Los Muñequitos de Matanzas:
Living Legacy of Africa
by Neil Leonard

Rhythm Music Magazine
Vol. 3, Num. 7, July, 1994
Copyright 1994, Neil Leonard

By 1791 Haiti was producing twice the sugar of any colony in the New World. That same year, Haitian slaves revolted and drove the French out, leaving one of the hemisphere’s greatest markets up for grabs. Over the next years, Cuba invested in the most advanced technology and began importing large numbers of slaves directly from Africa to build its sugar industry.

Matanzas, near the turn of the century, was a fertile but largely untended province. In a small village of the same name, several thousand inhabitants lived in thatched houses. Oxen were used to power the sugar-processing mills and to drag the cane from the more remote plantations to Matanzas harbor, where it was loaded on boats and shipped off to Havana for export.

All this was to change in the new century. The introduction of steam boats and railways helped turn Matanzas into Cuba’s most productive zone for sugar. By the mid-1800s, Matanzas accounted for roughly one eighth of the world’s total sugar cane production. Tens of thousands of slaves were imported to work the plantations. With them came the gods and belief systems of numerous ethnic groups of Central and Northwest Africa, making Matanzas a cradle for African culture in the Americas.

In 1952, a group of young musicians were sitting in the “El Gallo” bar in Matanzas City, listening to Cuban guitarist Arsenio Rodriguez on the juke box and slapping out the rhythms on the bar. Surprised by the applause of a crowd of patrons and passers-by, they decided to form a group. They took the name Guaguanco Matancero, after the Afro-Cuban guaguanco rhythm popular in Matanzas. From the beginning the group had a dual repertoire of religious and secular material, which they performed at first in the city’s toughest neighborhoods, Simpson and La Marina. The following year they played in Havana, appearing on television and radio and recording their first 78 rpm record for the Panart label. On the A side was a song called “Los Beodos,” (The Drunks), but it was the B side that literally made a name for the band: “Los Muñequitos de la Calle,” a song about the antics of comic-strip characters, was such a hit that people began referring to the band simply as “Los Muñequitos.”

Over the years the Muñequitos earned a reputation as Cuba’s keepers of rumba, a percussive secular music that is rooted in the Congo/Angola region but sung in Spanish. Rumba is a highly competitive style that was originally performed in the streets. Unlike Afro-Cuban religious music, rumba is used to tell stories about everyday Cuban life, and permits musicians and dancers to use a larger degree of improvisation.

I visited Matanzas in 1988, where I was able to see first-hand a small piece of Africa’s legacy. A mutual acquaintance had given me a letter to take to Cha Cha, a percussionist and founding member of the Muñequitos, at his home in Simpson. Downtown Matanzas still has lines of turn-of-the-century buildings with tiled roofs of red ceramic, high ceilings, wrought iron gates with swirling patterns, and small patios in the center. Simpson, by contrast, is made up almost entirely of one-story row houses that looked like they had not seen a good paint job in thirty years. The streets were dusty and riddled with pot holes.

I found Cha Cha holding court at an abandoned gas station at the very outskirts of the city, surrounded by a dozen middle-aged men drinking beer from plastic gasoline canisters. Cha Cha was very amiable and took me to his home, which consisted of two or three rooms off an alley used to raise chickens.

I was also asked to the home of a friend of Cha-Cha’s, who seemed somewhat better off. His house, which had a garden lined with sugar cane and a living room with a 16-foot ceiling, also featured a startling array of religious paraphernalia. The living room contained an altar mounted on two shoulder poles, a holdover from the massive Yoruba processions that had been outlawed for decades. Another room was soon to house a Yoruba initiation ritual, he explained, showing me cupboards and a chest of drawers packed with color-coded casseroles, plates, and cakes to be used as offerings to the Yoruba gods, or Orishas.

Finally, he took me to a locked shed in the back of his yard. He knocked on the ground twice, asking permission to open the door. Inside was a large cauldron filled with harpoon-shaped sticks, chicken legs, and a human skull. Cha-Cha’s friend took a rum bottle filled with what looked like chicken innards in liquid and poured some of it over the altar, sending insects scattering. Finally, he took a sip from the bottle and spat it out before shutting and locking the shed.

Of the founding members of the original Muñequitos only one remains, percussionist Gregorio Diaz. Both the lead singer and director have children in the group. The band has been in business forty years now, and their unique sound is being passed down to new generations. They have expanded their original lineup to include dancers, enhancing the visual aspect of their performance. The group’s only U.S. tour, in 1992, consisted of six singers, five dancers and three percussionists.

The program they performed was called “Patakin,” Yoruba for “stories of the gods.” It featured religious music in the first half and secular music in the second. The Muñequitos tribute to African gods began with Yoruba chants and bata drumming. The bata is shaped like an hour glass, with a head on each end, and is placed across the lap while played. The mesmerizing bata rhythms place more emphasis on tight group interplay and the building of intricate rhythms rather than virtuosic soloing.

As soon as the drummers got going, dancer Vivian Ramos came out, playing the part of the Orisha Eleggua, the childish trickster. She danced through the audience laughing and making mocking faces, throwing candy and blowing a toy horn. Her brother, Barbaro Ramos, followed, dancing the part of Oggun, an Orisha of war. He came out dressed in an African grass skirt, a green bandana around his head. He was swinging a machete and smoking a cigar, which he put in his mouth ash first, blowing smoke out the other end.

The closing piece of the first set featured music and dance of the Abaqua, a secret society of men from Calabar. Two dancers dressed as ancestral spirits appeared, wearing burlap cone heads with eyes sewn near the point. Two more eyes were sewn on hat-shaped disks that were affixed to the back of their heads. From the neck down they wore a checkered burlap body suit representing the leopard, which they worship for its elegance and strength. They waved large wands in one hand, fans in the other, and had three large cowbells strapped to their waists, which they played by shaking their hips. Dancer and director Diosdado Ramos followed them, using a cross-shaped, four-chambered rattle to guide and control them. Although in large part the Muñequitos program was designed for lay audiences, the group was occasionally surprised by Cuban exiles who shouted out Abakua phrases from the audience.

The second part of the show, in contrast, was devoted to some of the more secular aspects of Afro-Cuban culture. The group came back on in multi-colored flowered suits, clapping and singing and playing the guaguanco rhythm. This set climaxed in a showdown between the dancers that mixed the most sensual dance movements with mime and sensational stunts. One dancer stepped about swinging knives across his throat and stomach and under his legs. Another dancer, the youngest in the troupe, kick-boxed, break-danced, somersaulted, moonwalked and performed leg splits, landing inches over a rum bottle. Diosdado Ramos did a military assassination skit in which he acted the parts of both executioner and victim. As a prop he used only a red bandana, transforming it from a saluting officer’s tie to rifle fire to blood spurting out of the victim’s chest. Diosdado Ramos and Ana Perez danced a courting dance, Ramos grabbing his crotch and thrusting his foot at Perez’s pelvis.

Though they originated in Africa, some of the culture and beliefs found in the dances of the Muñequitos and the back alleys of Matanzas no longer exist in that form in Africa today. Africans in Cuba preserved their beliefs as a way of holding on to their identity despite enslavement; in some cases this was even endorsed by the Church.

While Spanish law required that all slaves be baptized as Roman Catholics, the Church hoped that by changing ancestral customs more gradually it could reduce suicides and uprisings. They encouraged Cuba’s Africans to create a blend between Catholic and African religious practices in the hopes that the Catholic saints would receive the same adoration that the blacks offered their own gods. Since West Africans commonly accepted the gods of their neighbors or conquerors as long as the gods proved useful, it was easy for the slaves to accept the saints and iconology of Catholicism without giving up their own belief systems.

The Church also set up African meeting places, or cabildos, to help the slaves feel more at home. In cabildos, the slaves were permitted to hold African religious rituals at fixed hours on specific holidays. One exception was the feast of the Epiphany, or Dia de Reys (Day of Kings), on January 6th. This Catholic holiday celebrated the legend of the magus Melchoir who came to visit the Christ child. As Melchoir was a black African, members of the cabildos were permitted to celebrate using their ethnic customs. Each group selected a ‘king’ whom they dressed according to their customs, then paraded through the streets of the town. Dia de Reys became Cuba’s biggest day of African celebration, the festivities lasting from dawn to dawn.

African culture also survived in palenques, stockaded settlements of runaway slaves situated in the hills and mountains of the far east, west and south of the island. Despite numerous attacks, these settlements survived until the wars of independence, which the inhabitants joined in force. Through the cabildos and palenques, fourteen African ethnic groups survived until the end of the nineteenth century.

The Muñequitos are now passing their African legacy down to new communities. In Philadelphia, for example, they were an inspiration to the faculty of the Traditional Afro-American Drum Society, whose goal is the recovery of ancestral traditions through music. The society has eighty five members and six teachers, who teach West African, Cuban and Brazilian music to drummers of all ages and from all parts of the city. The entire faculty attended a workshop the Muñequitos held last year at the African-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia.
After the workshop some of the faculty approached the Cubans and invited them to their homes. Two of the Muñequitos agreed, and the group went to the house of Leonard Gibbs, a top Philadelphia percussionist who specializes in Yoruba and rumba styles. There, said professor Frank Williams, another member of the faculty, “they grabbed a couple of spoons and showed us the rumba de la casa, where they play the whole house. They played rumba on the dresser drawers, walls and chairs. They did not use any drums, only their voice and the house.”
The two Muñequitos, said Williams, “were very impressed with the way we played bata and with what we knew. I believe that they respected us as professional followers of Cuban music.” The Muñequitos also updated and clarified some of the finer points of Matanzas-style percussion for Williams and his colleagues, showing them how different rumbas, such as the columbia and grito rhythms, are played in Matanzas. (Some excellent examples of the Muñequitos playing Matanzas rumba and other rhythms can be heard on their album Rumba Caliente 77/88 from qbadisc records.)

Williams was envious of how deeply rooted the Muñequitos were in their particular culture and rhythmic heritage. “African-Americans hear so many types of music that our music ends up being a collage of rhythms. Being able to pinpoint our roots and play them correctly is our whole struggle. Having a base is such an important thing when it come to these rhythms. What would it be like to know one root totally, then have the freedom to branch out freely to other styles? Seeing the Muñequitos made me think: could I be Cuban, Ghanaian, Senegalese? Before all this slavery, where could I have been from?”

Neil Leonard’s compositions were recently performed at the Audio Art Festival (Poland), the Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York) and Carnegie Hall. He premiered Cuban composer Juan Blanco’s Espacios V for saxophone and tape at the New Music Festival at Wesleyan University. Leonard teaches multimedia and music synthesis at Berklee College of Music.

Sidebar:
The word Guaguanco, according to Fu-Kiau Bunseki, authority on Congo culture, evolved from the KiKongo word Kuwanga do, meaning “Don’t you hear?” or “Come and listen.” Both the rhythm and the act of drumming itself invite the community to join the group to hear the spiritual voice of the ancestors come through in the sound of the drumming.
Abaqua, notes Robert Farris Thompson in his book Flash of the Spirit (Vintage/Random House), is a creole version of Abakpa, a term for the Ejagham people of the Calabar region. Thompson writes that “Ejagham and Ejagham-influenced captives” brought to Cuba “included members of the...male “leopard society” called Ngbe in Ejagham. These men founded their own ‘society’ promulgating values of nobility and government as personified by the master metaphor of masculine accomplishment, the leopard, who moves with perfect elegance and strength.”