The agentive powers of Afro-Cuban dance

Blog post by Ruxandra Ana, University of Łódź, Poland

​My Identities article, ‘Modes of embodiment: exercising agency through Afro-Cuban dance’, was inspired by a conversation with Alvaro, a Berlin-based dancer and dance instructor and one of my research participants after the opening of the exhibition O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies, hosted in 2023 by the House of World Cultures in Berlin. One of the installations in the exhibition, Table of Goods by Portuguese visual artist Grada Kilomba, consisted of a pyramid of soil surrounded by candles, indented with notches filled with coffee, sugar and cocoa, to symbolize the violence that facilitates modern pleasures, and serving as a metaphor for trauma and the colonial wound.

Alvaro spoke enthusiastically about this particular installation, which resonated with our on-going conversations about the fetishization of Black and Brown bodies as part of broader processes of commodification of Cuban music and dance on the island and in European contexts. Our talks inevitably touched upon the experience of racial discrimination in Berlin and the German desire and occasional positive valorization of Blackness, almost unequivocally connotated negatively in Cuba, and Alvaro was not an isolated example.

Table of Goods installation by artist Grada Kilomba. Image credit: Author’s own.

​Between 2021 and 2023, I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic research project among Cuban professional dancers in Rome, Berlin and Havana, which looked at dance labour in touristic and migratory settings. The main method employed in the project was participant observation in different dance worlds and immersion into dancers’ daily lives, training programmes and creative struggles.
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The European salsa scene, as I discuss in my Identities article, provides Cuban migrants with an opportunity to access the labour market by employing their bodily skills along with their symbolic and cultural capital. Cuban adaptations to global dance commerce are deeply rooted in legacies of dance education and dance work in Cuba under precarious conditions, and although the dance business may appear to create spaces for difference and inclusion, dancers often find themselves limited by rigid institutional settings, pushed into constant self-actualization and expansion of movement vocabularies as a result of increasing dance consumerism.
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As complex kinesthetic cultures are reduced to products apt for consumption as part of the transnational movement of dance forms, Cubans employ various strategies to monetize their creative labours and exercise their agency and, in the process, recentre the African roots of Cuban dance and reaffirm Black identities in response to everyday experiences of racism and exoticization.
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On stage, Cuban dancers embody the racialized authenticity that is one of the pillars of the global dance business. But the deeply racialized contexts in which they function do not equate successful artistic careers with respectability and prestige. As many of the research participants pointed out, their dark skin colour and migrant backgrounds exposed them to discrimination and occasional harassment off stage, adding further challenges to their quotidian existence, whether in terms of navigating the city, the healthcare system, or finding property to rent.
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These dynamics were best summarized by Jorge, a dancer from Havana based in Rome:
 
“Growing up, I was constantly bullied, whatever happened, it was always the fault of the Black kid. I gained more confidence once I started working in tourism, I was dancing in hotels and all of a sudden, I was surrounded by white tourists, from all over the world, who wanted to meet me. It’s good to be Black when you are dancing, because it is the only time when you are treated better. But they never ask about you, about your life, your problems, you are treated like an object, just for dance, and all that time you think how to send money to Cuba.”
 
In touristic and migratory contexts, movement practices associated with Afro-Cuban traditions reclaim the emotional and spiritual knowledge embedded in dance as counteraction to increased dance consumerism. At the same time, they create a platform for discussing (still) unacknowledged social and racial problems that span beyond the worlds of dance. 

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Image credit: Author's own.

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Read the Identities article:
Ana, Ruxandra. (2025). Modes of embodiment: exercising agency through Afro-Cuban dance. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2025.2463767​

Read further in Identities:

‘When breaking you make your soul dance’ Utopian aspirations and subjective transformation in breakdance   OPEN ACCESS

CON EL ECO DE LOS BARRILES: RACE, GENDER AND THE BOMBA IMAGINARY IN PUERTO RICO

THE SALSA CLASS: A COMPLEXITY OF GLOBALIZATION, COSMOPOLITANS AND EMOTIONS