Based on extensive field and archival research conducted in Cuba and the United States, this dissertation explores two overlooked musical traditions practiced in Cuba, Chinese lion dancing in Havana and Afro-Cuban conga culture in Santiago. In it, I examine the activities of marginalized music makers in their aim to preserve and transmit their cultural practices. First, I re-tell the histories of both social groups from their arrival in Cuba to the present day and clarify the meaning of marginality in Cuba. After highlighting their cultural similitudes and intersections, I explore these actors' activities in and surrounding music making practices as they struggle to overcome the strictures of the highly regulated Cuban government. I find that political policies and strategies designed and implemented to rescue the Cuban state from failure—such as the creation of a dual monetary system and the adoption of tourism, an industry fiercely opposed by Castro at the beginning of his socialist regime—effectively and officially exclude the majority of Cubans from this extremely lucrative sphere of economic activity. However, opening the country to tourism has had unexpected consequences on the ground that the state cannot readily control. The encounter with foreign visitors who prefer to expand their exploratory horizons beyond the limits of traditional forms of tourism (e.g., the all-inclusive tourist package experience) has resulted in the adoption of values more commonly associated with capitalist attitudes. This is a process that started in the 1990s, when tourism was reinstated in Cuba. Today, marginalized music makers have developed an ethos that, without being for or against dominant narratives of identity (e.g., the meaning of being Cuban) and civic membership (e.g., the benefits of citizenship), expresses these fundamental transformations. Engaging with theories of value, I show that in the search for what is meaningful in life (e.g., cultural production and expression), these social actors embed their activities in and surrounding music making with their cosmopolitan worldviews, generating spaces of possibility. In these spaces, music makers are not only empowered to navigate the complexities and strictures of power in Cuba, but also to redefine what it means to be Cuban and how to inhabit such Cubanness.