This island in the Caribbean has produced some of the finest musicians and some of the most distinctive rhythms and sounds in modern music. Cuban music has been recognised and played across the globe, beginning with the rumba of the early 1900s through the mambo and the cha-cha-cha , to salsa, the New York craze of the 1970s and 1980s.
The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century, and the subsequent slave trade, resulted in an intense blending of the...