Puerto Rican star of the 1940s New York mambo dance craze
Pedro "Cuban Pete" Aguilar, who has died of heart failure aged 81, was a leading exponent of the US version of the mambo, the Cuban dance craze that flooded New York from the late 1940s. Athletic and sensual, he and the Italian Millie Donay embodied that craze, while their marriage challenged racial taboos. Aguilar enriched Latin dance with a host of new moves – the shimmy-shimmy, the Susie Q and swing step.
Called el cuchillo (the knife) by fellow dancers because of his rapid mambo hand movements, the Puerto Rican immigrant acquired the nickname "Cuban Pete" after Desi Arnaz, who had starred in a film of that name, introduced him as such at New York's Palladium Ballroom. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Aguilar arrived in the US some years before the 1 million-strong Puerto Rican migration of 1945-60 created el barrio, the Latin community of the South Bronx and East Harlem, where the new mambo took off. His parents settled first in Washington, where Aguilar showed early promise in dances such as the danzón and bolero. However, the breakdown of his parents' marriage led to Aguilar growing up in orphanages. During those unhappy years, he learned to box. In the early 1950s, Aguilar reached New York, where he continued to box and, one night, turned up at a club with his face marked with bruises. A Puerto Rican singer, Miguelito Valdes, persuaded him to enter a dance contest. Aguilar won the $1,000 first prize and gave up boxing.
Having discovered the new mambo scene at the Palladium, he met Donay there in 1952. Her lindy-hopping skills combined with his quick-footed tap techniques made them a formidable combination. Weekly dance contests were held for $12.50 prizes, and soon "Cuban Pete and Millie" had become the talk of the town. New York's "new" mambo scene largely celebrated Puerto Ricans' expanding sense of cultural identity. A revised entrance policy of welcoming Hispanics at the midtown Palladium in 1949 had catapulted the dance into the centre of the city's nightlife. A slightly later extension to the door policy, to include African-Americans, created a sizzling atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, some Cubans came to resent what they considered to be this American upstart version of their dance.
Rubbing shoulders at the Palladium with stars such as Bob Hope and Marlon Brando, whose escorts came "dragging their minks and jewels", convinced Aguilar that he had made the right choice. As Aguilar and Donay's fame spread, they featured in Life magazine and appeared at Carnegie Hall, at Madison Square Garden for the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and in the film Mambo Madness (1955).
Aguilar increasingly emphasised the clave, the rhythmic pattern used to keep time in Afro-Cuban music, as featured by leading musicians such as Machito and Tito Puente, as the basis of his dancing. As Aguilar insisted in a later interview: "Dancing is about rhythm and the music tells you how to do it. Your ear is your third leg on the dance floor – without you even knowing it." Although sounding dismissive about new dance steps, he created many mambo versions from a fusion of tap, lindy hop and Latin sources.
By 1956, the dramatic upsurge in rock'n'roll had changed the dance scene and Aguilar and Donay split. Aguilar left to work in Hollywood, but returned to New York when interest in Latin flared up again, as it did with the twist. He performed for a time in the Peppermint Lounge. He also danced at the White House, for presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, and appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show. Never doubting himself, he remarked after a Canadian gig resulted in a British command performance before the Queen: "Wow – it was the biggest reception I had ever had."
Aguilar later drifted out of the dance business until 1989, when Barbara Craddock, a professional dancer, found him working in a clothes store and persuaded him to return to the mambo. They moved to Florida, and their teaching and performing resulted in a 1992 commission to train Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas for roles in the film The Mambo Kings (1992), which also involved renewed choreographic collaboration with Donay. Edward Villella, the artistic director of Miami City Ballet, commissioned Aguilar and Craddock, in 2000, to work on a new ballet called Mambo No 2am. Villella said: "Guys like Pete are great artists, but they're not always looked at that way."
Donay died in 2007, and he is survived by his daughters, Denise and Petrina, and a son, Sean.
Pedro ("Cuban Pete") Aguilar, dancer, born 14 June 1927; died 13 January 2009