This article examines how and why Cuban modern dancers and their scholars cite several white US dancers as forebearers in their nationalistic, anti-imperialistic, and anti-racist dance tradition. I use “contamination” to analyze this complicated topic, which threatens to unfairly center US dancers at Cubans’ expense or to romantically caricature Cubans defying US imperialism with a nationalist hybrid. Multidirectional, indeterminate contamination moves us away from narratives about US culture as a homogenizing force or a vanquished one. Contamination also importantly connotes stink, given that it is a product of imperialism and capitalism bringing far-flung people into close encounters. US contamination in Cuban modern dance histories, then, pushes attention to the shadowy reaches of the unseemly and incongruous—stylistic impurity, structural racism, historiographic neglect, revolutionary disaffection, and failure. Seeing the regrettable provides a fuller picture of the past, including the often-overlooked reality of shared damage and destructibility.

Anna Sokolow (1910–2000), an American Jewish choreographer known for her social statements, led the workers dance movement and performed as a soloist with Martha Graham. She imbued her dances Strange American Funeral (1935) and Case History No.— (1937) with proletarian ideology that spoke to 1930s working- and middle-class audiences aligned with values of revolutionary and modern dance. These choreographies spoke to a political atmosphere focused on social justice while they appealed to a broad dance-going public. Sokolow's Graham training engendered a modernist aesthetic in her choreography that led critics to consider her work universal instead of marked as coming from a working-class left-wing Jewish dancer. This article argues that while narratives about Sokolow's work downplay her Communist affiliations, these ideals played a critical role in her choreography and in her navigation of international Communist circles. As Sokolow's choreography reinforced her politics, so too did her affiliations support her dance work.