Salsa is like much of the greatest popular music. The creative fire was lit when Africa met the cultural cauldron, the new world America.
Cuba set modern Latin dance in motion, but a transformation took place not in the Caribbean but on the streets of New York and Miami. It was there that Puerto-Ricans and Cubans had come to settle as a result of the joint upheavals of poverty in the former and isolation due to the revolution in the latter.
The Americas was
not the only continent where Cuban music and Salsa was exposed. As long
ago as the 1930s, Cuban bands were playing in Paris and New York. In the
1950s, and at various other times in recent history, Europe and North America
were virtually colonized by the cha-cha-cha. North American jazz and Latin
dance forms have gained huge popularity all over the world but when Latin
music came to stay in America, suddenly there met two parallel traditions
that had dipped into the same creative gumbo made of Africa and the new
world.