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Whenever the Cubans wanted to evoke a link to the spirit, there was drumming and there was chanting. Specific rhythms were associated with specific deities, specific drums to specific rituals. In Nigeria, the bata were said to belong to Chango, the most graceful dancer of the orishas . While the rumba was said to have been invented on the docks of Havana by men beating on codfish boxes, the bata was always the spiritual heart of the music. Rumba comes from guaguanco , music that goes back hundreds of years to when the Spanish brought flamenco to Cuba. These two musics, the rhythms of Africa and this Spanish style, mixed together and led to early versions of the rumba.
    The histories of Cuban music and American music are like parallel universes. The busy trade route between Havana and New Orleans may have provided some piquant cross-pollination long ago. Early New Orleans jazzmen sometimes played in a habanera style from Cuba, andJelly Roll Morton always spoke of what he called “the Spanish tinge” as an essential ingredient to his early jazz. In fact, some of the earliest recordings of anything remotely resembling jazz does not come from the white Americans imitating the black New Orleanians, as commonly presumed, but a racially mixed orchestra recorded in Havana almost ten years earlier. But New Orleans is more Caribbean than American in many ways, and once jazz moved up the river, this Cuban element was lost from its story for decades.
    No doubt it was the music that drew Bert Berns to Cuba during the winter season of 1957–58, no matter what vague ideas he had or stories he told people before he left. The snaking guajiro rhythms drew him like a beacon to Havana. He and his pal Mickey Raygor, another ne’er-do-well from the Bronx, may have talked about putting together a comedy act for Havana nightclubs. Berns goofed around on such an act with Howard Storm a couple of years earlier. Storm was a young up-and-coming comic struggling to make it when he met Berns at Hansen’s, the Broadway drugstore where show business types without offices of their own congregated. Berns sweet-talked Storm into coming out to the Bronx to rehearse a two-man act with Berns as the piano-playing straight man. Storm took a couple of subway rides out to some Bronx catering hall where Berns had managed to commandeer a stage with a piano during the afternoons. But nothing ever came of it.
    Nothing ever came of any of Berns’s schemes to get into show business. He held down a few nothing jobs, but none that ever lasted. He wrote a few songs with some other writers, especially Al Rubin, who managed to place their calypso-flavored song, “Way Down by the Cherry Tree,” with vocalist Micki Marlo on Capitol Records. He tried touting singers. He knew all the Broadway characters. His brother-in-law and sister, when they went on their honeymoon cruise, were surprised to discover when he saw them off that Berns knew the ship’s entertainer, former child star Bobby Breen. He knew the players. He knew some of the moves. He knew how to look and he knew the phone booths atHansen’s. But, at age twenty-nine, Bert Berns had nothing going on and nothing coming up. He lived in a dump in the West Village he couldn’t afford and sneaked out to the Bronx every so often, where his soft touch mother would slip him money behind his disapproving father’s back.
    In Havana, Berns drank too much rum, smoked reefer, and slept on the beach. He and Raygor got involved in some half-baked plans to buy a nightclub, only to back out when they discovered they were actually negotiating the purchase of a whorehouse. He soaked up the atmosphere, hanging out in clubs by night, making the scene, and taking it all in. The rhythm of the orishas began to surround Berns.
    Berns and Raygor ran out of money after a couple of months and headed home long before the good times in Havana crashed to a close. Over the years, Berns would tell many different stories about his stay in Cuba.