Son Cubano
The 8 Best Son Cubano
Tracks of All Time
Cuba's foundational popular form, out of the eastern hills and into Havana by the 1920s: Spanish song over African percussion, organised around the clave and the montuno — the call-and-response vamp everything else is built to arrive at.
- Origin
- Oriente and Havana, Cuba, 1900
- Tempo
- 80–180 BPM
- Also known as
- son, son montuno, cuban son, trova
- Tracks
- 8
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: Compay Segundo / Chan Chan
1987
Written by a man in his eighties who said it came to him in a dream, and then made globally famous by the Buena Vista Social Club a decade later. Four chords, and no one tires of them.
Number 2: Rita Montaner / El Manisero
1928
A peanut vendor's street cry turned into a son-pregón, and the record that set off a rumba craze across America and Europe. Cuban music's first global export.
Number 3: Joseíto Fernández / Guantanamera
1929
A guajira whose verses were improvised nightly on the radio, later fitted with José Martí's poetry. Probably the most sung Cuban melody there is.
Number 4: Arsenio Rodríguez / Bruca Maniguá
1937
The blind tres player who added a piano, a conga and a second trumpet and turned son into the conjunto format. Everything salsa does structurally, Arsenio did first.
Number 5: Septeto Nacional / Échale Salsita
1933
Ignacio Piñeiro's septet at the point the form settled into its classic line-up. The title supplied a word that a New York industry later took for itself.
Number 6: Ibrahim Ferrer / Dos Gardenias
1997 · World Circuit
A bolero sung by a man who had been shining shoes when Ry Cooder found him. Whatever one thinks of the Buena Vista project, this performance is not in question.
Number 7: Bobby Capó / Quizás, Quizás, Quizás
1947
Osvaldo Farrés wrote it without being able to read music. A bolero of total economy, and one of the handful of Cuban songs everybody can hum without knowing where it came from.
Number 8: Faustino Oramas / Candela
1995
El Guayabero, filthy and delighted about it, working the double meanings that were always half the point of son lyrics. Recorded when he was seventy-four.