What Salsa Owes Cuba — and What Happened After It Left Home

Why I decided to publish this now

I had been sitting with this article for a while.

The subject is delicate, and I knew that even an honest attempt to be balanced could still be misunderstood. When people talk about Cuba, salsa, credit, ownership, royalties, and cultural memory, the conversation can become emotional very quickly. So, although I had already written much of this piece, I held back from publishing it.

Then I came across a video by a Cuban dance instructor speaking passionately about what he saw as the great lie surrounding salsa. His frustration was clear. His grievance was real. But the tone of the presentation also reminded me why this subject deserves a calmer treatment.

I do not believe the history of salsa has to be discussed with accusation on one side and defensiveness on the other. Cuba’s contribution can be honored without dismissing New York, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Panamá, the Dominican Republic, and the many other places that helped shape the music after it traveled. At the same time, those later developments should not be used to erase Cuba’s foundational role.

That is the spirit in which I am offering this article: not as a final verdict, not as an argument against anyone’s pride, but as an attempt to look at the subject with respect, historical honesty, and as little unnecessary heat as possible.


A fair place to begin is with the obvious.

There are some debates in music that never really end, but this one should at least begin with a clear admission: the musical roots of what we now call salsa are deeply Cuban.

That is not a small detail. It is not a footnote. It is the foundation.

The son, mambo, guaracha, guaguancó, rumba, cha-cha-chá, danzón, and other Cuban forms helped provide much of the rhythmic, melodic, and structural language that later generations of musicians would use under the broad commercial umbrella of “salsa.” The Smithsonian’s ¡Puro Ritmo! exhibition describes salsa’s journey as one in which Afro-Cuban music evolved into a defining sound in the United States, moving from Havana to New York and beyond.

So when Cubans say, “Wait a minute — a lot of this came from us,” they are not imagining things.

They are pointing to something real.


But the next part of the story is just as important.

Once that music reached other shores, it did not stay frozen in time.

In New York, especially, Cuban-rooted dance music entered a new environment. It mixed with the lives of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, African Americans, Jewish musicians, and other communities moving through the same streets, clubs, studios, and neighborhoods. The sound absorbed jazz, R&B, soul, street language, barrio politics, urban pressure, and the particular energy of Latin New York.

That is why it is not enough to say, “Salsa is Cuban,” and stop there.

A more honest statement would be this: salsa is heavily indebted to Cuba, but it became a wider pan-Latin and diasporic language after leaving Cuba.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s profile of Johnny Pacheco and Fania Records puts it plainly: Pacheco popularized a New York version of Cuban dance music, and Fania helped turn that sound into a worldwide market for Latin dance music. The same source notes that the word “salsa” gave a convenient and marketable name to music whose roots were older than the name itself.

That distinction matters.

The name was new.
The ingredients were not.
The final dish, however, had changed.


Another way to hear the difference is to listen country by country.

Cuban popular dance music does not sound exactly like New York salsa. New York salsa does not sound exactly like Puerto Rican salsa. Puerto Rican salsa does not sound exactly like Colombian salsa. Venezuelan salsa, Dominican salsa, Panamanian salsa, Peruvian salsa, and Mexican salsa all developed their own accents, priorities, and flavors.

That is what happens when a musical language travels.

The same basic vocabulary can be shared, but the phrasing changes. The swing changes. The way the coro sits may change. The percussion may lean differently. The arranging style may be more urban, more folkloric, more romantic, more aggressive, more elegant, more commercial, or more streetwise depending on the place and period.

This does not weaken Cuba’s claim.

In some ways, it strengthens it.

A musical tradition does not travel that far unless it has power.


The dancing tells a similar story.

On the dance floor, the differences can be just as clear.

Cuban casino and rueda de casino do not move through space in the same way as the linear styles often associated with New York or Los Angeles. Casino tends to feel more circular, more wrapped around the couple, more connected to Cuban social dance traditions. Linear salsa often emphasizes the slot, the break, the turn pattern, the timing system, and the visual line.

Of course, dancers borrow from each other all the time. No community is sealed off in a glass box. Still, anyone who has spent time around different salsa scenes knows that “salsa” does not mean the exact same thing everywhere.

That is part of the point.

The umbrella term covers a lot.

Sometimes too much.


This is where the Cuban grievance deserves to be heard.

The grievance is not only about musicology. It is also about credit, money, visibility, and history.

Many Cuban compositions, rhythms, arrangements, and musical ideas traveled widely. Some were recorded, rearranged, renamed, repackaged, and sold in markets far from Cuba. In some cases, Cuban composers and their families did not receive the compensation, recognition, or control that they believed they deserved.

That part of the grievance is legitimate.

It is not bitterness for the sake of bitterness. It comes from a real history in which Cuban music fed an international industry while Cuban creators were often separated from the commercial benefits of that industry.

At the same time, this has to be said carefully. It is too simple to describe the whole thing as one group stealing from another. The real picture includes old publishing contracts, disputed copyrights, exile politics, the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. embargo, blocked or restricted payments, record-company practices, and the complicated legal status of Cuban-owned or Cuban-controlled rights abroad.

In other words, yes, there was exploitation.

But the machinery behind it was bigger than one nightclub, one label, one country, or one bad actor.


The embargo made an already messy situation even messier.

The political wall between the United States and Cuba created a strange and often unfair environment for Cuban music.

After the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. embargo, normal business between the two countries became difficult or impossible in many areas. That affected music too. Rights, royalties, licensing, publishing, and payments were not just artistic matters anymore; they became trapped inside politics.

That does not mean every use of Cuban music in the United States was automatically illegal or immoral. It also does not mean every musician who played Cuban-rooted music was acting in bad faith.

But it does help explain why Cuban composers and heirs could feel that their work was circulating, earning money, and building reputations for others while they were left outside the door.

The legal picture has also shifted over time. Current U.S. Cuban Assets Control Regulations authorize certain transactions related to informational materials, including royalties or other payments connected with those transactions. That is important because it shows why the royalty question cannot be reduced to one simple statement that applies equally to every decade.

The grievance is real.

The legal history is complicated.

Both things can be true.


There are examples that show how deep the problem runs.

The disputes around Cuban compositions made famous through the Buena Vista Social Club era are a useful reminder that these issues are not imaginary. In British court reporting from the mid-2000s, companies fought over rights to Cuban songs dating back to the 1930s, with arguments over whether composers had been properly compensated and whether old publishing agreements were valid.

That case was not about salsa in the narrow dance-club sense, but it reveals the same larger problem: Cuban music had enormous international value, and the people who created it were not always the people who benefited most clearly from it.

That is the wound behind a lot of the conversation.

When Cubans object to the way the word “salsa” can blur origins, they are often objecting to more than terminology. They are objecting to a pattern of erasure.


Still, crediting Cuba should not require erasing everyone else.

This is where the conversation often goes wrong.

One side says, “It is all Cuban.”
Another side says, “No, salsa was born in New York.”
Someone else says, “Puerto Rico built salsa.”
Another person adds Colombia, Venezuela, Panamá, or the Dominican Republic to the discussion.

The truth is not as neat as any slogan.

Cuba supplied much of the deep musical foundation. New York gave the music a new urban platform and a powerful commercial identity. Puerto Rican musicians and audiences were central to salsa’s development, especially in New York and Puerto Rico. Other Latin American countries then took the music, loved it, changed it, localized it, and gave it back to the world in their own voices.

Oxford Bibliographies notes that, beyond the old Cuban-or-Puerto Rican origins debate, salsa scholarship has increasingly looked at salsa as a music representing Latin Americans of many national, ethnic, and social backgrounds.

That feels right to me.

Salsa is not less Cuban because it became international.
It is not less Puerto Rican because it has Cuban roots.
It is not less New York because its musical DNA came from the Caribbean.
And it is not less Colombian, Venezuelan, Panamanian, Dominican, Mexican, Peruvian, or global because Fania helped market the name.

The music is bigger than one passport.

But it did not come from nowhere.


The word “salsa” is useful, but it can also hide things.

As a practical term, salsa works.

DJs use it. Dancers use it. Venues use it. Record stores used it. Streaming platforms use it. Promoters use it. The public understands it.

But as a historical term, it can be slippery.

It can make older Cuban forms seem like they were merely raw material waiting for someone else to modernize them. It can place New York at the center while pushing Havana, Matanzas, Santiago de Cuba, and other Cuban spaces into the background. It can make people forget that many “salsa classics” are tied to musical forms that already had long histories before the salsa boom.

That is why the Cuban complaint should not be dismissed.

Sometimes the word “salsa” clarifies.
Sometimes it covers tracks.


The fair approach is not to choose a camp, but to tell the whole story.

To honor Cuba properly, we should name the roots.

To honor New York properly, we should name the transformation.

To honor Puerto Rico properly, we should name the musicians, singers, arrangers, dancers, and audiences who carried the music with such force.

To honor the rest of Latin America, we should recognize that salsa did not simply arrive in those countries as a finished product. People there reinterpreted it, danced it differently, wrote new songs, created new orchestral flavors, and gave the music new emotional homes.

And to honor the composers, we should not romanticize the business side of the story. Some people were celebrated. Some people were paid. Some people were not. Some names traveled. Others disappeared behind publishers, labels, politics, and paperwork.

The music may be joyful, but the history is not always clean.


Maybe the most respectful answer is this.

Salsa owes Cuba a debt that should never be minimized.

That debt is musical, cultural, rhythmic, historical, and spiritual.

But salsa also became something else as it moved through New York, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Panamá, the Dominican Republic, and the rest of the world. The music grew because people outside Cuba did not simply preserve it. They lived inside it. They fought with it, danced to it, rearranged it, urbanized it, romanticized it, commercialized it, and sometimes misunderstood it.

That is what living music does.

It travels.
It changes.
It leaves home.
And sometimes, the people at home have every right to ask whether the world remembers where the journey began.


The final word, at least for me, is respect.

Respect for Cuba, because without Cuba, this conversation would not exist.

Respect for the musicians of New York and Puerto Rico, because they did not merely copy; they created a new urban language from inherited materials.

Respect for the countries that later made salsa their own.

Respect for the dancers, who prove every night that music does not belong only to archives and arguments.

And respect for the composers whose work moved the world, even when the world did not always move fairly toward them.

So when someone says salsa has Cuban roots, I agree.

When someone says salsa became something broader than Cuban music, I also agree.

And when Cubans insist that credit, compensation, and historical memory still matter, I think we should listen carefully.

Not defensively.

Carefully.

- El Caobo

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