‘Fusion? Its like cooking, mi amor. You throw in some black beans from Cuba, spices from India, BBQ chicken from down-south USA, add a little salsa from here, a sweet potato from there …and what have you got? Fusion, blend, mix, spice, something hot, something new, mi amor, something new!’ Contemporary fusion is a spontaneous phenomenon that’s a key element of Cuban musical life.

Calle 13 (13th St.) in the Vedado district of Havana ends in a great open space right in front of the sea. This 23rd of March, 2010, the city awoke from a very long siesta to enjoy a concert by the duo/band known precisely as Calle 13. An estimated 300,000 people attended the two-hour show at the open-air Tribuna Antiimperialista opposite the Malecón seawall arriving from before noon for the 5pm concert to give the band a rapturous welcome.

Hip-hop beats first trickled into Cuba in the early 90’s via crackly US radio transmissions, picked up in coastal regions outside of the capital like Alamar and in provinces such as Guantánamo. And then it came pounding in via other musicians and by young walkman-listening, CD-playing, ipod-wearing foreign students and tourists who hooked up, in various ways, with Cuban youth. Rap, Cuban-style, is now very much part of the islands musical culture.

For all Cuba’s deep and long-lived cultural connection with the US, its pretty interesting that one of the latter’s great musical genres—rock ‘n roll—hasn’t really developed on the island as one might have expected. During the early 60’s and 70’s, rock was not well-supported on the island but in the more open 80’s, rock groups began to form, very influenced by heavy metal, trash and grunge, and by bands such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple.

Although these electronic/acoustic genres originally developed outside of the island, once they arrived, they quickly took on elements of Cuban style, rhythms and beats, and there are now a deal of artists involved in these two areas, most, although not all, associated with Laboratorios de Música Electroacústica. Juan Blanco (1919) is the godfather of this centre and this movement, with a tremendous heritage and compositional output, and one of his first pupils, former rock musician, Edesio Alejandro, has, over the years, been best known for his electronic music for film—especially with one of Cuba’s finest directors, Fernando Pérez.

Joyvan Guevara won a well-deserved music prize this year and with it came the first ever recording deal for a Dj in Cuba. So now he’s not only busy with his very popular weekly slot at the Turf Club in Havana’s Vedado district, but also with preparing tracks for recording at the Colibrí Studios early in 2010.

What we now call Timba began with NG La Banda in the late 80’s, but the musical concept at the heart of Timba, combining Cuban music with modern creative songwriting, began 20+ years earlier with Los Van Van.

For some time now, when in Cuba, and especially in Havana, people talked about “The Concert,” it was understood to be the one that took place at the Revolution Square, on Sunday, 20 September, under a blazing sun and before a gigantic audience of over one million people. Organized by the 38-year-old, 12-time Latin Grammy winner, Colombian singer Juan Esteban Aristizábal—better known as Juanes...

It seems that a day cannot go by without an article in the MSM declaring that “Cuba is opening up to the world.” There’s a lot of tricky logic going in such statements, and this past Sunday’s Concert for Peace without Borders organized by Colombian pop star Juanes can help us to reflect on this a bit, and also to act to change United States restrictions on travel by Americans to Cuba.

The Royal Ballet’s first ever trip to Cuba marked many milestones and ticked many boxes but above all it was a triumphant homecoming for the magnificent Carlos Acosta (the Cuban lorry drivers son now a star with the Royal Ballet in London) and a tribute to the legendary Alicia Alonso (iconic Cuban legend and current artistic director of the principal Cuban Ballet). Above all, perhaps it was simply a magnificent treat for the Cuban ballet aficionados.

A raw, edgy-but-lyrical singer-songwriter, achingly funny and hailed as one of the finest trovadors of his generation. By anyone’s standards, this young man is a huge musical talent. So how is it that a few years ago, tremendously impressed by a solo concert, I asked for a CD and instead was given...

Dedicated to Africa and its Diaspora, Cubadisco 2008 has just come to an end, and yet already we are making plans for Cubadisco 2009, scheduled to take place from 16 to 24 May, 2009 with guests of honour Puerto Rico and the Music from the South—the music that represents the identities and legacies of countries that are usually ignored by the media and the record industry.

Absent for several years from the big stages in Havana—its usual venue is the Favorito, a converted movie house with quite uncomfortable conditions for both audiences and dancers—the company founded and directed by dancer and choreographer Narciso Medina returned to the Mella Theatre with a program that included two new dances plus the piece that has been his trump card for more than two decades—Metamorfosis.

Raulito’s voice cuts through the syncopated music, urgent and insistent. As he speaks, his hot breath fluttering on my ear, he indicates the stage with his head, gracefully arcing his neck. A thrill of excitement shivers through me, adrenalin surging from my gut. Excitement tinged with horror. I can’t go up there, not in front of this audience, not after these performers. And especially not to dance columbia.

In 1999, on one of my first visits to Cuba, a friend in Havana asked me if I wanted to go see a “Girl Band.” I didn’t know what he meant, but when I first saw the eight women of Caramelo Son playing, singing and dancing in the shadow of the Cathedral in Havana, I was hooked.

Whoever visits Old Havana’s Historical Centre in April will find a surprising sight: the old city dances. Plazas, parks, streets, museums and old rambling houses seem to be possessed by the spirit of dance, which invoked by dancer and choreographer Isabel Bustos and her company Retazos—Bits and Pieces—turns balconies, windows, stairs and centenary walls into stages.

Rumba is one of the most famous and well-known genre of popular Cuban music. Born, according to the majority of scholars, in the poor neighbourhoods of the province of Matanzas—approx 100 km away from Havana—it is characterized by the sensual movement of hips and shoulders while dancing, with an aggressive attitude on the part of the man and a defensive attitude on the part of the woman, and by the chanting of one or several soloists who sing melodies of 8 bars in 2/4 meters, repeated over ...

In a country with probably the world’s highest number of musicians per capita, where competition for coveted concerts slots at the “Casas de la Música” (the famous venues literally called ‘Music Houses’, one located in Miramar and the other in Centro Havana) is fierce, the rapid climb of the musical group Salsa Mayor to the upper echelons of the Cuban music scene is nothing less than astounding. In October 2007, Maykel Blanco y Su Salsa Mayor celebrated their third anniversary with a special concert at Havana’s Salon Rosado de La Tropical.

One very sunny day last year, in March (2007), a small party from Ireland descended on Havana laden with radio mics, cameras, sound people, leather, felt and wire. Cameras, leather, felt and wire, I can hear you asking, brows, naturally, a little furrowed? Well…could be a country crafts series, or... what about a late night, one-off, tropical bondage short? Actually, no. Rest easy.

To enter Alicia Alonso’s office is to visit an inner sanctum. She works in a small room tucked away behind the unassuming headquarters of the Cuban National Ballet, on 17th St. in Vedado. Outside, gaggles of young ballerinas gather. Inside, an army of efficient secretaries protect her from the uninvited. The room itself is dark, and spartan. The shutters are drawn.

Blind but beady-eyed, beaky-nosed, old, imposing and profoundly glamorous, Alicia Alonso stands in a single spotlight at the front of the dress circle of the Gran Teatro de La Habana, bathed in waves of applause. Whenever she appears in the audience, everyone in the theatre—not least the prima ballerina assoluta herself—considers a standing ovation her due. The epitome of a Grand Dame, Miss Alonso holds the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in thrall.

Havana is music. From first thing in the morning till last thing at night it pours out of houses, bars and cafes, echoes down narrow alleys, reverberates from balconies, blares from radios, booms from cars and wafts round squares. ‘Where can we hear some real Cuban music?’ incoming innocents ask their taxi driver as they head from the airport into the city. “Where can we not hear it?” might be a more appropriate enquiry.

Armando Gómez is suddenly a subversive. And only an act of God, or George Tracey Eaten Bush, will allow him to attend the piano tuners convention in Dallas this week. Gómez laughed at first when U.S. authorities refused his travel visa. “What am I? A Taliban?” the Havana piano technician said.