BORN TO RUMBA
How a Cuban dancer is honoring his late father — the legendary Felix ‘Pupy’ Insua — in New York City
STEVIE Insua is one of the most popular instructors at Alvin Ailey, where he teaches AfroCuban dance on Friday nights to the general public. It doesn’t matter that the 40-year-old barely speaks English — as he whips his long braids and demonstrates the proper way to do a cha-cha step, you can feel the room shed its collective inhibition.
“My father was a dance teacher, so it’s in my blood,” the Havana-born Insua tells The Post in Spanish. “He had me do my first performance when I was 4 years old. I danced the rumba onstage while holding these two lit candles — without getting burned!”
His father was the legendary Felix “Pupy” Insua, who performed all over the world and who was brought to New York City by “Mambo King” Eddie Torres to teach his troupe how to dance authentic Cuban salsa. Insua now has his father’s old job, teaching traditional Afro-Cuban dance at the legendary Alvin Ailey school.
Insua was born in 1976 in the artist and worker community Cayo Hueso in Havana. His mother was a flamenco dancer and singer, and for a while she performed with Insua’s father, before Stevie came along.
Little Stevie spent his weeks with his mother and grandmother, going to school and studying, but on weekends Pupy would whisk him all over the island to watch his performances. But Pupy left Cuba in the ’90s, and like many ballerinas, baseball players and artists who left during that period, he stayed abroad.
“He traveled all over the world, to Arizona, Russia, Canada, Europe,” Insua says. “I loved Cuba, but I wanted to see the world like my father, and it was more difficult back then.”
After graduating from Havana’s Conservatorio Nacional, Insua danced and played drums with several folk companies before being offered a chance to perform with a “Cuban cabaret” troupe that was traveling to Italy. “At that time the only way you could get out of Cuba was by getting work, so I went,” he says. “And then worried about how I could stay later.” In 2002 he arrived in Florence with his young daughter, and soon fell in love with an Italian woman. They taught salsa together, got married and had a baby girl. But in 2010 he received a call from New York: Pupy had lung cancer. Insua had separated from his wife, and though he was still hesitant to leave his two daughters, he dropped everything to come to the Big Apple.
“New York was difficult — the crowds, the clashes that happen every day when you have so many different people living together,” he says. But his new home of Washington Heights had some elder Cubans living there, and his mostly Dominican neighbors were friendly and spoke Spanish. “There’s always music playing out in the street, no matter what time of the day or night, and that has helped me feel at home,” he says. “Wherever there’s music I feel alive. It feels like Havana.”
After Pupy died in June 2011, Insua’s friends helped him get a US work permit. He began teaching classes and gigging for whatever salsa, rumba or Latin dance festival or concert would come to town. But a year ago, he received a call from Ailey Extension, the dance company’s communityeducation program: Would he be interested in inheriting his father’s former Afro-Cuban dance class?
“I could not believe it,” he says. “I was so happy.”
Insua speaks to his mother, who still lives in Havana, two or three times a week, and though he has only visited her twice in the past five years he hopes for more reunions with now-improved USCuban relations.
He now has a son, Stevie Jr., who just turned 4. “We play soccer in the park, sleep in and dance. I miss Cuba very much, but I want to stay here. It’s home.”