1987-1989Cuba

Timba

Also known as timba cubana

Timba is a Cuban genre that sharpened earlier popular dance music into something more elastic, percussive, and impatient. Its best-documented early center of gravity is the Havana scene around NG La Banda, with Los Van Van and Charanga Habanera helping turn the style into a broader movement.

Origins and context

Cuban popular dance music that crystallized in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially around Havana, as musicians reworked son and salsa with stronger Afro-Cuban rhythmic drive, jazz harmony, funk energy, and the realities of the Special Period.

Cuba

The sound

Characteristics

Syncopated percussion
Brass section
Bass
Piano
Congas
Timbales
Afro-Cuban rhythmic patterns

History

Timba took shape in Cuba during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the Special Period. Sources on the genre’s history consistently place NG La Banda among the key early forces, with José Luis Cortés often credited as a central architect of the sound; Charanga Habanera and Los Van Van also helped define and popularize it. The story is not that timba appeared from nowhere, but that Cuban musicians drew on son, songo, salsa, jazz, funk, and Afro-Cuban percussion and made those ingredients move with new urgency.