Cuba keeps dancing despite Trump’s oil blockade

HAVANA — After another nationwide blackout debilitated Cuba, electricity began flickering back on in parts of Havana on a recent Sunday afternoon. As cell signal returned, Alberto González’s phone buzzed nonstop with messages.

“Will you open today?”

“Is there power?”

“Good afternoon, brother. Will there be dancing?”

Until now, it wasn’t a question people needed to ask. Of course there would be dancing.

For decades, González and his wife, Mercedes Cruz, have run a popular weekly dance night in a historic social hall in one of Havana’s oldest neighborhoods, a few blocks from the Caribbean Sea. Both 72, they call the event Los Tradicionales — “the traditional ones” — because their goal is to help preserve Cuba’s rich dance heritage, from rumba to timba to casino, an ancestor of salsa.

They have continued to host the party in recent months amid power failures and food and water shortages — the result of a near-total U.S. blockade on oil shipments to Cuba.

The Vedado neighborhood of Havana goes dark during a nationwide blackout on March 21. Power outages are common as Cuba weathers a U.S.-imposed oil embargo.

(Natalia Favre / For The Times)

Many here lack water to bathe and flush toilets. They have become accustomed to rising from bed whenever the electricity blinks on, no matter the hour, to cook and do laundry. The party is a break from all that — and from constant worrying about what President Trump has planned for the island (“Cuba’s next,” he warned after bombing Iran).

“Here, you don’t think,” Cruz said of the party. “You dance.”

Without a fan to keep the heat and mosquitoes at bay at home, she had barely slept. But once it became clear there would be electricity, she styled her blond hair and slipped on a floral dress while González phoned up the cast of characters that powers Los Tradicionales: the lanky ticket-taker, the stylish deejay, the man whose single job is to coax popcorn from a finicky machine.

Then the couple walked down a famed boulevard named after the father of Cuban independence, José Martí, to the old building that houses Havana’s community center for Cubans of Arab descent. Like so much here, the space had a vintage feel, with old tile floors and walls hung with faded photographs of a visit to Cuba by Yasser Arafat, the long-deceased Palestinian leader.

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1. Alberto González put on shoes for a night of dancing. 2. Mercedes Cruz looks at photos of one of her sons on her phone in Havana. She and González have two children living in Florida whom they have not seen in four years. 3. Cruz rests her hands on a table in the hall where the weekly dance gathering takes place in Havana.

Alberto González speaks with a security worker before dancers arrive at Havana’s community center for Cubans of Arab descent.

“Hola, mi amor!” Cruz called out to the bathroom attendant reporting for duty. She and González had cranked the air conditioner way up, filling the hall with cool air, and she took a moment to enjoy it.

The building is on the same electrical grid as a local hospital, which means that unlike most parts of the island beset by rolling daily blackouts, it loses electricity only if the nationwide power grid collapses.

By sundown, a line had formed outside. González, sporting a baby blue polo shirt and the sort of jaunty hat favored by golfers in the 1970s, greeted the guests one by one, helping several nattily dressed older women climb up a steep marble stairway.

The first track boomed, a Bad Bunny number remixed with a salsa beat, and people started filing in.

Yaima Pacheco Muñoz, 37, was the first person to start dancing, along with a friend, Míosoti Bell Leon, 52. As a parade of people streamed in, many stopped to kiss the women on the cheek.

“It’s really a family here,” Bell said as she and Pacheco took a break at a table draped in red cloth.

Nurys Núñez Arellano, 61, gently touches her partner, German Fernández Miranda, 66, who is eating popcorn and watching the dance floor.

Pacheco, an economist, said she had been without steady electricity at home for days. Like the battery on her phone and computer, she was drained.

When a journalist asked whom she blamed for the problems, Pacheco closed her eyes and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not here.”

Sunday nights “are therapy,” she said. “This is the only place where I can relieve the stress.”

A dance hall track by Sean Paul started and she pulled Bell back onto the floor.

Eugenio Leiva sat alone at a table by the bar, nursing a whiskey. “The enemy’s drink,” he called it, a joke about the United States. “I do like rum,” he said. “But I like whiskey more.”

Maurin Piedra Rodríguez, 52, speaks on the phone during a break at the weekly dance gathering in Havana.

The dance night skews older — and draws about twice as many women as men. Leiva, 74, doesn’t dance, but he likes watching.

A writer, he once worked on cultural issues for Cuba’s communist government, before moving abroad. He had recently returned from Spain, and said he was shocked by the conditions, which he blamed in part on U.S. sanctions and in part on mismanagement by the government. All but one of his five children had left the island because they didn’t see a future there.

Dancing, Leiva said, “is one of the few things that they haven’t taken from us.”

Leiva, who works at the community center’s library one day a week, said the dancing reminds him that Cubans, even when things are hard, turn to one another for support. His neighbors, he said, offered him food daily, even when they barely had enough to eat. And on nights when the power went out, Cubans gathered in the street to play dominoes or sing classic songs a cappella.

“We’re in our worst crisis,” he said. “But we’re united.”

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1. Attendees at the “Los Tradicionales” record themselves dancing while a ‘reparto” song plays. 2. A woman who just gave her name as Susana joins Juan Marín, 73, on the dance floor.

Roberto Rodríguez, 48, was one of the most proficient dancers. After each song ended, another woman looked to him eagerly, hoping for her turn to be twirled on the floor. He labors seven days a week as a construction worker, but goes out dancing every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

“I dance, I have a beer, I talk with my friends, and then I’m ready for whatever the week throws at me,” he said.

Some of his earlier memories are of dancing at family birthday parties or big public carnival events where the country’s top orchestras would play. He plays salsa music at home constantly so his sons, 14 and 16, know how to move to it, too. “Dancing is a language,” he said. “It is our mother tongue.”

At 9 p.m., González called up the regulars who had recently celebrated birthdays so the crowd could serenade them.

Then he led a large group in the “casino circle,” a sort of Latin square dance that originated in Havana in the 1950s. Smiling pairs danced the same steps simultaneously, exchanging partners every few beats.

María Camejo pays for cookies at the bar during the “Los Tradicionales” gathering in Havana

For Cruz, it was a symbol of Cubans’ connection to their history — and commitment to community. It’s what she missed when she traveled to the United States, where her grandchildren live.

González put down the microphone and somebody turned down the lights. A reparto track came on — Cuba’s version of reggaetón. González made a beeline to his wife of five decades, and for the first time all night they did what they had come to do: They danced.