Cuba kicks up its heels

RICH, animated, hip-gyrating and soulful, Cuban music has long been a breeding ground for the sounds and rhythms of Latin America.

Praise be ... drummers play during a religious ceremony on a Havana street. Picture: Reuters

RICH, animated, hip-gyrating and soulful, Cuban music has long acted as a breeding ground for the sounds and rhythms of Latin America.

From the down-at-heel drinking houses of urban Havana to the villages of Pinardel Rio, everything from son, salsa and charanga to cha-cha-cha owe at least a part of their existence to the eclectic musical dynamism that was first ignited here.

While the vast majority of the island's two million annual visitors make a beeline for the all-inclusive hotel complexes of Varadero, where trite renditions of Guantanamera are served up by insipid, government-groomed guitar trios, Cuba's real musical party, complete with libidinous dancers and trumpet-stabbing salsa bands, is kicking off riotously elsewhere.

Here's where to enjoy a memorable night out with the locals.

CASA DE LA TROVA, SANTIAGO
In March 1968, hot on the heels of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper and Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, Cuba's socialist administration opened its first government-funded Casa de la Trova in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba. It was an act, musically speaking, almost as revolutionary as the Castro coup.

Named for their trovadores (troubadours) and characterised by their libertarian, anything-goes approach to songwriting and artistic performance, these impromptu music houses quickly became a national obsession, spreading in a matter of months to other provincial cities such as Trinidad, Baracoa and Bayamo.

From an entertainment point of view, the results were groundbreaking. In a country that invented son, salsa, bolero and mambo, the rapid rise of the burgeoning trova house scene was like a fuel-injected rocket blasting its way through an otherwise dark, embargo-strapped economy. Nearly 40 years after its initial incarnation, Santiago's shrine to the power of provocative music is still very much alive and kicking, continuing to draw in big-name performers such as Buena Vista Social Club luminary Eliades Ochoa.

Warming up on the ground floor in the early evening, the action slowly migrates upstairs where, come 10pm, everything gets a shade more caliente (heated) as haranguing hustlers slink out of the shadows and sultry senoritas wink lewdly at passers-by from the strategically positioned balconies. Arrive with a good pair of shoes and prepare to be (quite literally) whisked off your feet.

TROPICANA, HAVANA
A city institution since it opened in 1939, the flamboyant Tropicana was one of the few bastions of Havana's Las Vegas-style nightlife to survive the clampdowns of the puritanical Castro revolution. Immortalised in Graham Greene's 1958 classic Our Man in Havana, this open-air cabaret show is where the book's protagonist, Jim Wormold, takes his overindulged daughter Milly to celebrate her 17th birthday amid the tawdry fleshpots and extravagant dance spectaculars of Cuba's mafia-run gambling capital.

"Chorus girls paraded 20 feet up among the great palm trees, while pink and mauve searchlights swept the floor," wrote Greene of the gaudy proceedings. He may as well have been filing a modern-day entertainment review, as little has changed since its '50s heyday. The Tropicana still features a bevy of scantily clad senoritas who climb nightly down from the palm trees to dance Latin salsa amid colourful flashing lights on stage. The only difference is that these days the tickets sell for a slightly less-than-socialistic 60 Cuban convertible pesos ($83).

CENTRO CULTURAL POLO MONTANEZ, VINALES
Known affectionately island-wide as guajiros, a term that translates roughly as country bumpkin or hick, the residents of Pinar del Rio, Cuba's westernmost province, have carved out a musical identity that is as barnstorming as it is bucolic. Overlaying jangling guitars with traditional 10-line poems known as decimas, the best place to catch these rustic, country-inspired songsmiths is at the Centro Cultural Polo Montanez, a kicking nightspot in the small tobacco-growing town of Vinales. Named in honour of Pinar's guajiro hero turned international music star, who died in a car crash in October 2002, this comparatively new addition to Vinales's laid-back traveller scene melds the soulful essence of Johnny Cash with the thumping punch of Ricky Martin amid the hills of Cuba's mist-shrouded tobacco country. Potent rum is plentiful and dancing is de rigueur.

LA TUMBA FRANCESA, GUANTANAMO
Eastern Cuba is closer to the former French colony of Haiti than to Havana, and the Gaelic influence is clearly evident in the region's distinctive culture and music. Forced to flee west after Toussaint L'Ouverture's bloody slave rebellion in 1791, several thousand French planters arrived in Cuba in the early 19th century and founded the city of Guantanamo. They brought with them the refinements and music of Napoleonic France. Elements of French Romanzas can still be traced in Cuban trova, while the changui and guaracha musical forms, characteristic of the Guantanamo region, are the latter-day descendants of the contredanse and various elements borrowed from French theatre. To gain an insight into these intriguing Gaelic offshoots, grab a pew at La Tumba Francesa, a classic spit and sawdust music house in understated Guantanamo, a city whose name, by a cruel trick of fate, has become a byword for confrontation and controversy.

CASA DE LA TROVA VICTORINO RODRIGUEZ, BARACOA
Tucked away in the island's precipitous east, Baracoa is Cuba's Shangri-La, an isolated and culturally distinct colonial settlement where mysterious flat-topped mountains flicker imperceptibly in the ethereal Atlantic sunsets.

Buzzing like a kicked beehive among the dark tumbledown houses of the diminutive town centre lies Cuba's smallest, zaniest, wildest and most authentic Casa de la Trova. It's a scruffy drinking den replete with dusty '50s artefacts and psychedelic Che Guevara murals that rocks nightly to the voodoo-like rhythms of changui-son. Mint-laced mojitos are served in old jam jars, a maverick master of ceremonies introduces new acts with a banshee-like scream, and the unprinted house rules conform to that age-old trova assertion that if you can sing or play an instrument, show us what you can do. BYO bongos and see what happens.

PLAZA LA VIGIA, MATANZAS
Rumba was first concocted in the dock areas of Havana and Matanzas during the 1890s when former slaves, exposed to imported foreign influences, began to knock out rhythmic patterns on old packing cases in imitation of various African religious rites. Vocals were added, dances emerged, and before long the music had grown into a collective form of social expression for all Afro-Cubans.

Rumba music has developed into three basic forms: guaguanco, an overtly sexual dance; yambu, a slow dance for couples; and columbia, a fast, aggressive, male dance often involving fire torches and machetes. Raw, expressive and exciting to watch, performers shake a leg every weekend at outdoor music extravaganzas in Matanzas, an easy-to-reach port city 30km west of Varadero, Cuba's ritziest resort.

The best time to catch the action is on Sunday afternoons in the Plaza la Vigia, opposite the once opulent Sauto theatre. Arrive early and be prepared for plenty of spontaneity.

FIESTA DE LA CUBANIA, BAYAMO
The capital of Granma province and birthplace of such eminent Cuban troubadours as Carlos Puebla and Pablo Milanes, Bayamo was the entry point for the first mechanical organs imported from France in the 1870s. By 1900 there were more than 100 hand-operated pipe organs in Bayamo, and in the ensuing 30 years the locally renowned Borbolla family built about a dozen more full-sized machines in a factory it had set up in the neighbouring town of Manzanillo. Eschewing modern trends, the tradition lives on in regular weekend street parties held under the yellow-tinted streetlights of Calle Jose Antonio Saco in the city's refreshingly hassle-free centre.

Shoehorned among the scattered colonial buildings, cheap food stalls sell spit-roasted pork and chess players trade pawns over flimsy streetside tables. Families sit with their noisy neighbours to catch up on the latest gossip to the rather surreal strains of Bayamo's archaic mechanical organs, which these days are accompanied by a more syncopated rumba beat. Dancing, fuelled by cheap beer and a barely palatable local oyster drink called ostiones, is an integral part of the festivities.

CLUB MEJUNJE, SANTA CLARA
Known to a generation of budding revolutionaries as Che City, thanks to its grandiose mausoleum and Che Guevara monuments, Santa Clara is a medium-sized provincial settlement in Cuba's geographic centre. This is where Latin America's most venerated guerrillero has been elevated into a socialist deity.

But stick around a few days longer in this gritty and oft-overlooked Caribbean colossus and you'll bump into a hip and happening music scene. Operations centre for the in-crowd is the vibrant Club Mejunje, a feisty bar and performance space set among the ruins of a derelict building in the city centre. Headlining busy weekly music programs are trova shows, children's theatre, disco nights, bolero concerts and, in a country where gay rights have always been something of a political hot potato, the odd improbable drag show.