Beginner's reference for casino, a.k.a. Cuban salsa

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“Don’t worry about the name or standard execution of each move – it’s all feeling” is not something to demand of an engineer! LWYMMD. I systematised it.

In the last 2 months, I’ve begun taking dance classes at the local designated club for learning casino (“Cuban salsa”). 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.

  1. A note on standardisation
  2. Basic terminology
    1. Elements of the dance
    2. Music
      1. Timing
      2. Genres
    3. Related dance styles
  3. Resources
    1. Videos
    2. Writeups
  4. General principles
    1. Body movement
    2. Followers can’t and shouldn’t anticipate
  5. Posiciónes
    1. Posición abierta
    2. Posición cerrada
    3. Posición caída
  6. Figures
    1. Starting in abierta
      1. Ending in abierta
        1. Guapea
        2. Vuelta derecha
        3. Vuelta doble
      2. Ending in caída
        1. Enchufla
        2. Enchufla doble
      3. Ending in cerrada
        1. Vuelta derecha cerranda
    2. Starting in caída
      1. Ending in abierta
        1. Dile que no (DQN)
      2. Ending in caída
        1. Exhibela
      3. Ending in cerrada
        1. Dile que no cerrando
    3. Starting in cerrada
      1. Ending in abierta
        1. Dile que no
      2. Ending in caída
        1. Aguajea
      3. Ending in cerrada
        1. Pal medio
        2. Paso son
  7. Longer sequences
  8. Final thoughts

Update (2026): I learnt a lot of my basics in a bad schooling system. A lot of the information in this article has been censored because I do not want to spread the bad education I received. Some parts were rewritten to be more correct, like the part on music. Anyway, I also think social dance should not be taught figure-first but frame-first and gait-first.

A note on standardisation

One problem the more casual salsa casino community seems to have is that it doesn’t like to define standard names and movement patterns, because – as you would expect from artsy people – standardisation “kills creativity and feeling”. Obviously this is wrong; you need standardised names if you want to communicate about figures, and you you need standardised movements so that you know which guidelines to vary around when you inject your own feeling into the dance.

I’ve heard the “Dancing is a language – all that matters is that your bodies understand each other.” platitudes, but problematically, the Google search bar doesn’t allow me to dance with it so that I can ask it for the figure I’m looking to learn about, and similarly, without learning the grammar of a language, you won’t be a great writer in it regardless of the “feeling” you put into your writings.

So here’s a written reference for salsa casino knowledge, about the structure of the dance, with structure. As far as I’m aware, there has only been one other nerd, Martin Blais, who has constructed something similar.

Basic terminology

Elements of the dance

Salsa Casino is danced as a couple, with a leader and a follower. They both execute figures that each consist of patterns of the arms, legs, torso and feet. The leader decides which figure he wants the couple to execute next, and signals this to the follower through tension. She interprets the signals and executes the patterns asked of her.

Music

Timing

Casino is danced on music with a 4/4 time signature. The bottom 4 means that every quarter note in the sheet music is one beat/count; the beat is the unit of evenly spaced repetition in the music, and how fast beats follow each other is the tempo expressed as its BPM. The top 4 means that every four beats form a bar, which the melody indicates with a more pronounced note. Every two bars form a phrase, like breathing in and breathing out. (Just like it feels weird to breathe cyclically starting on the exhale, it feels weird to start a figure in the second bar of a phrase.)

Your feet step – alternatingly receive your weight – on the beats. (Note: when a movement happens on a particular count, that means it finishes on that count. E.g.: if you “take a step on 1”, the foot hits the ground on 1, rather than starting to move on 1.) To make the dance less nervous, each bar has one beat where there is a pause in the weight transfer. The consequence of this is that when the first step taken in a bar is with your left foot, the next bar will start with a step of your right foot. Therefore, it takes one phrase to loop around, and so dancers count beats as 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-1-2-... rather than 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-... like musicians, who are focused on bars.

Dancing a tiempo (“on the tempo”) means we choose to step on the first three counts of each bar (1-2-3-_-5-6-7-_-1-2-3-_...). Dancing contratiempo (“against the tempo”) means we choose to step on the last three counts of each bar (2-3-4-_-6-7-8-_-2-3-4-_...). It is customary in casino that leaders use their left foot to start the first bar and followers use their right foot, so leaders will step L-R-L-_-R-L-R-_L-R-L-... whilst followers will step R-L-R-_-L-R-L-_R-L-R-....

Genres

In principle you can dance casino to all 4/4 music, but it is particularly suitable to be danced to timba music and to salsa music. (Casino is one of the only dances that is not named after the music it is danced to, but rather after the location it was created.)

There is a core set of instruments that reoccurs in these two genres to help you find the timing. To dance a tiempo, if the cowbell player does his job properly, you can follow him to find the 1-3-5-7. To dance contratiempo, you can listen for the conga, which hits on 4 and on 8. To practice recognising which instruments generally indicate which beats, check out the Salsa Beat Machine or the PercussionTutor app.

When you research “salsa dancing”, you will stumble upon three prominent names: Cuban, LA and New York. (You will also find less prominent names like caleña and choke, but these are an order of magnitude removed from the other three.) You can dance all of these to salsa music.

Casino is described in this article. It is an invention of the Cuban people that consists of two sets of figures: those that involve one leader and one follower (en pareja, “in couple”), and those that involve more than one leader-follower pair (rueda, “wheel”). Casino en pareja, i.e. only the partner dancing figures, is what you will usually learn in dance classes. When you dance casino in a circle of couples, with one “supreme leader” (cantante, “singer”) calling out the name of the next figure, it is called rueda or rueda de casino (“wheel of casino”).

Son is the predecessor of casino. Its figures are less complex, primarily closed rather than open, and it is usually danced contratiempo. This is a perfect example.

Casino is not a form of salsa. This is purely a historical fact. There was son music since the early 1900s. In the early 1940s, Arsenio Rodriguez evolved son into son montuno music. This popularised son partner dance. Then, in the mid-1950s, at the dance halls (casinos deportivos) in Cuba, people had the idea to start dancing son with multiple couples in a circle, i.e. a rueda de son, still to son montuno music. To make partner changes easier, a third position was needed besides open and closed position (see below), and this was the birth of the rueda de casino. Soon after, people started dancing this way outside of the rueda, and this marks the birth of casino. Meanwhile, salsa music evolved out of son montuno music only in the 1970s; although the word “salsa” (“sauce”) existed in music before that, the genre did not. To dance salsa, you need salsa music. There was no salsa music for the first decade of people dancing casino, so it is not salsa. “Cuban salsa” is an anachronistic marketing term.

Linear salsa (to distinguish it from caleña and choke) is an umbrella term for LA-style salsa and New York-style salsa. In both cases, the follower (but not the leader) is restricted to moving back and forth on one straight line. The difference between them is on which of the 3 non-pause beats the dancers move their feet apart.

  • In LA-style, the dancers move their feet apart on the first count. See this and this and this and this.
  • In NY-style, the dancers move their feet apart on the second count. This topic gets confusing, but note the following:
    • This video by Dance Dojo distinguishes ON2 CT (on-2 contratiempo) from ON2 AT (on-2 a tiempo), which means that the “tiempo”s and “on”s are orthogonal dimensions to describe a style.
    • This video is fully a tiempo which means a person’s feet pause on 4 and 8, and “on-2” here means that they move away from each other on 2 and 6.
    • This video says that differences are also made through “rhythm”, i.e. which counts are quickened and which are dragged out.
    • This video (a 1-minute summary of this video) seems to agree with all of the above that using the term “on 2” is underdetermined.

I tend to stay away from terms like “on1” and “on2” to denote dance styles, because when you involve numbers, you implicitly refer to timing, and this is confusing.

Dance style is independent of timing. If you decide to dance casino but with contratiempo timing, are you still dancing casino? Do deaf people have the right to dance casino even if they can’t hear the count, only feel the bass? And is it still casino if there is no music at all? Of course. The style of dance is independent of timing. If you film a video of a dance, and you then mute it, you can no longer identify the timing, yet you can still identify what style of dance it is. That is the essence of a dance style, not its timing. You can dance casino contratiempo or dance son a tiempo. In fact, originally, casino was danced atravesa’o, i.e. on the timing 3-4-5-_-7-8-1-_-3-4-5_..., and the people who dance NY are still split between a tiempo and contratiempo to this day.

Rueda is casino with more than one couple, and partner switching happens during the dance. The circle indicates which followers the leaders switch to next and the centre of the circle indicates the direction of many of the moves.

MCC is a teaching methodology for casino and, by consequence, a footwork styling framework. Like everyone else, teachers have their own “flavour” they add overtop their dance style. That flavour usually does not have its own name, unless the teacher is called Yoel Marrero (the infamous “YM” you may see mentioned online), who calls his systematisation of casino “MCC”. The telltale signs for “YM was here” are cross-legged steps in closed position and a mandala-like foot diagram on the ground, like in this video of his students. I don’t like his system, but I appreciate that it’s a system.

Casino en pareja is distinct from all of the above since it has two degrees of freedom for the movement of both leader and follower (unlike LA/NY), has three positions (unlike son), and is improvised by the leader on a grid rather than being dictated in a circle (unlike rueda).

The rest of this article is about casino en pareja.

Resources

Videos

Most informal salsa casino videos on the internet date back to between the late 2000s and early 2010s. A handful of modern YouTube channels make trustworthy, high-quality, and most importantly systematised material.1

  • If you want a step-by-step explanation of basic figures, Amando Méndez’s Salsaficion has you covered. Don’t look at his feet too much, though.
  • If you want a much richer catalogue of figures, Michał Niezgoda’s La Suerte is an infinite resource.
  • If you want a high-quality but less coherent kind of approach, Steven Messina has multiple helpful videos, including one where he shows the relations between figures. When he has a video on a figure, it is a gold standard. Unfortunately, he does not offer a coherent video series since most of the figures he teaches are behind a paywall, although he does provide an archive of dozens of livestreamed 1-hour salsa casino classes. He also teaches how to listen for instruments in the music.

There are also older video catalogues that are worth looking over:

  • Avinciia Danse has about 30 videos with quite complex and uncommon figures, useful for those who have graduated past beginner level.
  • Salsa Steps is a massive video library of 358 figures, of which 70 are available free of charge and the rest can be purchased at €1 per figure, which is a reasonable price considering that in-person classes will run you €10 for a one-hour class showing one figure live. The quality of the videos can be previewed on their YouTube channel.

And lastly, I should mention several compilation videos where one couple performs dozens of figures, one after another:

  • Kenner Diaz’s compilation of “50 best figures” (written list found in the video description).
  • Jose Lunares’s compilation of 54 figures, grouped by relatedness (written list found in the comments, provided by somebody who is undoubtedly just a chill guy).
  • La Clave’s compilation of “100 must-know figures”, split into 4 parts: 1-32, 33-58, 59-81, 82-100.

All of the above sources are about casino. Daniel Rosas makes good videos on LA style, which can sometimes be incorporated into casino.

Writeups

There are only a handful of written sources that really go into depth about casino.

  • As mentioned in the intro, as far as I’m aware, only Martin Blais has actually ever attempted to collect knowledge of casino figures by describing them in a clear system. In fact, he was so ahead of me that he started his notes around the time I was born. He took down his book in 2015 to revamp it, but he never did, so we only have the table of contents and 10 sample pages available.
  • Jesper Tverskov’s SalsaSelfie blog is the most extensive written source on casino that is publicly available. He dedicates articles to individual figures, comparing videos from multiple sources and eras, and he also writes about his opinions on the broader philosophy of the dance.
  • Salsa Yo is a database of figures with their basic properties (e.g. which other figures they are based on), a link to a (usually old) reference video, and a description of the figure. I usually find Salsa Yo’s description hard to follow, though, so I only use it to find names.

I’ve also come across some small Blogspot pages about casino, but nothing worth mentioning (especially not whatever this is).

General principles

Two general principles of dancing salsa casino before we get technical.

Body movement

Salsa Casino is playful, not serious nor rigid. Movements are fluid and limbs should be in motion as much as possible.

When moving your arms, the impulse should come from your elbows (upper arms), whereas your hands (forearms) should lag behind and react to this movement. Think about how people do “the wave” at sports stadiums: they don’t stick their hand up, but move their upper arms and let their hands whip (with control) as a result.

For followers: always leave a gap open under your left armpit. Leaders need to be able to catch your back through that gap.

Followers can’t and shouldn’t anticipate

As a leader, when you transition to the next figure, the central principle to always remember is that the follower can’t read your mind. She does not know what you want to do next, so if the first bar of a figure looks exactly like the first bar of the last figure, she will repeat the second bar too, so to transition out of the figure, it is you who should change his second bar such that it stays compatible with her inevitable movement. More generally: if the follower does not move like you wanted her to, your signalling is always at fault.

As a follower, you shouldn’t try to anticipate the next figure, because if you guess wrong, you’ll lose track of what’s happening, and if you guess right, you’ll rush it. Letting go of control is difficult for many women at first, but what makes salsa casino both fun to dance and watch is that the follower is always slightly surprised. The man does the work of improvising a choreography, the woman pays attention and trust him by relinquishing control.

Posiciónes

All figures start with the leader and follower positioned relative to each other in one of three ways.

If you’re a computer scientist, this may help: every figure in Cuban salsa casino can be interpreted as a transition between the 3 states of a finite-state machine, which are the positions described in this follow-up article.

Posición abierta

In posición abierta (“open position”),

Posición cerrada

In posición cerrada (“closed position”), The leader’s right hand is on the follower’s left shoulder blade, and her left hand is on the leader’s right shoulder blade. Her arm passes over his, even if there is a height difference, and her elbow rests on his. The other hands are clasped together (or alternatively, the follower holds the leader’s thumb) while each elbow is held at 90° or more. If the leader wants to make it more intimate, he can move closer until his left forearm sticks to hers.

This frame has four points of contact (hands, elbows, two shoulder blades) and must be kept firm. The leader should be able to take the follower anywhere by pushing and pulling, without the frame distorting.

For a strong frame:

  1. The follower’s left arm should press down onto the leader’s elbow. I have found this to be the most important cue to teach followers what it means to have frame.
  2. The follower’s right arm (held by the leader’s left) must be tensed such that it always makes a 90⁰ angle, allowing him to push her around.
  3. The leader has a slight, constant pull inwards with his right hand, and the follower leans back slightly to balance the force.

Posición caída

In posición caída (literally “fallen position”, also “perpendicular position”), the leader sees the follower 90° to his right,

Naming this position is not usually done, but it is extremely useful. Allegedly, this naming is one of MCC’s contributions to the salsa casino world.

You may see caída appear in a different form: the leader and follower facing the same way, with the follower to the right of, but behind, the leader. There is more to be said about this (because people who dance like this also usually have an abierta that looks different from what I’ve described above),


Figures

I will describe these figures as a teacher speaking to a leader (you) with a follower next to him (her), unless specified otherwise.

A note on Spanish names for figures: when figure names come from verbs, they are always in imperative form (i.e. the name commands the leader to do something). Such an imperative is used interchangeably with and without a direct object, and hence you may see these names written two different ways. Here’s what you should know:

  • Spanish has only a few verb paradigms. The most common one is for verbs whose infinitive ends in -ar, e.g. hablar (“to speak”), and the imperatives for such verbs are formed by just dropping the -r, e.g. habla (“speak!”).
  • In Spanish, direct and indirect objects are glued to the verb they belong to. Since the follower is archetypally a woman, the direct object pronoun used in figure names is -la.

Here are some examples of figures with two name variations that are in use:

  • The verb guapear means “to show off”. You can either guapea (“show off!”) or guapeala (“show her off!”).
  • The verb vacilar means “to tease”. You can either vacila (“tease!”) or vacilala (“tease her!”).
  • The verb enchufar means “to plug in”. You can either enchufa (“plug in!”) or enchufala (“plug her in!”), which is mostly shortened to enchufla when spoken quickly and with no emphasis on either part of the command.

Starting in abierta

Ending in abierta

Guapea

A default step in open position. It is evil.

  • Etymology: guapear means “to show off”, related to the compliments guapo (“handsome”) and guapa (“beautiful”).

























Vuelta derecha

A simple clockwise 360° for the follower.

  • Etymology: a vuelta is a turn and derecha is right(ward), so “rightward turn”.
















Vuelta doble

A vuelta derecha, except the leader also turns.

  • Etymology: doble means double, so “double turn”.


























Ending in caída

Most complicated figures end in posición caída since it’s quite difficult to untangle into posición abierta directly, whilst we have the perfect tool to go from caída to abierta (dile que no, see below).

Enchufla

8-count figure relying on a counterclockwise 180° for the follower to get from posición abierta immediately into posición caída. Best explained by teaching the half-enchufla first.

  • Etymology: from enchufar (“to plug in” or “to make settle in”) and shortened from enchufa-la (“make her settle in”).





















Enchufla doble

Sequence of a half-enchufla and an enchufla.

















































































































Ending in cerrada

Vuelta derecha cerranda

A vuelta derecha, except for transitioning from abierta to cerrada.

  • Etymology: I made up the name. cerranda means “(while) closing”.












Starting in caída

Ending in abierta

Dile que no (DQN)

The way to open the position again. The basic idea is that in the 1st bar, you indicate the line along which she will be walking, you set her up in that direction, and then she walks past you in the 2nd bar. Online, people abbreviate it to “DQN”.

  • Etymology: interestingly, there is some debate about what the phrase “dile que no” means. The Spanish pronoun le is the indirect object form for both male and female, meaning both “to him” and “to her”. Di-le means “tell him” or “tell her” and que no means “that no [I don’t want you]”. You would think that since this opens the position, the meaning is that the woman is telling the man she no longer wants to give the man attention from up close, so she pulls away and walks past him. However, in rueda, where enchuflas are often used to switch partners, DQN is never used for this (in fact, it is used when accepting a new follower), so some say that it is the man who tells the next follower that he doesn’t want to dance with her and will stick with the current partner for now. This matches the fact that salsa casino figure names command the man rather than the woman, and that it is the men who yell “No!” in rueda, not the women.





























Ending in caída

Exhibela

  • Etymology: exhibir means “to exhibit”, with imperative exhibe, so “exhibit her”.























For leaders, make sure to prepare your mind for the exhibela in advance. At the end of the first phrase (the enchufla), you should already have the mental cue SHIFT WEIGHT LEFT in mind. Muscle memory from DQN and sacala will tell you that you should shift your weight forward, and when you decide to go into exhibela too late into the enchufla, muscle memory will take over by stepping forward, and then your body will commit to doing the exhibela, which causes you to trip on 2. If need be, you can do a wide cruzado to really give momentum.

For followers, make sure to arrive where you started on 7. You should be able to do any amount of sacalas until the leader stops you.

Ending in cerrada

We have seen only one way to go into cerrada so far (apart from just starting your dance there and never coming back to it), which is by modifying a vuelta derecha (abierta to abierta).

Dile que no cerrando

You can do a DQN (caída to abierta) to close the position. Just keep holding her shoulder blade with your right hand, and let your hands move into closed grip on 5-6-7.






Starting in cerrada

Ending in abierta

Dile que no

See above.




Ending in caída

Aguajea

  • Etymology: this figure has many names.
    • aguajea: imperative form of the non-existing verb aguajear, from el aguaje meaning “the tide” or “the motion of the ocean”.
    • paseala en frente: “make her pass in front of you”.
    • entrada: “entrance”. Rarely used (see e.g. here), might be a sex reference.
    • abajo / para abajo / pa’bajo / llevala pa’bajo: “(carry her) backwards”. Some people use this term to denote a more low-key version of aguajea, see e.g. here and the video here.
    • paseala: do not call this figure “paseala”. The name paseala without modifier is severely overloaded. There are at least 2 other figures called the same (one is just rotating the couple 180⁰ in posicion cerrada, the other is the woman passing in front and/or behind you like dile que no). This problem is known. “Paseala en frente” is less known but is unambiguous. In this rueda video, you’ll see a llevala abajo and one of the other meanings of paseala.
    • guapea: obviously, do not call this figure guapea, despite what Salsaficion says.









Ending in cerrada

Pal medio

Half-tempo sidestep in cerrada.

  • Etymology: short for para el medio (“towards the middle”), referring to how this figure is used to synchronise couples at the start of a rueda (see e.g. the start of this flashmob). Sometimes it’s called al centro.

  • Leader counts:
    • On the 7 of the last phrase, spread your legs by moving your right foot outward.
    • 1: left foot inward.
    • 3: left foot outward.
    • 5: right foot inward.
    • 7: right foot outward.
  • Follower counts: mirrored.

Note that pal medio does not start with feet together, unlike other figures. The legs are put together as the first step, on 1. Spreading your feet as the first step is not correct.

  • Video: Retomando el Son Bailando Casino shows, twice within one minutre, that even during a rueda that is already in motion, the feet in pal medio very explicitly move right and outward on 7, and inward on 1.

Pal medio is not really used between figures, but it is a great way to synchronise your follower to the beat at the start of your dance. The usual approach would be to go into either paso son or paso basico once she is with you, so that you are dancing on all 8 counts and in sync.

Paso son

Full-tempo pal medio. Every time a foot is joined by another foot, it steps in-place.

  • Leader counts:
    • On the 7 of the last phrase, spread your legs by moving your right foot outward.
    • 1: left foot inward.
    • 2: right foot in place.
    • 3: left foot outward.
    • 5: right foot inward.
    • 6: left foot in place.
    • 7: right foot outward.
  • Follower counts: mirrored.


































































Longer sequences



























I attended my first salsa timba party after 5 classes, knowing only guapea, the two vueltas, the two enchuflas, dile que no, and paso basico. With just that very reduced instruction set, you can already start stringing infinite sequences together, where vuelta derecha is a 3-way decision point (close, stay open, or go into one of the enchuflas and a DQN) where all the surprise happens. It worked.

Final thoughts

Salsa Casino is perhaps the best hobby I’ve taken up since photography. It is cerebral (for leaders) since we have to systematise, memorise and improvise, and it gives a neat excuse to mingle with women who want to be mingled with – that is, when you offer to interact with them, they almost always happily accept, and at parties, they either don’t drink at all or do it with enough moderation to be able to still follow the lead. It’s also a light cardio workout (depending on the BPM of the songs).

Regular night life is literally the opposite of this, filled with women who (strangely) go out with the attitude of wanting to be engaged with as little as possible, drinking themselves into a state of impeded cognition, and flailing their limbs, alone, to the same early-2010s pop hit being played wherever the floor is sticky from spilled beer stinking up the place. Salsa Casino is dignified. Sign up to salsa casino classes now!

  1. What it means to systematise dance is to convert figures from one continuous motion (which is what dance is, and what it looks like on video) to sequences of reusable building blocks that are discrete in time (e.g. one phrase is only 8 counts, one figure consists of one or more standalone phrases, …) and in space (feet locations exist on some kind of grid with a finite amount of possibilities; in salsa, that’s a rectangular grid). The system gives one canonical way of doing each figure, and styling happens around those canonical rules. The alternative to a system is that all figures are learnt through “feeling” and require memorising the full continuous movements. The debate between system vs. feeling is like the debate between phonics (words contain syllables containing letters, and there are patterns in how words are formed) vs. look-say (there is no pattern in how words are formed, and you should just memorise them in their entirety by association with what they look like in the physical world). ↩︎

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