CUBA Y SU TUMBAO is a portfolio of analog black and white as well as digital photographs taken in Cuba between 2001—2015.

I lived in Havana for three full years and created a wide range of images reflecting everyday life, but my ongoing work in dance and music research dominate. In fact, I wrote a doctoral thesis on AfroCuban dance titled Rumba: A Philosophy of Motion (Yale University, 2010), which reflects my focus on AfroCuban performance culture in the context of the African diaspora.

A book is in the making exploring the iconography of Cuban rumba – a unique AfroCuban dance and music complex that represents the foundation of contemporary Cuban popular culture – and argues that rumba constitutes an essential part of a greater African-based ontology.

I conceptualize rumba dance performance as knowledge embodied, an avatar of non-verbal cultural communication and consciousness, which plays a central role in the organization of daily life and formation of identity. Moreover, Rumba: A Philosophy of Motion demonstrates that concrete continuities exist between the diaspora and mainland Africa through close scrutiny of rumba and parallel performance art traditions in north, west and central Africa. The project also attempts to identify specific African-based stylistic conventions as exemplified by Sahara’s Imazighen (also known as Berber) peoples, Mali’s Mande (known as Gangá in Cuba) and related groups, and the Kongo civilization establishing that although ethno-cultural boundaries exist, they tend to be permeable. By contextualizing Cuba’s complex cultural landscape, an art history of rumba demonstrates the central role of performance in the transmission and preservation of culture, and the drive for self-healing in the face of shattering interruption and forced migration.

The heart of man’s most fundamental questions of life, although AfroCuban culture cannot be separated from anti-colonial consciousness, it is the journey of existential and spiritual self-deliberation that lies at the heart of this inquiry.