What cuban salsa is

Cubana, casino and rueda de casino turn up mixed together on flyers and confuse anyone starting out. Cubana is the style. Casino is what it is called in Cuba, after the social clubs where it was danced. And the rueda is a way of dancing it in a group, not a different dance.

So a night advertising "casino" and one advertising "cuban salsa" are offering the same thing. If it also says rueda, it means the circle happens at some point in the evening.

This is the difference you can see from across the room and the hardest one to put into words. In line salsa the couple travels forwards and back along an imaginary slot, and the lead returns the follow to that slot again and again. In cubana the couple turns around a shared centre: both of them travel, both of them go around.

Two practical consequences. It takes more room diagonally, so on a packed floor you have to look where you are going. And the contact is more constant: there are a lot of arm tangles that come undone by turning, and that asks for soft hands and loose shoulders.

Several couples in a circle, someone calls a name, and everybody does the same move at once. From the bar it looks like you need to know fifty of them. You don't: a beginners' rueda runs on six or seven, and whoever is calling picks the ones the group knows.

What you actually learn is not the moves but hearing the call and going on time. And partners rotate, so if a move falls apart, eight counts later you are with someone else and it starts again. It is the most forgiving way to get something wrong that this music offers.

Quite different things sit under the cubana label. Son is the slower, older end, with a feel that invites walking more than spinning. Timba is the opposite: fast, full of sharp breaks, choruses that land out of nowhere and stretches where the band simply lets go.

People coming from line salsa often find timba baffling at first, because the breaks destroy the comfortable count of eight. The answer is not to count harder: it is to stop counting for a while and follow the singer, who is the one telling you when everything comes back.

Almost any school that teaches salsa teaches cubana too, though it may call it casino. Worth asking before you sign up, because the two styles are learned differently and switching halfway through a course is expensive.

To try it, a night with a rueda beats a single class: you see the room, you dance with a lot of people in a short time, and you don't need to bring a partner. Cities with a cuban scene usually have one every week.