If you’re a Cuban salsa leader, I’m sure this has happened to you before: you’re at a salsa social and ask a woman to dance, to which she responds she has never actually danced salsa (for example, because she is a bachatera), or alternatively, she dances LA style. You could just tell her “Nevermind…“, but, if she tells you she’s open to it, you could teach her, like a man. How will she ever catch up on the dozens of hours of classes you’ve had? Here’s the secret: all follower movement can be reduced to a very small set of prerequisite patterns. I’m about to give you a script I’ve used many times over to teach followers from zero in just 15 minutes.

A while back, I was walking a girl back to her dorm after a night out. At some point on our walk, she shared with me that she had a personal philosophy about her aesthetic, and I thought I’d write something about it.

One of the problems I have struggled with when dancing casino is that I have to actively plan which figure to do next, and this planning takes up so much bandwidth that the dance stalls in guapea in the meantime. This is excruciatingly boring for followers (and therefore also takes away the fun for me as a leader), and I’m going to call this pathology guapeitis. As for all maladies, there is a need to remedy this.

As a man on the internet, I sometimes come across videos of women saying they would not settle for men who make “under 6 figures” (i.e. <$100k). I would like to expand on that and give the male analogue.

In my first article about casino (a.k.a. Cuban salsa), I started by describing the three main positions of the couple (abierta, cerrada, caída, a.k.a. open, closed, perpendicular) and organised the rest of the article into a taxonomy of figures starting in a certain position and ending in a certain position. I’ve noticed, however, that two of the three positions, namely abierta and caída, can look different depending on the dance school. Since doing one differently often goes hand-in-hand with doing the other differently, there really exist entire positional systems for dancing casino, which nobody ever points out. For beginners trying to look up basic figures, this difference is not trivial, so let’s point out two such systems.

My first series of casino classes recently ended, just in time for the holidays. However, along with some other outlier students, I didn’t want to lose momentum over Christmas break, so I started venturing into the wild trying to find figures within reach to self-teach. Along the way, I started to see patterns between all the figures I saw appear most, and I realised that I could double the amount of figures I knew just by understanding three new phrases: one phrase to learn vacilalas, two phrases to learn sencillas. And it worked.

Recently, I was served a video of a female influencer deluding herself and her audience with the idea that being single and “freed from the shackles of commitment” allows people to achieve heights of happiness that couldn’t otherwise be accessed. I was attacked for disagreeing with her. Let’s talk about it.

In the last 2 months, I’ve begun taking Cuban salsa classes at the local designated club. I’ve gotten so hooked that I genuinely can’t remember what occupied my thoughts and free time in the 23.75 years prior to this, and of course, like all excellent students, I’ve been taking notes.

Here’s a fun fact about me: I graduated with the joint title of engineer (ir.) and master of science (MSc) in computer science, without anyone ever teaching me about sorting algorithms. It was only a couple months after I was hired as a PhD student that I taught myself sorting algorithms, and that was because I had to teach them to bachelor students in turn the week after.
Inevitably, while studying other data structures, I also encountered the concept of amortisation. I vaguely remembered coming across its Wikipedia page once and taking away that it meant something like “proving that something is fast via black magic”. And yet, it really is not that deep.

“Why would you even care about my future well-being? Why would you not just block me everywhere and pretend I no longer exist? My well-being has no benefit to you. I could die and it wouldn’t affect you.” This is an approximation of what my first girlfriend conveyed to me when I parted ways with her. It’d take me a year to unpack that response.