ABSTRACT
Rumba means so much. In the neighbourhoods, rumba meant a lot because earlier, people who practised rumba were discriminated against. There are people, you know, who study at university, people whose fathers have been to university. So, what is the difference between a dancer that learns at school and a dancer that learns in the street, a person of the street? The street dancer … knows the rhythm better, the sound, because he was born with folkloric roots …. And the dancer who learns at school? He has problems with the rhythm. This rhythm, you carry it in your blood, you’re born with this—my father, my mother, an uncle, I don’t know. My father is a percussionist and my mother is a dancer because they were born with this inside them. Aside from this, my grandfather and my grandmother were leaders of the Society for Negros. From a brother, an uncle, you take something. Because in the home is where you learn this, with them there beside you. You are there, eating it, hearing it, eating the rhythm, and without this no dancer, no dancer, could do it. (Interview with Dreiser, a rumba performer living in Havana, 25 December 2005. All names of research participants have been changed)
