The ballroom rumba derives its movements and music from the son, just as do the salsa and mambo.

Rumba is a dance term with two quite different meanings.

In some contexts, “rumba” is used as shorthand for Afro-Cuban rumba, a group of dances related to the rumba genre of Afro-Cuban music. 

The most common Afro-Cuban rumba is the guaguancó.

The other Afro-Cuban rumbas are Yambu and Columbia.

In other contexts, “rumba” refers to ballroom-rumba, one of the ballroom dances which occurs in social dance and in international competitionsc. In fact the rumba that we see in the westernised international competition (being a mixture of salsa, cha-cha-cha and rumba) derives and originates from the African Cuban rumba.

In this sense, rumba is the slowest of the five competitive International Latin dances: the paso doble, the samba, the cha-cha-cha and the jive being the others. 

This ballroom rumba was derived from a Cuban rhythm and dance called the bolero-son; the international style was derived from studies of dance in Cuba in the pre-revolutionary period.