Nobody Dances With Pain: Re-centering Traditional Cuban Music in the Musicolonial Politics of the Transatlantic Caribbean

Abstract

In the vibrant landscape of Caribbean culture, music stands as a powerful testament to the region’s history of resistance, resilience, and identity. Focusing on Cuba and the genre of Son Cubano, this paper explores how traditional Cuban music has functioned, from 16th-century Spanish colonization to the present, as a tool for asserting sovereignty, shaping cultural memory, and fostering transatlantic solidarity. Today, however, this heritage faces threats from commercialization and impeding artistic expression. Drawing on the fields of musicology and cultural anthropology and framed by the concept of musicoloniality, the paper traces the evolution of traditional Cuban music between (neo)colonial power and decolonial aspirations. Through ethnographic vignettes of Cuban musical artists and autoethnographic reflections, we show how traditional Cuban music conveys transinsular narratives and challenges Western representations of music and the communities it originates from within a music system that privileges marketability over meaning. We propose a decolonial approach that recognizes traditional Cuban music not just as cultural heritage but as an ongoing form of political and artistic resistance. In doing so, this approach responds to the call of Caribbean artists to reclaim traditional music as a space for social critique and cultural sovereignty.