DANCING IN CUBA

Forget you Castro and Guevara with your stationary hips and bearded jabber jabber about the capitalist decadence of dance: forget you. From the baby shimmying in his crib to the wrinkled señora tapping on the table, the country is in motion. A packed metro bus: girls shaking against poles and old men bobbing their heads to the grating electric boom boom of reggaeton that comes muffled through the P.A., the same song I heard a week ago in a crossroads Santa Clara disco where every night young bodies in busy shirts bump and grind, bump and grind in simulated dance floor sex. Too drunk to remember how I got there. Something about a rickety Lada racing down country roads, holes rusted into the floor, a crease in a shaved head smiling in front of me, a girl in the passenger seat jabbering in Spanish. And what was her name? How many beers? How much rum? One more mojito? Sure, what the hell: they only cost a dollar. This round is on me, Jessica—en español, Hessica. Was that it? That’s what I called her, and she didn’t seem to mind, but looked bored as hell as I stumbled over my own big feet. How many rounds? I asked myself the next morning, feeling my empty wallet and churning stomach, looking at the tangled bed covered in the neon phosphorescence of my own bile. How many rounds? Outside my window, the sweet heavy beats of a rumba band, like knives in my skull. This country: bands playing on every corner; old men with guitars, young guys rapping harmonies, topless black men pounding wild santera drums, hundred-strong orchestras filling old city squares with classical masterpieces and the madness of mambo, lone cornet players splashed on sea walls, women singing Spanish ballads, keeping rhythm to the clack clack of their own heels, accompanied by the bustle of the city. Music pours from street to street, melting into a cacophony of sounds that hook the arms, necks, heads, breasts, legs, and hips of people, young and old, who shake and shimmy in ways I never knew humans could bend. And me? I can dance, or at least I thought I could, but I never felt so lost as I did that night at Havana’s Casa De Musica, a 15-piece salsa band blaring horns, while I, a gringo wallflower, watched women and men, black white yellow tan brown, fluid and beautiful, and my own sideline movements so goddamn clunky that the no one but hookers would dance with me.

Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Shawn Otis