Cuba's Revenge

Rubbering up Broadway last week, wondering out-of-towners stopped to gawk at the window of an auto showroom--at the window itself, not at the glittering barges behind it. The glass flexed in and out, visibly and violently, like the stomach of a sales manager who has just hit a triple in a company Softball game. The explanation of this marvel lay in a large, gilt-plastered room one flight up: Manhattan's Palladium Ballroom. There, nearly 1,000 tunestruck New Yorkers--Cubans and Puerto Ricans, non-Latin secretaries and button-downs--were writhing from side to side, stomping and waving handkerchiefs in the air. The building is sturdy, but the floors rose and fell to the stomping.

The cause of the uproar was a seismic new dance called La Pachanga--Caribbean slang for "wild party." Historians are able to date the dance with some exactness. In December 1959, a young Cuban musician named Eduardo Davidson wrote a song called La Pachanga. Havana's charanga groups (drums, flute, piano and strings) picked it up, and by the time the noise drifted north a year later, it was a dance whose gyrations suggested a meringue blended with the samba, Charleston and Bunny Hop. Early this year Bandleader Jose Fajado brought La Pachanga to the Palladium and Dancing Instructor "Killer Joe" Piro began teaching it there. Killer Joe feels that the dance is too complex for definition, but an executive of the Fred Astaire Dance Studios describes it easily as "two basic movements, a swinging from side to side and a style of truckin' done in half time, with infinite variations." At any rate, the stomp was on and the handkerchiefs were out. Skirts, which are worn sin-tight at the Palladium, were double-sewn at the seams. Up to 350 panting pachangueros crowded into the hall's weekly dance classes.

Elsewhere, reactions were mixed. Roseland, a staid, family waltzery near Broadway, banned La Pachanga because it feared for its floor. Freddy Alonso, an El Morocco bandleader, played pachangas but reported sadly that someone had knocked over a table while essaying the stomp. It is "just not El Morocco," according to one patron, to wave one's handkerchief while pachangaing.

Pachangas have poured into the jukeboxes in Latin American neighborhoods and into record shops everywhere; across the nation the hopeful hip are beginning to ask for lessons. In Manhattan, the Astaire Studios and Arthur Murray's were offering instruction up to the Ph.D. level, including such variations as the Under Arm Step, the Indian Hop, and the Kennedy Stomp. But even the experts still seemed somewhat confused. "The Pachanga," Arthur Murray pronounced sagely, "is gay and fun and sexless." Clearly, Murray had been watching the Palladium's handkerchiefs, not its skirts.

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