Soon, Azpiazú's style was followed by other Cuban artists such as Armando Oréfiche and the Lecuona Cuban Boys, which had extensive international tours in the 1930s.
The kind of rhumba introduced into dance salons in America and Europe in the 1930s was characterized by variable tempo, sometimes nearly twice as fast as the modern ballroom rumba, which was developed as a dance in the 1940s and '50s, when the original music movement had died down.