I have danced more in Cuba than I have danced in any other time of my life, and some of the best nights I have had in Havana have been on dance floors.
Nothing beats walking into a club on a night between Thursday and Sunday, ordering something to drink for $2 or $3 and then wading through the crowd until you find familiar faces. Kissing cheeks and quick check-ins before arms go above heads, hips begin swinging and feeling the bass vibrating against all of the bodies and walls in the room.
The music is inescapable. No one has phones out. No one is looking at other people dancing. Everyone is having such a great time and focusing on how good they feel, how great the people are whom they are with. It’s all about the music and on weekend nights in Havana, it seems like every song that plays is your favorite song and the favorite song of everyone else in the club.
The humidity reaches maximum capacity but it doesn’t make you want to leave the dance floor, but rather, each drip of sweat that careens down your face, neck or back is just proof of how hard you and everyone else is dancing. Hair sticks to backs of necks and shirts to backs and the dancing continues: doing that cabbage patch like never before, bumpin’ and grindin’, salsaing (or at least attempting to), jumping and moving in any which way the music takes you.
Depending on where you go to dance the crowd is different, each with a higher density of one of the following groups but all having afros, dreads, long, dark-haired Cuban girls, well-dressed gay men, people in their first year of Santeria wearing all white from head to toe, foreigners wearing Birkenstocks and denim shorts, and each crowd is peppered with jineteros and sex workers lounging at the bar chatting up one foreigner or another.
Then the music plays a techno song that you know but see it as a sign to dip out and get a breath of fresh air outside and a drink. Weaving around clouds of smoke and hands cradling glasses and couples holding onto each other, you find your way to the bar. Drink in hand, you don’t find a seat but you find a place to lounge with your friends until you all are cooled down, talked up and ready to jump back inside and dance some more.
Because in Cuba the dancing never never ends – clubs close between 2 and 6am and then it moves to the streets – to the Malecón. As my time in Cuba is coming to a close it feels awfully like an hour before closing at the club – having such an exceptional time and dancing your heart out, knowing you have to get your fill – until at least, you step back into that club and get that feeling again.
24 days left Cuba – let’s get everything out of this we can.