"Dancing with Cuba" by Alma Guillermoprieto

    

"Dancing with Cuba" by Alma Guillermoprieto. Alma's story is extraordinary. 

Alma left New York to take a teaching job at Cuba’s National School of Dance. For months, she'd work in a run down studio with students who had very little interest in dance, much less Cuban dance.

She would spend her time there eating rice and beans with government issued rations.   She's stand in line with hundreds of people to be served.  She'd plea with the government; insisting that her dancers needed to eat more due to their extreme work out schedule and insisted that eating food with corn syrup was just not healthy.

 She'd get sent to pick sugar cane along with other Cubans in an involuntary draft for Cuba's Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest . That year, Cuba conceived a plan late in 1963 that aspired to break all historic sugar production records.http://faculty.mdc.edu/tpedraza/MMF-Ten%20Million%20Ton%20Harvest.htm.

Throughout her teaching debut in Cuba Alma would come across many challenges.  One of them being, learning the specific dance moves that she'd be forced to teach.  She would write out all of her dance moves on flash cards and organize those cards on the floor repeating the moves until she got them.