When reading about the slave trade, one has to wonder: why such incredibly gratuitous cruelty? If, today, a farming enterprise ordered a shipment of tractors, it would try to ensure that all of those tractors arrived in working order and that once put to use they stayed in use through appropriate care and maintenance.

A historical innocent might assume that farm operators would treat slaves at least as well as tractors. But in Cuba's sugar-plantation economy it was cheaper to wear out the slaves and discard them, replacing them with new arrivals from Africa.

This, Sublette points out, was a fundamental difference between the North American and the Cuban slave trades. Where the North American slave population came to be generations removed from Africa, the Cuban slaves were constantly being reintroduced to their African roots as more slaves were imported. The roots themselves were different as well, Cuban ones lying predominantly in the Congo.

And then there was the disparity in scale: many more slaves were imported to Cuba than to all of North America. Cuban slaves found it easier to maintain their African religion; in Cuba, a Yoruba god could become a Catholic saint.

All of which helps to explain why Cuban music is Afro-Cuban music.

Sublette provides an admirable summary of the African musical aesthetic:

It was communal in spirit and participatory in nature, without a rigid separation of performer and audience. It was not something separate from daily life, but part of life, with specialized music for various activities. It was charged with magical meaning. It was inseparable from dance, which was mimetic and overtly sexual. It was orchestral, and that orchestra always tutti, with all instruments playing, all the time . . . . But it was percussive, so that the durations of individual notes were very short, allowing plenty of space in the music for everyone to play and it was polyrhythmic with everyone following a rhythmic key. It was texturally so deep that the only way to hear what was happening was through mesmerizing repetition. It was open in form, allowing for extending the music indefinitely and requiring spontaneity -what has become known as "improvising".

That is what I heard in Central Park forty-odd years ago. And yet Cuban music is not simply African music. It uses European scales, chords, chord progressions, instruments like the guitar, the trumpet and the piano. Here is the tricky part: to make chords and chord progressions you have to line up your music vertically, which in practice means putting it into measures. African polyrhythms resist this discipline; they want to stretch out horizontally.

Great creative effort was needed to marry these two separate musical cultures.