As the intricacies and complexities of Cuban music were not understood abroad it was easy to say and remember the word Rumba for anything that came from the island and soon it became a general description for Cuban if not Latin music lumping together such diverse groups of music as son, danzon and bolero much to the dismay of Cuban scholars who had to watch the degradation of their culture from the sidelines. This can be seen by the extract of the book “Música popular Cubana” by Cuban author Emilio Grenet Sánchez whose translation by R. Phillips reads:
“Our neighbors of the North think that our musical genre consists exclusively of the rumba. And even the rumba, embodying in gesture and sound our most outstanding vitality, has been divested of its true spirit and made effeminate in the same manner as the Argentine tango with which our rumba has been confused. The result is something alien to us a superficial, false and unexpressive dance.”
While Americans and Europeans thought they were listening to Rumba and dancing Rumba, the above extract very nicely illustrates how well Cubans, the inventors of Rumba, thought they had achieved that goal. What followed was a period where the moniker Rumba became associated with almost any type of popular Latin music similar to the way the term salsa is misused today (i.e. see the blog series “salsa leeches on this subject) and the dance that originated in son became something entirely different particularly in America where they merged it with a slow foxtrot making it easier to pick up the dance. Many artists tried to climb on the “Peanut Vendor” bandwagon by copying Azpiazú’s style labelling their music as “rhumba” in turn and the musical movement that ensued and which was in essence still based on son was mislabelled rhumba craze or rhumba mania.
