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de Rumba (Sunday Rumba) at the Callejón de Hamel in the Cayo
Hueso neighborhood of Centro Habana. The rumba at the Callejón
has gained much international fame and scholarly attention since the
event was founded in the early 1990s by local artist Salvador
González, and it is mentioned in every tour guide as the place to go if
you want to experience “authentic” Afro-Cuban music and culture.
The vivid, bright colors of the Afro-Cuban religious-themed murals
painted on the walls of the buildings that enclose the alley are a tourist
attraction in themselves that seem to create a perfectly appropriate
backdrop for rumba performance.
As is the case for many foreigners, the first rumba performance I
experienced in Cuba was the Callejón event, which I attended the day
after I arrived on my first trip to the island in July 2003. Because there
is no entrance fee for the event, the Callejón is almost always intensely
crowded with a diverse mix of locals and tourists, professional musi-
cians and those who work en la calle (in the informal economy), plenty
of jineteros (hustlers) attempting to establish relationships with foreign-
ers, and often a few policemen who circulate through the alley during
the course of the performance. Anthropologist Lisa Knauer discusses
the Callejón as a “contact zone” between cultural tourists and Cuban
musicians, noting that the latter often attend the Sunday rumba even if
they’re not performing that day in the hopes of drumming up work
opportunities or making a few dollars selling CDs (Knauer 2005: 479).
Musicians can often find employment not only with foreigners seek-
ing private lessons, but also with other Cuban folkloric musicians who
might have a gig for a private religious ceremony and not enough
musicians to play.
The musical line-up at the Sunday rumba usually includes a perfor-
mance from the house rumba group(s) and an invited group, either
from Havana, another province of the country, or occasionally, a for-
eign music group that does not necessarily play rumba. Although the
Callejón event appears to many outsiders to be informal and sponta-
neous, there is a significant degree of planning and control by Salva-
dor González and his wife Martiza, who determine which groups will