Tango in Havana

It was a year or two ago that a woman who’d just returned from Cuba posted in the “Stranded at an Airport Tango Meet-Up” Facebook group. Said she’d danced tango in one of the Havana hotels. That post gave me the motivation I needed. I’d been to Cuba once, long before I became a dancer, and wanted to go back. But I’d been prevented by the US Government’s ban on travel to Cuba. That policy has been relaxed in recent years, however, and commercial airlines have resumed scheduled flights to the island. So, I decided, this year I’d go to Havana to look for tango. It’s still technically illegal For US citizens to go to Cuba as tourists, but I’m not a tourist. I go places to dance, to hang out, to see how the world looks from a different vantage point. Or in this instance to get information, do research, satisfy my curiosity. (The bizarre meanderings of my career, before I finally realized that I was meant to be a tango dancer, included several years as a journalist.) My plan to investigate the Havana tango scene, therefore, qualified me for travel in some of the State Department’s non-tourist categories. And this January I made it happen.

There are now daily scheduled flights to Cuba from the US on American and other major airlines.

Having spent ten days in Havana, I don’t pretend to know everything there is to know about tango in Cuba, or even in Havana itself. Maybe I just scratched the surface. But this is a report on what I did find. Those members of “Stranded at an Airport” who post for tango partners to dance with while waiting for their next flight will be frustrated at HAV—Havana’s José Martí International, where they won’t have cell data unless they have a Cuban cellular account, and where there’s not likely to be internet service for some time to come. But if you arrive in Cuba and want to tango, grab a vintage taxi outside the arrivals terminal—for $25 you can get into the city and with the information here hit the ground running . . . er, dancing!
Researching tango in Havana in preparation for my trip, I turned up a few leads, the most enticing of which concerned outdoor milongas held on the Prado, Old Havana’s main boulevard, on Sunday evenings. There are videos on YouTube, in fact, though none provide contact information for the organizers of these events. Still, I planned my trip to be in Havana over two Sundays so if nothing else I’d be sure to make those. As it happened, I arrived at the Prado at 4 pm my first Sunday in Havana. It was a sunny but breezy day and I found artists and craftspeople displaying their work along the tree-lined median, but no tango. One artist told me, yes, they did come sometimes around 5 pm. So I waited, but no tangueros showed up. The artist ventured that perhaps it was too windy. (A little wind wouldn’t have stopped me!) Then, my second Sunday produced a sudden, ferocious tropical storm, very unusual for Cuba in January. It also brought the tornado that ripped through eastern Havana, causing four deaths, numerous injuries, and the destruction of many dwellings. It was said that a tornado like that hadn’t hit Havana since 1940. In any event, my hopes of finding tandas on the Prado were a flop, for this trip at least. 

On the Prado, where Havana tangueros dance—when they do dance—but sorry, no tango today!

At La Casa del Tango I found a large 

painting of Carlos Gardel, the god of tango 

vocalists. "I am forever arriving in Cuba," 

it says. Curiously, the Cubans are portrayed 

as children—and miniature children at

that! I wonder who painted this?

Another lead I had was a place called La Casa del Tango. I found it with no trouble at Calle Neptuno 309, between Avenida Galiano (a/k/a Italia) and Calle Aguila in Central Havana. La Casa turned out to be a curious combination of a school and tango museum, established in a private dwelling. The museum is dedicated primarily to memorabilia of tango vocalists long gone. Mondays at 5 pm they have a free “tango show.” The day I went, the show consisted of two Cuban vocalists performing to recorded music. The first, Samuel Figueroa, was an older man whose tango vocal career, I learned, had flourished in the 1950s. Now frail of body and voice, he performed just one song. The second, Castelio Saborit, perhaps 20 years younger, is seen in the video. Saborit’s voice, as one can tell, hasn’t left him. On the dance floor behind him was a European tourist couple, later to be joined by myself partnering with one of the school’s young tango instructors. The program lasted only half an hour or so. The audience of about 15, mostly older Cubans, were fans of tango vocal music, not dancers, but they seemed satisfied with the entertainment. 

Castelio Saborit performing at La Casa del Tango 

Beginner tango class at El Ojo del Ciclón. Francisco 
Jackson Gayle Gómez, an accomplished dancer, instructs.

It was the director of La Casa del Tango, Rubén Daubar, however, who gave my third lead. He pointed me to El Ojo del Ciclón, the workshop of Cuban artist and tango aficionado Leo De Lázaro, located on Calle O’Reilly at the corner of Calle Villegas in Old Havana. There, it turned out, they have a free beginner tango lesson at 8 pm Sundays and Fridays, followed by a milonga that can run well into the morning hours. My first visit to El Ojo, on a Friday, I found a small group of tangueros in attendance—perhaps ten. I danced two or three tandas, but didn’t stay late. The following Sunday I found a larger group. El Ojo also advertised a Wednesday milonga, but when I showed up on Wednesday evening I found El Ojo closed. Along with two others, I waited to see if anyone would show up. When that didn’t happen one of the others made a phone call and announced that Wednesday tango had been cancelled, they just hadn’t gotten around to updating the sign. Although tango in Havana seems to be headquartered at Ojo del Ciclón, more or less, organization is informal. Later, when, to my surprise, I discovered that there’s a Havana tango Facebook site, Tango en La Habana, I found a post recounting how some tangueros had in fact shown up at El Ojo that Wednesday after the three of us left. Finding it closed, they put together an impromptu outdoor milonga in a plaza nearby, spreading the word by phone. I was sorry to have missed that! No doubt it’s been that sort of impromptu informal organizing that puts together the Sunday afternoon milongas on the Prado when they do happen. 

Milonga at El Ojo del Ciclón (Photo by Amy Bermúdez Díaz) 

People seem surprised when I mention tango in Havana. For them Cuba conjures images of salsa, mambo, bolero, rumba and cha-cha, and rightly so. But things are more connected than they realize. Tango not only has great potential in Cuba, it has a history there also—ancestral links between that country and tango, musical DNA exchanged between Cuba and the Río Plata region of South America where tango emerged first as a dance, later as the musical genre we know today.

Under the Spanish empire, Havana was a central hub for commerce between Spain and its American colonies. It was a cultural hub as well. Africans were were brought to Havana as slaves from the Angolan port of Benguela, and to Montevideo as well, which was founded in large part to serve as a slave depot for the Viceroyalty of the Río Plata, as present-day Argentina and Uruguay were then known. The very word tango is believed to come from one of the West African languages. It was first recorded, coincidentally, in both Havana and on the Río Plata during the first decade of the 19th Century—but with the accent on the second syllable. Then, it referred not to a specific dance, however, but to a gathering at which African music and dance were regularly present, originally in the context of religious ceremonies. This influence of African culture in the Americas led to the “Africanization” of the Spanish contradanza, the result of which was the musical genre known as habanera, presumably because La Habana was the mixing pot from which it emerged. Habanera became widely popular in post-colonial Latin America during the 19th Century. It was the root of the popular genres of Cuban music that followed. As a result of the African connection, the name "tango" was applied to a new and shocking style of dancing to habanera music that appeared on the Río Plata as early as 1866—dancing in a closed embrace that at times involved full body contact and was considered lewd and licentious given the mores of the age. During the last third of the 19th Century habanera, with its dramatic 2/4 time signature, became the basis for the tango musical genre. Early in the 20th Century, as tango spread beyond the arrabals—the peripheral slums—of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rosario where it first took root, it caught on and became popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world, Cuba included. In more recent times, political refugees from the military dictatorships in Argentina sought asylum in Cuba and, it is said, revived interest in tango there. 
The Tango el La Habana Facebook site is relatively new and not yet being used to the fullest. It is only in the last few years that Habaneros have had access to the internet. Many institutions certainly have more or less full-time connectivity, but individuals without access to them must obtain a wifi antenna and then purchase 1-hour connection cards at CADECA, the national telecommunications company, for $2 each, which would be expensive anywhere. Nevertheless, those in Havana who want to get online seem able to find a means to do so, and one sees as many people in the street gazing into the crystal ball of their smart phone as anywhere else in the world. 
Last year Havana had its first tango marathon. Its second is coming up the end of this April. On Sunday, February 24, even as I wrote the foregoing, an announcement appeared on Tango en La Habana that there would be tango on the Prado from 5 to 8 pm that very evening. I sighed and began thinking about my next visit.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1769504306477356/

The Fábrica de Arte Cubano (FAC)

The FAC is an amazing place—huge, cavernous, labyrinthine. I went there thinking it was another combination artists’ workshop and gallery, having seen a couple of reports of tango having been danced there. From the outside it looks like it might once have been a monastery, and the designation of its five zones as “naves” would seem to support that. In truth it had been an electrical generating plant, and later pressed olives into oil. It has many levels, galleries, alcoves, stairways, terraces, and courtyards, many of them mixed use spaces. It’s like an indoor mall combining art, music, dance, food and drink. I counted six restaurants and bars, with varieties of food otherwise hard to find amidst Havana’s ubiquitous comida criolla joints. And it's all cheap—by design, to make the FAC accessible to as wide a public as possible. There’s a $2 entry fee at the door, where they give you a card cross-hatched into blocks. As you make your circuitous way through the five naves, each time you purchase food or drink the server marks the price in one of the blocks. When you leave the FAC you turn in your card to a cashier where you pay for everything at once. I didn’t have much—a piece of “selva negra"—Black Black Forest cake—and a glass of vino tinto, total price $3.20. There is a lot of art on display—I saw mostly photography—but scattered throughout are video screens of all sizes, some displaying video art, others music videos—mostly pop and hip-hop, both Anglophone (e.g. Alicia Keys) and the inescapable—in Cuba—reggaeton and other latin hip-hop sub-genres. One screen played a Charlie Chaplin movie. There were several dance floors or potential dance spaces, with dj’d music in most, but one live conjunto playing a latin mix. That space was relatively small and crowded, with the audience unable to do more than a little swaying. In one large dance space with a wall–sized screen the “dancers” looked as if they’d been stricken by some form of palsy—or was it freestyle jazzercise? Oh, and get this—the FAC is only open Thursday through Sunday, 10 pm till 3 am. Kind of cool, really.  Art as nightclub/nightclub as art. But I’d come as a part of my quest for Cuban tango. Alas, there was none in evidence during my visit, although the FAC will be hosting one of the events during the 2nd Havana Tango Marathon next month. Still, I was glad I’d come, and left imagining one of the FAC’s many spaces morphed into a dedicated tango salon or café. 

  A walk through a small portion of the FAC