their skills at maintaining, mixing and serially selecting facets of different lifeways and styles all Rastas have demonstrated a high degree of multiple cultural competence as well as an attachment to a multiplicity of identities. In addition, all Cuban Rastas, even those who insist on an ideology of purity, have to a greater or lesser extent juxtaposed and fused objects, symbols and signifying practices from different and separate domains and in so doing have produced new, creolised versions of Rastafari.

On the whole, what we thus find is a wide variety of identifications with the movement, which can perhaps best be described as a Rasta continuum, ranging from orthodox religious brethren and sistren to those who identify with Rasta as a style. This same continuum is in addition in constant flux as individuals engage in an ongoing process of learning, adding, copying and reinterpreting Rastafari symbols and doctrine. As a cultural phenomenon Rastafari can be said to be in a constant state of cubanisation.

Chapter from:

Katrin Hansing (2001) Rasta, race and revolution: Transnational
connections in socialist Cuba, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27:4, 733-747,
DOI:10.1080/13691830120090476

On African music and transculturation

On By Jah BillahIn dUbLeave a comment

African music forms and rhythms that emerged in the Americas constituted a beat that has “always threaded back to Africa.”

In the words of the Caribbean poet, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the middle passage created “bridges of sound” that carried memories of Africa to the Americas, music that echoed down the generations from “Harlem” to “Havana.”

Individual islands in the Caribbean and the mainland diasporic slave communities in the Americas shared the basic rhythms (and some instruments) derived from Africa. But these were fused with the instruments and rhythms of the cultures with which African slaves interacted, a process that the Cuban ethnomusicologist Frederick Ortiz termed “transculturation.”

Trinidadian calypso and parang, and the samba and son rhythms in Cuba (son was a modified, more refined version of rumba which became popular in the second half of the nine- teenth century) combined the structure and elements of Spanish canción (song) and Spanish guitar with African rhythm and percussion instruments.

Son, samba, rumba, and other Latin and African-Caribbean dances influenced salsa. In the Southern U.S., the European fife and drum convey some of the rural music that has the most authentic African rhythms.

The fife and drum are also the basis of Jonkanoo music in Jamaica (Jonkanoo is a Jamaican Christmas tradition, incorporating African traditions going back to the days of slavery).
This incorporation of European instruments and music forms demonstrates how Africans in the diaspora subverted the dominant culture and asserted positive African identities. Slaves played for their master and learnt European instruments and rhythms but these became syncretized into popular folk music (defined as played with acoustic
instruments). Jamaican mento draws on the fife and drum of Jonkanoo, Pocomania (an African-Christian revivalist cult) and church music, the European quadrille, and slave work songs passed through the generations.

Musical forms in different parts of the diaspora have also retained purer African elements where percussion instruments and call-and-response vocals predominate. Examples here include rumba in Cuba, Rastafarian Nyabhingi in Jamaica, and the Kongo and Yoruba music found in African-derived religious sects such as Kumina in Jamaica,
Shango in Trinidad, Haitian Voodoo, and Cuban Santeria. Such music was performed “beyond the ken” of whites during slavery and continues to be associated with peasant or urban working-class cultures.

From:

Barbara Bush (2006) African Echoes, Modern Fusions: Caribbean Music,
Identity and Resistance in the African Diaspora, Music Reference Services Quarterly.

Image source:  Nyabinghi Drum Circle with Wolf