Rumba

Rumba is a family of percussive rhythms, song and dance. It originates in Cuba as a combination of the musical traditions of Spanish colonizers and of Africans brought to Cuba as slaves. It is secular, with no religious connections. The term spread in the 1930s and 1940s to the faster popular music of Cuba (the Peanut Vendor was a classic), where it was used as a catch-all term, rather as salsa today. Also, the term is used in the international Latin-American dance syllabus, where it is a misnomer: the music used for this slower dance is the bolero-son.