Watch Tata Guines play

In a culture in which rhythm seems to be second nature, Tata Guines was Cuba's most celebrated percussionist for half a century. Known as “el rey de los tambores” (king of the drums), his speciality was the tumbadoras - the name given in Cuba to the congas, a tall, narrow drum of Congolese origin brought to Cuba by African slaves - and he played them with everyone from Frank Sinatra and Josephine Baker to the veterans of the Buena Vista Social Club.

Born Arístides Soto Alejo in 1930 in the poor neighbourhood of Guines, to the east of Havana, from which he took his stage name, he made his first bongo drums from old tin cans and by the age of 12 was playing his home-made percussion with the group Ases del Ritmo. He also played double bass in a dance band led by his uncle, Dionisio Martínez but drumming was his first love, and he soon switched from bongos to the more sophisticated congas, working by day as a shoemaker and playing in the Estrellas Nacientes orchestra by night.

In 1948 he moved to Havana, but although he sometimes stood in with bands led by Bebo Valdes and Arsenio Rodriguez and with the singer Guillermo Portabales, he did not find full-time employment as a musician until 1952 when he joined the charanga band Fajardo y Sus Estrellas. After touring Venezuela with the group in 1956, the following year he moved to New York where he was feted by the jazz community, jamming with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson and Miles Davis at Birdland and giving a famous solo performance at the upscale Waldorf Astoria hotel. He also recorded the seminal 1957 LP Cuban Jazz Session In Miniature with the bass player Cachao and added percussion to studio recordings by Frank Sinatra and Josephine Baker.

When the Cuban revolution took place in 1959, many Cuban musicians left the island for America, but Guines moved in the opposite direction. He had for some time been sending dollars from his American earnings to help sustain the Communist revolutionaries in exile and he felt it was his patriotic duty to return home and support Fidel Castro's new government. It involved a considerable drop in his standard of living, but he later claimed that he was only too glad to escape the “whites only” signs he encountered in America.

Back in Cuba he was given a solo slot in the Caribe Cabaret at the Habana Libre Hotel, and in 1960 he joined Chico O'Farrill's celebrated Latin jazz band. He also founded the group Los Amigos, led by the pianist Frank Emilio Flynn, and lent his fiery percussion to recordings by the cream of Havana's top musicians, famous for being at ease with almost any Cuban style including son, rumba, guaguanco, cha-cha-cha and Latin jazz.

Cuba's post-revolutionary isolation meant that international opportunities were largely restricted by to visits to Eastern Europe and the Hispanic-speaking countries, and he was on tour in south America with the pianist Alfredo Rodríguez when Ry Cooder arrived in Havana to record Buena Vista Social Club in 1996. Cooder had been impressed with Guines's playing on a famous series of 1970s descarga (jam) sessions by the impromptu “super-group” Estrellas de Areito, which he saw as a model for the Buena Vista recordings. Along with several other participants in the Estrellas sessions, including the pianist Ruben Gonzalez and the trumpeter Manuel Guajiro Mirabal, Guines was on a “wish list” the American producer submitted of the musicians he wanted to employ.

Perhaps Guines could have changed his plans, but there was no good reason for him to do so and he declared himself unavailable. Cooder and his record label World Circuit hoped that if they were lucky Buena Vista might sell 100,000 copies to a specialist world music audience. Nobody had any inclination that the album would become the biggest-selling Cuban crossover recording of all time, the subject of an award-winning film and eventually top seven million international sales. Guines missed fame and glory by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet it was not in his nature to be disappointed, let alone bitter, and he later played on several of the Buena Vista spin-off albums.

During the 1990s he also recorded with the group Cubanismo! under the direction of the acclaimed rock producer Joe Boyd and in recent years he also made important contributions to three Grammy-nominated albums: Lágrimas Negras (2004) with Spanish flamenco singer Diego “El Cigala” and Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés; La Rumba Soy Yo with the Cuban All Stars (2000) and Cuban Odyssey with Jane Bunnett (2000).

He received Cuba's highest music award, the Premio Nacional de Música, in 2006 and continued to direct his own traditional rumba group until his death. His most recent recordings include Pasaporte with Miguel Angá Díaz and Aniversario with his own group.

Tata Guines, percussionist, was born on June 30, 1930. He died of a kidney infection on February 4, 2008, aged 77