According to Holger Henke in his The West Indian Americans, Jamaican Rex Nettleford was right when he said: "'dance was a primary tool of survival'." As a vital part of cultural traditions, dance plays a vital role in historical culture. Three of the most influential dance styles in the Caribbean are Rumba, Merengue and Salsa. The word Rumba is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as “a ballroom dance of Haitian and Dominican origin in 2/4 time in which the foot is dragged with each step.” Here, however, Rumba is a collection of percussive rhythms, songs and dances that originated in Cuba as a combination of the musical traditions of Africans brought to Cuba as slaves and the Spanish colonizers. The term spread in the 1930s and 1940s into the faster popular music of Cuba, where it was used as a generic term. There are two sources of this dance and genre: a Spanish one, from the colonizers, and an African one, starting from the 16th century with the importation of African slaves. The native folk dance Rumba is essentially a sexual pantomime danced extremely fast with exaggerated hip movements and a sensually aggressive stance on the part of the male partner and a defensive stance on the part of the female partner. The music is played with a staccato rhythm, in line with the vigorous expressive movements of the dancers. Emerging in the mid-19th century from the secondary neighborhoods of Havana and Matanzas, this percussion-based music and dance was not widely accepted and, in fact, was often suppressed and restricted because it was considered dangerous and obscene. While the Rumba was modified and adapted in other Caribbean countries, most of the rumba's development took place in Cuba. The "Son... center of the card... bow and action); 1995. Peñalosa, David. Rumba Quinto. Redway, California: Bembe Books, 2010. Powell, Jane. The Girl Next Door.. and How She Grew. New York: William Morrow, 112. free." Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online .com/dictionary/merengue (accessed April 1, 2011). "Salsa - Definition and more from the free Merriam-Webster dictionary." Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online http ://www.merriam-webster.com/. dictionary/merengue (accessed 1 April 2011). Steward, Sue: Musical Heartbeat of Latin America London: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Yeo, Loo. "Salsa & Merengue Society - A History of Salsa: One Man's Word. " Homepage of the Salsa & Merengue Society. http://www.salsa-merengue.co.uk/revealit/histsal/part1.html (accessed April 3, 2011).