Coffeebeans Routes

The second was a commercial revolution at the turn of the millennium. It turned him and Cuba into a global currency. You see, the revolution will be commodified.

He's everywhere. He's on T-shirts, lighters, beach towels and hats. He's on cigar boxes. He's on posters and flyers advertising everything from hip parties to revolutionary mustard. He's on watches. If you can't wear him, you can drink him. His image made it onto a controversial vodka ad. He's on just about anything that can be sold. Everybody from Bellville to the Bronx wants a piece of him.

And everywhere Che goes, so does his dear Cuba.

In the space of a few years Cuba has become the hippest, most desirable country in the world. Everybody wants to go there.

It took Ry Cooder, a film by Wim Wenders, the style, panache and talent of the members of the Buena Vista Social Club, and a superb marketing strategy to make it happen. Or at least that on the surface is what seems to be the case. In the wake of the Buena Vista's extraordinary success - so far they've sold about 6 million copies - the whole world has been exposed to the beauty of Cuban music and culture. It's a cultural coup, no matter how crass it is. But like all revolutions, it has deep roots. The Buena Vista Social Club was just the lever that opened the tollgate.

Roots
It`s a revolution that started in Africa, as far back as the 1700s when slaves were first taken to Cuba. Some 700 000 slaves in total were taken there, estimate historians and musicologists. At any one time during slavery, slaves made up the majority of the population. It was inevitable that their forms of expression would make an impact. So to say African music is the base of Cuban music is obvious.

That base is the claves - the sound of two wooden sticks hitting against each other that is so distinctive in Cuban music, particularly salsa. It is the rhythm of life, the rhythm of Africa that survives from the slaves. It is the lifeblood, it is life itself.

Just like in Brazil, the continued religious practice of the slaves was fundamental in the evolution of Cuban music. It was through the practice of religious ceremony, syncretised with Catholicism to form the Santeria that is still popular today, that links with African culture have survived in Cuba.

Language is also a core root. In the old Bantu language of West Africa, mambo means "conversation with the gods". Rumba evolved out the Lingala word for belly button. Kim Douley, an icon of Brazzaville's music from the 1950s, told me the story: "The music used to be called the Kumba," he explained moving the longest finger on his left hand in a triangle to the hole of his belly button, then allowing his hips to sway on that pendant. "Kumba is the belly-button in Lingala, just over the years it became mis-pronounced to be the rumba..."

Routes Part I
As early as the 1920s, Cuban 78s arrived in West Africa. The music of the continent that had left in chains now started dancing back, liberated, newly clothed and somewhat familiar. The circle started to complete itself. Over the next 50 years West Africa and in particular Central Africa, the Congo, lapped it up. And the Cuban music invasion was relentless. The radios played nothing but Cuban music. Cosmopolitan cities like Kinshasa reveled in cha cha chas, rumbas and son. They listened to Trio Matamoros, Sexteto Habanero, Perez Prado and his orchestra and Benny More. They celebrated the African tours of Cuba's oldest and greatest band Orquesta Aragon. "Cuban music was everywhere," explained the DRC's vocal legend Tabu Ley Rochereau to me in Brazzaville in 2001 ( the same year that Orquesta Aragon turned 70 and won the Fespam Lifetime Achievement Award). "When we started out as musicians we played only Cuban music. I was in the Congo's first dance band, African Jazz, and we played cha cha chas and rhumbas and son and all the stuff we knew from the radio. That's what people wanted, Cuban music. But we appropriated it and made it our own."

Franco, the `grande maitre' of African music, Tabu Ley, Dr Nico, Papa Noel and Sam Mangwana, all the Congolese legends took the Cuban music and made it their own. The piano, which dominated Cuban rumba, was replaced by the guitar. And slowly, with Spanish lyrics being replaced by Lingala lyrics, the melody and vocals started to change to follow the tonality of the language. Cuban music evolved into a very distinctly Congolese music, African music.

In the 1970s Cuban music flooded into Senegal. Radio stations like Voice of America, who started broadcasting in French to Africa in 1960, was a part of this music revolution. And here, like in the Congo, further cultural fusion took place. It was out of this environment that Orchestra Baobab was born, bringing a raw, slowed down and often angry edge to the Cuban sounds that were everywhere. Their 1982 recording Pirate's Choice (released in 1989 on World Circuit Records) is a brilliant set piece of the convergence of Cuban and African sounds.

Routes Part II
Right now in cities like Kinshasa, Brazzaville, Dakar, Abidjan, Luanda and Maputo you'll find old Cuban albums on vinyl being sold on the street. In Brazzaville I found a 1970s recording of Cuba's greatest band, Orquesta Aragon, being sold from a shelled out building. In Luanda I found a Sexteto Habanero LP. A friend of mine recently visited Cuba. On a street in Havana he found a Springbok Radio Hits LP that had been pressed in Maputo. Music travels. It is transitory. It is in a constant state of evolution.

And it's fitting that Cuban music should have exploded into the world's ears when it did. Not only was there the tradition that had danced across Africa and made its way back to Cuba yet again, more informed and evolved by its African birthright - there was the younger music to balance it. To show the emerging side. Cuban hip hop, with its attitude and aspirations firmly grounded in the place it knows so well. "Our music is African," insisted Cuban hip hop group Orishas, named after the Santeria gods. They were a hit at the North Sea Jazz Festival Cape Town in 2001. "Hip hop started with the drum, it began in Africa and evolved in the United States and now Cuba."

The Buena Vista Social Club kicked the commercial revolution in Cuba into action. Orquesta Aragon might be annoyed that the world is talking Buena Vista Buena Vista when they've been doing it since day one. But it wasn't about Buena Vista. It was all about the timing. The world was ready for Cuba. They were ready for the history, the romance and the story that Cuba represents. And Che was the perfect host for the commodity revolution. Who better to validate the movement than Mr Revolution himself.