Pregón

[2] Over time, the official town crier, who read public announcements sanctioned by governments, disappeared, but the street cries associated with itinerant vendors continued into the 20th-century, and can still be heard in commercial marketplaces and fairs.

[8] In Cuba, ethnologist Miguel Barnet noted that cross-fertilization was common as hawkers also often based their pregones on rural tunes or popular genres such as son and guaracha.

The Cuban music historian Cristóbal Díaz Ayala has compiled a list of nearly five hundred examples of popular tunes based on hawker songs ‒ most from Cuba, but also from other Latin American countries such as Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.

[9] One of the best-known examples of a pregón is the song entitled El Manisero ("The Peanut Vendor" in English) which was written by Cuban musician and composer Moisés Simons and first recorded by Rita Montaner in 1928.

The 1930 version recorded by Don Azpiazú in New York City with Antonio Machín on vocals became a worldwide hit starting a rhumba craze that swept throughout North America and much of Europe in the 1930s.