Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals by Wendy Dale Page A

government.” Then he added in a loud whisper, “Death to all Americans!
Yanquis
go home!”
    I ignored him and walked onto the dance floor, overwhelmed by the bigger problem in front of me, namely my feet. Salsa is very difficult to master, but when done well it is a mesmerizingly sensual dance. When done poorly it looks—okay, so it looks the way I did it.
    As we found an open space among the crowd, I struggled to follow my dance partner’s lead. For me it was still a challenge to combine the essential hip movement with the simple forward-back step. As if to highlight the contrast between his abilities and my own, in between spins, to my great humiliation, my partner would do back flips across the dance floor as people stood back and applauded. Fortunately, within less than an hour, I became a little too drunk to care.
    Alcohol, the friend of inhibited dancers everywhere, had come to my aid just in time. The man I was with (I had learned that his name was Alberto) had snuck a bottle of rum into the club so every few songs, we’d creep off to a dark corner and take several swigs, which was having a beneficial effect. My ability to gyrate my hips was consistently increasing while his ability to do acrobatics was rapidly decreasing so in just a short while, our dancing talents were beginning to even out.
    During our dance breaks, I had managed to learn a few details about him. He was twenty-seven, had just graduated from college as a civil engineer, and while he looked for a job (how one went about this in a communist country was a concept I didn’t completely grasp), he worked as a supervisor on the bus lines.
    He was a few inches taller than me with nice features, a bit on the skinny side but otherwise attractive. He looked like a regular guy—he had short hair and wore a T-shirt and jeans. Like many Cubans, he was light-skinned with green eyes. But it wasn’t his appearance that drew me to him; there was something erotic about him—not in that overboard, sleazy, male swagger kind of way— rather, he wasn’t aware of his power, which made it all the more effective.
    During a slow dance, standing provocatively close to each other, it occurred to me that there was an advantage to travel that I hadn’t considered before—the possibility of a vacation fling with no strings attached. Travel would allow me to savor the heart-pounding adrenaline rush of a new romance without having to stick around for the hard part, the predictable part, the “we have to talk” part. Besides, most of the men I had met in my life had proven themselves so good at refusing to commit. I figured that any woman capable of it was just helping to even the score.
    Consider this a public service announcement broadcast in the interest of American women everywhere, but there is a Latin lover myth that I think needs to be cleared up before I go any further. In an extensive study I would conduct much too late to do myself any good, I now present my findings in the hopes of benefiting others.
    Using the criteria of (1) duration and type of foreplay, (2) duration of intercourse, and (3) probability of subject’s staying the night, Latin men consistently scored lower than all other groups in the first two areas.
    â€œSlam, bam, thank you ma’am” was the phrase characteristic of most participants, with several subjects occasionally falling into the “slam, bam bam, thank you ma’am” category. Though one “bam” was by far the most frequently encountered.
    Several subjects did show some signs of recognition of the concept of foreplay, but even the most highly advanced in this area had never put the idea into practice and had discarded it as a theory with about as much validity as the Lamarckian concept of evolution.
    To the subjects’ credit, Latin men continually scored higher in the third category than any other group; however, given their consistently low