Cuban folk music

Dr. Olavo Alén says about the "generic complex system": "In his book Música Folklórica Cubana as well as in his opus masterpiece Del canto y el tiempo, he (León) shows us a panoramic view of our music departing fundamentally from the description of the original genres of Cuba.

of the generic complexes has been viewed with skepticism within the musicology circles from various countries, including Cuba, where some musicologists have oscillated between rejection, skepticism and depise…According to Cuban composer and musicographist Armando Rodríguez Ruidíaz:[4] Autochthonous Cuban popular music is indeed similar to a macroorganism in which all its components descend from a common origin and are related, in one way or another, through its entire evolutionary process, which is shown as the development of a formal and stylistic primeval prototype; the common ancestor of all posterior generic forms… …the Spanish song-dances of sesquiáltera (hemiola) rhythm were the primeval starting point of the evolutionary process from which numerous Iberic-American autochthonous styles departed.

3 – songs, comprised by the habanera, the bolero cubano, the guajira, the clave, the criolla, the tango congo, the pregón and other hybrid genres such as the guaracha-son, the guajira-son, the bolero-son, the lamento-son, the criolla-bolero, the bolero-danzón, the canción-habanera and the canción-bolero.

This style was sung by popular choirs mostly integrated by colored people, called "Coros de Clave", and its rhythm was the vertical hemiola, also utilized in the ternary Cuban Contradanza.

Some well known Cuban folk music artists are: Punto singer Celina González, trovadores Sindo Garay and María Teresa Vera as well as soneros Ignacio Piñeiro, Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz Telles (Compay Segundo), Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén Gonzalez.