Staff Sgt. Oscar Gamboa is the station commander for the Orlando Physicians Recruiting Station which is under the Orlando Medical Recruiting Company and the Redstone-based 2nd Medical Recruiting Battalion. (Eric Schultz/U.S. Army)
Staff Sgt. Oscar Gamboa’s days as a professional cabaret dancer are behind him, but he still occasionally turns on his music in his Florida recruiting office and cuts a rug.
It’s been over a decade since he performed at the popular Coco Bongo Show & Disco cabaret in Cancun, Mexico, on the way from his hometown of Havana, Cuba, to becoming an American soldier.
“We did mambo, salsa, samba,” Gamboa said in an Army statement last week. “There were plenty of others. Like Michael Jackson choreography, Madonna choreography. We used to do ballet, too.”
Gamboa had joined a dance company in Havana in 1998, when he was 12 years old, and did ballroom dancing and swimming ballet as a professional there, the Army statement said.
He also met his wife, Claudia, through dancing. A Cuban native living in Florida after coming to the U.S. as a 3-year-old, she’d returned to Havana as a teen to learn to dance for her Quinceanara, a traditional rite of passage for 15-year-old girls.
Oscar Gamboa joined a dance company in his native Havana, Cuba in 1998 when he was 12 and danced professionally for 10 years. (Handout) (Eric Schultz)
Gamboa was her instructor for more than a month, then her partner, or galan, when they and six other couples danced at a celebration in Havana in July 2007. They married in January 2011.
In 2009, Gamboa's father had been living in Cancun since 2006 and did the paperwork to get Gamboa from Cuba to Mexico, where he did a five-month stint at the Coco Bongo before he shimmied to Reynosa, Mexico, in July 2009. He crossed McAllen, Texas, on Independence Day that year and took a 28-hour bus ride to Florida.
In Jacksonville, Fla., Claudia's father gave him a job at his trucking company, where he drove 18-wheelers around the country until 2011, the year he joined the Army. He’ll mark 10 years in the service June 20 and plans to serve another decade.
“Ever since I got to the United States, I always had the desire to serve,” he said. “This country gave me so much. It was the least I could do to pay back.”
After joining as a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist, he became a licensed practical nurse in 2014 and then a recruiter in late 2020.
The Miami resident became a U.S. citizen in 2012. He’s now in charge of the Orlando Physicians Recruiting Station and a father of three.
“My wife never let me dance again (professionally) when I got to the States,” the Army statement quoted him saying with a laugh.
He also laughed about how he was 165 pounds as a ballroom dancer, but now tips the scales at 220. But he’s proud of what he’s done since trading dance shoes for combat boots.
“It has been a lot of great experiences,” he said. “The Army gave me the opportunity to become who I am. It gave me a career. It gave me a profession.”
Twitter: @chadgarland
