David Cazares writes in his South Florida Times interview with Barbara Craddock about the African roots of salsa:

"Salsa, which means 'sauce' in Spanish, is the term many people use to describe a variety of Afro-Cuban rhythms that include rumba, guaguancó, son, mambo and conga. Bands play to the clave rhythm, the 3-2 or 2-3 beat that characterizes much of Latin dance music.

"For hundreds of years, waves of enslaved Africans in Cuba kept their culture and musical traditions alive, even without drums -- often by playing on boxes and furniture or with gourds and sticks. By the 1800s, Afro-Cuban musicians were fusing such African rhythms with Spanish genres such as the danza and danzón, musical experimentations that would lead to Cuban son - the precursor to salsa - along with the cha-cha-chá and mambo. Arrivals from Haiti brought flutes and violins that are heard in charanga music.

"In the 20th century, Cuban bandleaders added horns, pianos and congas, creating large bands that played rhythmic and danceable music that spread to the United States. Jelly Roll Morton often spoke of the importance of adding a 'Spanish tinge.'

"By the 1940s, jazz musicians in New York were collaborating with their Afro-Cuban counterparts, as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie did with conga player Chano Pozo on the ground breaking tune 'Manteca (Lard).'"

Patrick Bonner, a coordinator with the Colombia Peace Project, writes about how Afro Colombians communities are organizing to regain stolen land and live in peace, in an article published in the LA Progressive:  "In 1997, Don Petro and 15,000 other civilian inhabitants of the region known as the Lower Atrato (near Panama), were forcibly displaced by a series of attacks known as 'Operation Genesis,' carried out by paramilitary forces and the Colombian army’s 17th Brigade. Soldiers participating in the operation told people, 'We have orders to clear out the area because somebody wants your land.' More than 100 people were killed. These inhabitants had lived in the area for generations practicing small-scale farming in harmony with the rain forest.

"Many of the displaced, while in refugee camps, organized themselves under the protective umbrella of Colombian and International human rights organizations.  Most of the displaced were Afro-Colombians, and therefore have a right to collective ownership of the land they had been living on.  This right was guaranteed in Colombia’s 1991 Constitution and codified in Law 70 in 1993 .  Negotiations following the initial displacement resulted in the government recognizing that 86,000 hectares of land in the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó river basins belong to those displaced communities. (A hectare is 2.47 acres.)"