Cuba and Its Music Quotes

“a gold earring in his left ear,”
― Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo

“Despite the formative influence of Islam on Spanish culture, Afro-Cuba was the least directly Islamized of the major black territories in the New World - and that would seem to be important to understanding why its music is the way it is.
There was a curious symmetry. Whereas Cuba's white people had an (amnesiac) Islamic heritage but most of Cuba's black people had never been Islamized, in the United States it was the opposite—the white people had never been Islamized, but significant numbers of black people came from Islamized regions of Africa.”
― Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo