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Cuban Rhythms
by Lea Aschkenas
Excerpts:
Early one afternoon in November, 1999, 32-year-old Denise Vancil was walking through downtown Havana, where impromptu baseball games take over the streets, salsa music emanates from surrounding balconies, and the Caribbean, never more than a few blocks away, smacks against the seawall, drenching pedestrians with its salty spray.
The heels of Denise’s dance shoes clicked out a fast-paced rhythm as her cane tripped along the uneven sidewalk. She walked with two American women from her salsa class, one of whom offered an elbow for support.
After two months of planning this trip and nearly ten years of fantasizing about it — and after endless attempts to convince her friends and family she would be safe as a blind woman traveling in Cuba — Denise had finally made it to Havana. She planned to stay for two weeks on an Afro-Cuban dance and percussion program organized by Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization.
But on the walk back to their hotel, her friends got deep into a conversation and briefly forgot that they were with Denise, who slipped into a large pothole and fell with all her weight on the side of her right foot. She went to the hospital and was put in a cast. She got crutches and tried to stay in Havana, until it became obvious that she couldn’t maneuver the city’s potholed streets in her condition. A week after she’d arrived, she flew home to recover.
Ironically, her physical therapist told her that her injury, a break in the fifth metatarsal, is called a “dancer’s break.” Her doctor said it would take at least three months to heal 50 percent and up to a year to fully heal, but she nonetheless made a reservation to return to Cuba in January. “I didn’t have a lot of time, because I was starting a new job in mid-February,” says Denise. “I remember being in physical therapy with a cast and a wooden shoe and telling the therapist, ‘O.K., I know my foot is broken, but I’ve got this salsa class in Cuba to get back to.’ Everyone thought I was crazy, which I am.”
Denise lost her sight at age 13, when her retinas detached following complications from a birth defect known as Persistent Hyperplastic Primary Vitreous. Ever since, she has spent much of her time doing things that people consider crazy, especially for a blind person. She has whitewater rafted along the Yampa River in Utah and hiked the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. She has swam naked off the Caribbean coast of Belize, danced merengue on a bar top in Ecuador, held an anaconda in her hand in a Bolivian rainforest and ridden a tandem bicycle through lavender fields in France . . .
