The two biggest hits (by Machito)... were about that enduring Cuban song topic-food: 'Sopa de pichn' [pigeon soup] and 'Paella'. If you think that all songs about food are double entendres for sex... Well, maybe all songs about food can be double entendres, but in many periods of Cuban history, for many people, food has been harder to get, and the subject of more fantasies, than sex.

Every farm with slaves was a slave-breeding farm. Raising slaves was mostly a cottage industry.

Up through and including Lincoln, American politicians nursed a fantasy of repatriating blacks to Africa.

Music is so essential to the Cuban character that you can't disentangle it from the history of the nation. the history of Cuban music is one of cultural collisions, of voluntary and forced migrations, of religions and revolutions.

The general disinclination of Spain to accept slaves from Islamicized regions of Africa during the formative years of Hispano-American society had enormous consequences for the development of music in the New World.

On occassion, slaves in Spanish New Orleans owned slaves, whose labor they could appropriate toward purchasing their own freedom, or whose ownership they could trade as a partial payment on their own freedom.

Black musicians rhythmicized the contredanse, creating musical styles which evolved into the habanera (also known as the tango) and, later, ragtime, as well as the danza, danzón, and ultimately the danzón mambo and its offspring the cha-cha-chá.