Rumba is the spirit and soul of Cuban music and dance. The fascinating rhythms and body expressions make it one of the most popular dances. It is a combination of three different rhythms: Yambu, Guaguancó and Columbia. Each one has its own story, feel, meaning and timing:

YAMBÚ: Slow, mellow, sensual and fluid. Represents when the couple first meets and get to know each other. GUAGUANCÓ: The next stage, building up: the man making advances and the "vacunao" (movement which symbolizes his sexual conquest). The woman is seductive and provocative: she attempts to turn away and cover herself, and a game of passion and teasing ensue!

COLUMBIA: Historically danced only by men but very occasionally can be seen danced by women. This may be the most complex form of Rumba. In it, the dancer imitates ball players, bicyclists, cane-cutters, and a variety of other figures. The rhythm is more upbeat and driven. It is a free dance style allowing the dancer to demonstrate their style and ability to improvise and essentially "challenge" the others...

Rumba is fiesta.  Rumba is the whole of the music, singing, and dancing that makes up a party.  Yvonne Daniel (1995) writes, "Rumba is a passionate dance, considered beautiful by many. Often the highlight of a community event or social gathering in Cuba, it embodies important elements of life: movement, spontaneity, sensuality, sexuality, love, tension, opposition, and both freedom and restraint. It requires play as well as deliberation. It involves the human body, the human voice, and tremendous rhythmic sense. And since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, rumba has become even more enigmatic, full of contrasts and contradictions, reflecting life and projecting national goals in contemporary Cuba."

The style emerged over the last century in the barrios found on the outskirts of Havana and Matanzas; in time, spreading throughout Cuba.  This music was born from African descendants and Spanish descendants finding commonality in their experiences of oppression at the hands of the ruling classes.  These white descendants of the Spanish, cut off from their origins, established new forms of social relations which brought them closer to the life of urban blacks. Ancestral gestures and movements that were characteristic of the black or mulatto population in Cuba played a part in the development of rumba. The creation of rumba was not a simple question of a profane style borrowing directly from ritual dancing (like a dance to Chango, or a palos ritual dance); neither was it a caricature or a debasement of the original elements of ritual dance, but rather rumba emerged as a new expression of cultural characteristics that were latently present in the population that created it. This is clear in the vocals, percussion and different forms of dance.

At first, rumba was performed in the places where people in the neighborhood usually gathered together; the meeting place could have been an empty plot, a cafe or a small room. Everything with any potential for percussion was used to make music:  the side of a cupboard, the drawer of a chest, any pair of sticks, etc. Rumba started up, just like that, without need for a reason, just as did ragtime, candombe, marinera and other Afro-American styles created all over the Americas. The original meaning of the word rumba is not known; however, it belongs to a class of Afro-American words such as tumba, macumba, tambo, and cumbe that were used to describe a party, both on the continent and on the islands.