Cuban music is so powerful that it has had an impact on virtually every region of the earth. The Habanera, a dainty rhythm that owes it’s inspiration to French and Spanish ballroom dances was the rage in the early 1900’s and influenced the development of the tango.
El Manciero (The Peanut Vendor) a catchy song about a nut salesman, was the 1930’s equivalent of the Macarena and put Cuban music permanently on
the map. Perez Prado turned the Mambo into a mainstream
favourite in the late 1940’s and 50’s. Cuban music was the base upon which modern salsa was built.

The Queen of Salsa!
No one in Latin music has ever approached the status of Celia Cruz in her more than fifty-year reign. She is quite simply the Queen of Salsa.

Celia Cruz’s vast repetoire of songs contains the history of Salsa - from the earliest, fresh-voiced records with the brassy Afro-Cuban son band, La Sonara Matancera (who led her out of Cuba in 1959), through her sixties recordings with Tito Puente, when she sang soul-stirring tributes to the Afro-Cuban saints and joined the New York set, to her unchallenged dance through Salsa’s history guided by Johnny Pacheco and picking up gold discs and grammies for albums with Fania’s other top bandleaders:
Larry Harlow, Willie Colón, Ray Barretto,’Papo’ Lucca.
Tito Puente said about Celia “There will never be another
Celia Cruz; she has everything”