Cuba Culture & Language

For an island of eleven million people, Cuba’s cultural output — especially its music — is wildly disproportionate, and most of it comes from the meeting of Spanish and West African forms.

Music

Son cubano, which emerged in the east around the turn of the twentieth century, is the root of almost everything: it fed into mambo, cha-cha-cha and, by way of New York, salsa. Rumba — drums, voice and dance, purely African in derivation — is UNESCO-listed, as is the punto of the countryside. Live music is genuinely everywhere, played well and mostly for locals.

Dance

Social dancing is close to universal and standards are high. The National Ballet, founded by Alicia Alonso, is internationally serious.

Writing and film

Jose Marti, the independence leader, is also the national poet and is quoted constantly. Alejo Carpentier and Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote the island; the Havana film festival and the ICAIC studios gave Latin American cinema some of its landmarks.

Cigars and rum

The tobacco of the Vuelta Abajo is rolled by hand into cigars regarded as the world’s best, and the light rum style that Cuba developed produced the daiquiri and the mojito.

Baseball

Not football. Baseball arrived in the nineteenth century and became the national game, played on any available ground with improvised equipment, and Cuba has been among the strongest amateur nations in the world for decades. The esquina caliente in Havana’s Parque Central — the hot corner, where men argue about the sport all day, every day — is a genuine institution, and a good deal more is discussed there than baseball.

Food

Ropa vieja, moros y cristianos of black beans and rice, roast pork, plantain, and in the east a coconut-based cooking unlike the rest of the island.

Spanish is the language, in a fast Caribbean variety that drops final consonants and whole syllables — Cubans will tell you their Spanish is hard, and they are right. Slang is abundant and local.

English is much less widely spoken than in the rest of the Caribbean. Tourism workers, guides and younger people in Havana manage, but outside that, expect little. Basic Spanish is genuinely valuable here and will change the trip.

Russian was taught for decades and is understood by some older Cubans, a legacy of the Soviet period.

Useful: buenos dias, gracias, por favor, cuanto cuesta for how much, no hay — there isn’t any — which you will hear constantly and should learn first, and que bola as the local how’s it going.