Black People Shaped Salsa – Here Are 10 of the Best Songs by Afro-Latines

Salsa isn’t just a genre — it’s Black history in motion. 🖤🔥🎶 Its roots trace back to Afro-Cuban rhythms like son, rumba, and mambo 🥁🇨🇺 — where instruments like the congas and the clave came directly from African musical traditions carried to the Caribbean by enslaved people. The tempo, the syncopation, the heartbeat of the music… that foundation is African. Without it, you don’t have salsa. ✊🏾🌍 And when those rhythms reached New York City with Cuban and Puerto Rican migrants in the mid-2