Little is written down about Nené Manfugás beyond the outline: a Guantánamo-born son of Haitian immigrants who carried the rural son sound out of Baracoa's back country and set it off at Santiago de Cuba's 1892 carnival, startling city audiences with a rhythm they'd rarely heard set to a tres. No recording of his playing survives — he predates commercial record-making in Cuba by decades — but later treseros remember him in the same breath as Isaac Oviedo and Eliseo Silvera, as one of the instrument's first documented voices.