The book on Cuba that merits a place on the shelf alongside Hugh Thomas's opus is Ned Sublette's masterwork Cuba and Its Music. Subtitled From the First Drums to the Mambo, Sublette's methodically researched book covers that and much more in some 672 pages. And that's just the first volume; a second is in the works beginning where this one ends--March 10, 1952, the day a former army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista seized power in a coup from which Cuba has yet to recover, even today.

Sublette, a musician, producer and founder of the record company Qbadisc, begins his sweeping, magisterial book with an audacious claim for a skinny, carrot-haired Texan: "This is a history of music from a Cuban point of view." But the claim is more than justified, and in Havana I was struck by the high regard musicians had for the americano from Lubbock, who was clearly seen as an aplatanado cubano, a transplanted Cuban.

"People often ask me how I got interested in Cuban music," Sublette writes in his preface. "The short answer is, I have good taste." And that he does. Although every musician who ever slapped a drum seems to get credited here, Sublette saves his enthusiasms for the divine: the achingly sublime trova singer Maria Teresa Vera, the bravura bassist Cachao, the versatile and prolific Sindo Gary and the celestially powered guajira singer Celina Gonzalez. And there are plenty of tasty nuggets about the brilliant and self-destructive Benny Moré, whose "soaring voice could sing any genre of Cuban music with any band," and the legendary son musician Arsenio Rodriguez, the blind grandson of a slave from the Congo who popularized the horn-driven bands known as conjuntos in the 1930s. Rodriguez's songs blended African and Spanish idioms, set to a rhythm that he called "canto congo." As Sublette observes, "White Cuban composers were writing dialect songs, but Arsenio was literally writing a history in a popular song, perpetuating the memory of how his grandfather's generation talked." Rodriguez left Cuba in 1951 for New York, where his star never shone as brightly as it did in Havana.

Many other musicians would follow Rodriguez seeking freedom, not to mention more lucrative record deals. Others stayed behind and threw in their lot with the revolution. There were the dueling divas: The great salsa star Celia Cruz died last year in her home in New Jersey, while Celina Gonzalez still lives in her neighborhood of Marianao. Exile/island comparisons have not always been kind to the former. Compare, for example, the slickly produced pop of Miami transplants like Gloria Estefan and Jon Secada with the aging soñeros of the Buena Vista Social Club.

Sublette weaves his history of Cuban music with the island's political history, from the Spanish conquest and the slave trade to the Independence War and the rise of a scruffy, bearded guy from Biran named Fidel Castro, who had a tin ear and a flat foot but scorching ambition. I read a few dozen books on Cuba and exiles before writing my own, so I don't say this lightly: If you buy only one book on Cuba in your life--and want the history, culture and politics all in one volume--this is the one.

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