In 1957, two years before Fidel Castro's revolution reshaped Cuba, the ethnographer Lydia Cabrera and her collaborator Josefina Tarafa carried recording equipment into homes and ceremonies in Havana and the sugar mill town of Matanzas to capture Afro-Cuban religious song as it was actually being sung. Cabrera, already the foremost outside authority on Afro-Cuban religion, and Tarafa assembled the results into a fourteen LP set, Musica de los cultos africanos en Cuba, Music of the African Cults in Cuba, a private and largely inaccessible document of ceremonies most outsiders never heard.
Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, ca. 1957, Bata, Bembe, and Palo Songs, the volume Smithsonian Folkways drew from that archive and released commercially in 2003, brings twenty eight recordings to a wider public, most given to bata and bembe drumming for Yoruba derived orisha worship, and a further set given to what the release simply calls Palo song, without naming which of Palo's ramas, Mayombe, Briyumba or Kimbisa, any single track belongs to. That silence is worth reading against this database's own account of the tradition, which records that Mayombe's name has long stood in outside writing as a shorthand for Palo as a whole, precisely the pattern these unlabelled tracks repeat. What the recordings document without ambiguity is Kongo-Angolan liturgical language surviving in nineteen fifties Cuba, the unsyncretised register scholars associate most closely with Mayombe among the three branches, since Briyumba and Kimbisa each openly incorporate Ocha or Catholic material these do not carry.
Smithsonian Folkways framed the release as preservation as much as documentation, returning to public hearing music that religious secrecy and political rupture had both kept from wider circulation.