One night on a dance floor in Boston, a man asked Silvana Cuello if she could tango.

“Can I tango?” she responded. “Well, I can move, baby.”

Cuello’s response captures the spirit of salsa dance classes she offers every Tuesday night in Blue Hill. She’s teaching the fundamentals of Latin street dance she learned growing up in the Dominican Republic and in formal training in modern dance. But when it comes right down to the beat, Cuello is teaching the moves.

Or to move, as the case may be.

“I made up these moves for the needs of this class,” said Cuello, who studied law and made commercials for TV in the Dominican Republic. “You could say I teach rhythm through salsa. You know, people say North Americans are big hoppers when they dance. My students are not hoppers. But it has been quite a challenge to break it down for those people who did not grow up dancing. When you come from a country where rhythm is as basic as life itself, you don’t think about it. Here, I have to think about it.”

Earlier this month on a snowy and icy night, Cuello was alone in the studio preparing for class. She was barefoot, but wore her winter coat, and had the music turned up loud as she went over combinations. Only three students showed up – a man and two women – but that was enough for the routines Cuello planned.

Once the room warmed up, she stripped down to workout clothes, pulled back her mass of corkscrew curls, and wrapped an aqua and orange floral scarf around her hips. The very act seemed to propel her back to the tropics of her native land, and she began to move – first the shoulders, 1-2-3-4, then the waist, 1,2,3,4, then the feet.

And if she was on the beach, at least one of her students was longing for the Maine woods.

“I’m dying in here,” said Paula Hogan, who lives in Brooklin. “It’s like a sauna. I feel like I’m dancing in the Dominican Republic, it’s so hot in here.” Then she stepped outside into the frigid night air to cool down.

“I’m in a different climate than you guys,” said Cuello, smiling broadly and rotating her hips as if they were made of elastic.

Cuello, who is 43, followed a relationship to this country and arrived just days before the fatal attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She had an interview at the World Trade Center that day but postponed it because her teen daughter had to start school in Ellsworth. The relationship and the job didn’t work out – she now holds a day job at a graphics design company – but Cuello fell in love with Maine. She has been teaching adult education Spanish language classes at Ellsworth High School and twice-weekly salsa step-aerobics classes at the Down East YMCA in Ellsworth, as well as the movement classes for more than a year.

“I really believe globalization has to work on both sides,” said Cuello, whose daughter is now 17. “I have told my friends that the best of the United States is what I have found in Maine. But I want to be a part of an exchange of cultures. … I felt that in the area I moved to, there was a big link not being covered. People asked me who I am. I am trying to tell them who I am through what my culture is. That’s the best exchange.”

“Poosh, poosh, let it go,” Cuello called out over the techno-salsa music. Late into the 90-minute class, her back glimmered with perspiration. She was demonstrating the hip swirl again, and the students were having trouble getting the right fluidity.

“I feel like I’m going to snap,” joked Hogan, who is as tall and reedy as Cuello is compact and muscular.

“Relax totally,” instructed Cuello. “And don’t look at me. This is not a watching show. Feeeeeeeeeeel it!”

Instinct for the beat is what she strives for in the class, she said, but she cannot teach a person to dance.

“While a dance teacher can show you steps and patterns, they can’t teach you to dance,” Cuello wrote in a notice about her class. “What they can do is give you the confidence to get the dancer that is a natural part of you out onto the dance floor. The rest is up to you!”

Later, after the three participants and their teacher had danced singly and as couples, Cuello led the group through a warm down. “I’m not going to make you suffer anymore,” she said in a motherly tone.

Suffer? Hardly. Even if the room requires a bit of acclimatizing, the dancers here had come from nearly 50 miles away to bask in the warmth of Cuello’s directives.

“It’s very nice because it’s singles,” said Hogan. “But there is a shortage of guys.”

The one man in the class, Richard Wist of Mariaville, was Hogan’s cousin. But several weeks after that night, Cuello said eight people had showed up for class, including several men. She hopes to broaden her cultural commitments later this year by teaching French language skills through the adult ed program, and step salsa and hip-hop for teens at the Y.

But you can be sure all the classes will be during the week. Where is Cuello on the weekends?

“Trapped in a network of dancers in Boston,” she said. “Out of 52 weeks in a year, I go 45 to Boston to dance.”

During those times, her students have to settle for her advice: “Get ahold of some CDs, turn the lights off, lie on the floor, listen to the music and dream that you are a good dancer. You just might be!”

Silvana Cuello’s salsa class meets at 7 p.m. Tuesdays in Blue Hill. The cost is $10 per class. For directions and more information, call 374-2824. To find about dance studios and companies in Maine, go online to www.dancelessons.net.