Accents can occur on the count or anywhere in between. It depends on what type of music is being played and the feel the musicians are after. Thus, for a particular instrument, a bar of music is divided into resonances with accent markers and rests. Rests describe the duration that an instrument remains silent. The resonance of a note can start on or before a count and extend beyond it.
Accents emphasise a note played by a particular instrument and are used to give feel to the music.
As a dancer it is important to pay attention to accentuations in the music, this will allow you to develop dance phrasing. In other words pick moves that visually express the music. Before you started to learn to dance, you instinctively felt the music but once confronted with choreographed moves and steps, many dancers stop listening, and replace the feel with the patterns contrived by their teachers. It is possible to understand the clave intellectually but the real understanding comes from the emotion that the dancer finds in the music. It is well documented that the Mambo dance was developed from couples innovating moves to fit the new music.