Hot Havana nights
Self-confessed school disco reject Sherelle Jacobs learns to salsa, strut and sway like the locals in Cuba.
‘He’s stood me up,’’ I thought, standing on the sidelines without my partner, eyeing the salsaing couples jealously. Memories of a school disco when nobody asked me to dance on account of my bifocals and choice of dress flooded my mind. I shuddered at the memory, then started fidgeting in my present attire: a black, puffy frock over the knees, sensible rather than suggestive for meeting a stranger in a bar overseas. As the fabric stuck in the heat, the evening was starting to feel like a fail.
Then my phone buzzed. My date for the evening – Andres – was waiting outside.
It was an awkward, shifty greeting among the potted palms in the lobby of the Hotel Florida: ‘‘You’re a little late,’’ I said laughing, but snippy too.
‘‘I was waiting outside the whole time,’’ Andres replied breezily. ‘‘Plus you said you’d be wearing red so I’d recognise you. You’re in black.’’
‘‘Hmmph. Well, OK.’’ I looked around shiftily, then unzipped my handbag. ‘‘Shall I pay you now?’’
Andres was unfazed by my awkwardness. ‘‘Yes, splendid. I hope you’re ready to dance!’’
I was in Havana to learn salsa. Like many solo travellers, I was in need of a partner, and had hired a ‘‘taxi dancer’’ through a local dance school, Salsabor a Cuba, to teach me moves at a salsa haunt. Andres pulled me on to the dance floor before I had time to be nervous. I tried to remember the basic moves, mouthing them to myself silently with every exaggerated step.
Andres jiggled my shoulders. ‘‘You know the steps, but right now you move like a crab. Think to yourself: I am a confident Cuban muchacha. And stop trying to lead. In salsa, the woman follows the man.’’
So there I was, trying to melt away my rigor mortis muscles and bossy feminist instincts with each one-twothree step, while concealing my struggle with a demented grin. But then my footwork became sprier; my hips found their attitude. It was just how I’d imagined it, all furious exuberance and fireball energy.
Disclaimer: for a school disco reject, I’m seriously into dancing. I’ve been doing ballet since I can remember. There’s a rhapsodic state that I can only reach through moving to music. I’ve found solace in it through difficult times. I have an inkling it’s also why thousands of Cubans dance, too.
I had an hour’s lesson with Jose every afternoon at La Casa del Son salsa school over the space of four days. He was a great teacher and one move we practised over and over was Dile Que Si and Dile Que No – impressive-looking salsa steps where partners swap sides with each other while displaying elegant effortlessness. Again and again, we’d land on the same spot with such mechanical precision that I feared my heels would wear holes into the antique tiles of the classroom floor. Now, armed with a solid portfolio of salsa moves, I felt ready to take on the Cuban music scene properly.
A night at the ballet at the Gran Teatro de La Habana in all its gilded splendour was inevitable. So was a trip to the trendy suburb of Vedado to listen to Cuban jazz until the early hours. One Sunday morning, I headed to the street-art-muralled Callejon de Hamel for its weekly outdoor rumba festival, all dreadlocked hair flicking and quick-paced drums. I even witnessed a spot of reggaeton, which is fast supplanting salsa in the cool stakes among the Cuban youth, at Cafe Cantante. The club in the basement of the National Theatre was stuffed with twentysomethings in hipster glasses and hip-hop video attire.
Exploring the city between all my dance classes and concert hopping was thrilling. There was music everywhere, from the taxis blaring Latin pop to the locals practising the saxophone on their balconies. It seemed like on most street corners there were guitar crooners scratching at their battered strings.
I also fell in love with Havana’s architecture. If the city was a woman she’d be an ageing Hollywood starlet who spurned the knife, or a Charles Dickens Miss Havisham, with all her baroqueness and decay. I rode in candy-coloured Chevrolets with broken doors; I walked through wide boulevards punctuated by untouched 1930s theatres, I stared up in marvel at towering neoclassical buildings corniced with Grecian faces.
My second stop was Santiago, Cuba’s most ‘‘Afro-Caribbean’’ outpost. Oh, the rumours: Haitian street dances, glitter-smeared Caribbean festivals and Yorubainfused religious bembes in the homes of Orishas, all herbal healing, warrior spirits and blood sacrifice. But arriving in the middle of summer, two months before the city’s biggest carnival, at first I wondered if I’d made a big mistake. The streets were choked with dirty petrol fumes from exhaust pipes of rusting Ladas. The sun burned ferociously all day. Frankly, I felt like an asthmatic who had just walked into a smoky bar.
I consoled myself with a conga-sonsalsa fusion lesson at the Casa del Caribe cultural institute: a headspinning but hilarious session of hip swaying, partner dipping and stepping against the rhythm to pounding percussive tunes. It was wickedly fun.
Evenings in Santiago were exceptional. I clinked beers with the locals at the Casa de La Trova while listening to guitar-clutching poets sing about doomed love. In the bar next door, I gawped as a 70-year-old woman dragged her husband by his wrists in a circle across the floor during a mambo number – before he sprang up and started busting moves like Bojangles.
Peering through an open window on Pio Rosado street, I spied a group practising tumba francesa, a genteel dance that dates back to the 1790s. A man and a boy slammed on drums with thundering abandon. But the dance was all gentle bows and handsome strides with marionettestraight posture, the women coyly sashaying in ruffled frocks.