Last dance for Cuba

Once in a while comes a moment of true understanding. Last October, Alihaydée Carreño danced without music on stage in Havana, and the crowd rose around me. That night, I began to understand the wonder of ballet. That night, I also felt my understanding of Cuba lurch forwards.

It was the third night of the 19th international festival of ballet. An hour or so before, an immaculately turned-out crush had formed in the narrow throat of the Gran Teatro de La Habana. The men were elegant and aloof; the women had clothed themselves with an expert needlework born of years of necessity, their bodies wrapped like confectionery.

Inside the Gran Teatro, five levels of balconies curve high around the stalls. Tightly packed in, the audience gazes out on to a stage topped with a frieze of naked women. At the heart of the curve created by the grand balcony sits an ageing deity, Cuba's prima ballerina assoluta, Alicia Alonso, her eyes covered by large dark glasses. A few seats along is Alistair Spalding, chief executive and artistic director of Sadler's Wells, alert to the company he is bringing to London.



It was a gala performance, with extracts of famous ballets performed by the finest Cuban and international dancers, and the audience pushed forwards to see, greeting their heroes from the Ballet Nacional de Cuba with yells and applause.

Carreño arrived on stage just before the first interval, accompanied by Leonardo Reale of Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. They began the famous pas de deux from Le Corsaire, graceful and exquisite until, cruelly, the recorded music began to skip and break up. The crowd inhaled as first Reale then Carreño struggled against the cracked rhythm. From the balcony, it was possible to see the misery on the ballerina's face, the audience hating to see one of their national idols struggle—and then someone offstage cut the music, and, with a small nod of the head, she exited.

The auditorium was silent, caught in appalled suspension, until, from the wings, the dancers returned, the only sound now their feet crashing against the boards. Without music, they seemed to grow and the audience began to rise. The beauty of these two dancing on their own, on an empty stage, with no accompaniment but the shallow breathing of sixteen hundred people, removed all sense of time.

Carreño was moving with a fluidity that spoke of the music in her head, until, at last, she arrived at the centre of the stage. There she rose to the tip of one pointed foot, beginning the series of fouettés, those exquisite turns using nothing but the momentum of her raised leg to whip her round. The audience began a low roar as she passed the 32 fouettés Le Corsaire required but she kept going, her gaze pausing momentarily beyond the audience, before her shoulders caught up and round she'd go again.

At last she stopped, and her raised foot touched the stage in front of her with deliberate precision. She stretched out her hands and looked up, to an auditorium beating the floor, beating palms together, bellowing. And there I was, a boy raised in the Calvinist highlands of Scotland, yelling—understanding.

There's a joke habaneros are fond of. "Do you like Cuba?" they ask. Say yes and they'll grin: "Good. Then give me your ticket home." Although life for Cubans is better than it was ten years ago, at the depths of the "special period in a time of peace" brought on by the collapse of Soviet subsidies, frustration troubles most conversation. Foreign money is renovating the old town, but the rest of the city is rotting. On stormy nights in central Havana, people quake in their beds wondering whether their house will be the next to fall to rubble.

How much of a salve art offers is difficult to gauge, but the frustrations of Cuban life are revealed in the ballet audience's response. There is something in the experience reminiscent of Furtwängler's rendition of Beethoven's 9th in wartime Berlin. Yet Cuban ballet is an art form caught in an aspic that has melted elsewhere. The Ballet Nacional is a piece of history preserved by the will of an ageing autocrat.

As Carreño gazed up at her astonished audience, the artistic director of Sadler's Wells was sitting close to where Castro might have been, had el Comandante not tripped a short time before, breaking his knee and fracturing his arm. Spalding is not typical of the international ballet crowd, appearing more like a friendly dad you might meet at a parent-teacher evening. Yet a day or two in his company reveals an acute observer. He was in Cuba to see Alicia Alonso's version of Giselle (which comes to Sadler's Wells from 16th to 21st August). The elderly ballerina offers something that is now quite rare—a classical, old-fashioned ballet. Giselle was her greatest role and, although she claims a hand in the reworking of the famous choreography, Alonso's insistence is on purity and the harsh, endless training that is required to get a corps de ballet to work. "It was her Giselle and she was famous for performing it," said Spalding. "It's of its time, but it is very well done. They've kept a tradition that has been eroded elsewhere."

It's a tradition that also says much about contemporary Cuba. Here is a company that has offered poor children the chance not only of schooling but a chance to excel. Yet here, also, is a company run by a woman who is unwilling to change; who, once her dancers have succeeded, restricts them to a stagnant pool from which they struggle to escape. The cliché outsiders use for Cuba is, "Go and see it before it changes." If that's true of the island, it's certainly true of the ballet.

Alicia Alonso, the blind director general of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, has the sort of handshake a prima ballerina should have; so delicate you feel you have the skeleton of an all but extinct songbird in your care. Her make-up is so thick and glasses so large that even up close you see little of her. She starts to nod before you speak, assured of the plaudits about to come her way, making it impossible to disappoint her. And why would you when faced with someone so dedicated to beauty? It's an act, of course. She's as tough a lady as ever took to the boards of Broadway.

In an art form that requires suffering, Alonso has paid more dearly than most. She was born in Havana in 1921, which makes her Castro's senior by five years. In the 1930s and 1940s, she performed with the infant American Ballet Theatre, working with the likes of Agnes de Mille and Antony Tudor. Although she is not one of the true immortals, she was good enough for George Balanchine to create a role for her in Theme and Variations.

The politics of her native land, and her disabilities, have helped to build the Alonso myth. She began to lose her sight at 19 but, despite the advice of doctors, kept dancing. Her then husband, Fernando Alonso, who would help her build Cuba's ballet schools, taught her the steps of Giselle by pressing them into her hand. She would, so they say, perform on a stage strung with guiding threads, bright lights would burn from the wings so that she knew which way she was facing, and her trust in her leading men had to be absolute. She would throw herself into moves with no certainty that there was anyone there to catch her.

As a Cuban, Alonso also had to trust Castro, and her support for the revolution remains strong to this day. She created the Ballet Alicia Alonso in 1948, but struggled until Castro's revolutionaries arrived 11 years later with a grant of $200,000. As her group became the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, Castro told her that she needed to produce great art in return for the funding, and that she would have to perform for the workers around the country.

While other great Cuban cultural plans have fallen, Alonso has made sure that her ballet survived, its funding increased even during the darkest days. Now, however, Alonso's ballet offers Cubans escape from Castro's reality. I invited a friend of a friend, a doctor from a town in central Cuba, to join me for a performance. The doctor had to travel by bus through the night to get there, but the ballet is one of the few pleasures of his life in Cuba. Of his provincial existence, he spoke miserably. "You have no idea how hot it is in the summer," he said. "I sit in this small office, in this small town, with no facilities or information, rotting in the heat. It is unbearable." He had been denied a visa to travel to a conference in South America, despite an invitation and the funds to go. The authorities believed he would not return. "Would you have returned?" I asked. "No," he said.

On one afternoon, I rose through the floors of a Havana skyscraper in a groaning elevator to meet Simon Wollers, one of a handful of foreigners who live in the city. Wollers works for Radio Habana Cuba, which broadcasts the Cuban government's views to the world in general and Florida in particular. He is, despite the jibes of diplomats who refer to him as Lord Haw-Haw, liked and admired, because he lives like a Cuban.

Wollers defended the regime by saying foreign visitors often only met those who are unhappy because those were the people who sought them out. He said that if you asked people in the countryside, they would be more supportive of the revolution. "Look at Haiti," he said. "And then judge Cuba's success." It's not a fair comparison, though, any more than is the contrast with Mexico.

The quality of Cuban misery is in many ways defined and sharpened by the quality of Cuba's successes—the ballet being a perfect illustration. Since the revolution, the national ballet school has set out to find any child that showed promise. In the early days, children were even taken from Havana's orphanages. Alonso set up an intricate network whereby schoolteachers would pick out promising children and send them up through regional schools. They would be tested physically, musically and psychologically. Eventually, the most talented would arrive in Havana.

This is communist Cuba's problem. Give people a good education, access to great culture and sporting achievement (the country collects more Olympic medals per head of population than any apart from Australia), and they will only want more.

For children from the provinces, the national ballet school must seem like a palace. To me, it seemed like a palace. Restored in 2001, it sits on Havana's Prado like a grand museum. Inside, marble staircases climb between cloisters that give on to classrooms where the youth of Cuba learn their steps in long lines. Down in the basement gymnasiums, boys compete to outdo each other on the small staves of wood they use to learn the pirouette, while their fellows crush their faces in pain as a teacher, clad in the white of the Santería initiate, orders their legs lifted to lie beside their ears.

This sweeping of Cuba for talent is credited with producing ballet's current hero, Carlos Acosta. Acosta was a poor kid born in Havana, with a street kid's suspicion of becoming a ballet dancer. Yet he has risen to be a star of London's Royal Ballet. His success was unusual in three ways: he was poor, black and macho.

Now Cuban "princes" are in many of the world's great ballet companies. It has given classical dance's audience a libidinous tickle to see these big, sexy men on stage. Ballerinas love dancing with Cubans because, in the words of one, "they don't drop you." For Cuban boys, any initial reluctance to pull on tights has slipped away. As Alejandro Sené, a member of the corps de ballet, once remarked, all the pain is compensated for by being surrounded by beautiful women.

It didn't take long at the festival to realise how much the world's dancers loved being in Cuba. The men of the Ballet de Zaragoza relaxed after a performance by spreading themselves over the terrace of the Hotel Presidente with a show of self-love that only male dancers are capable of, the ballerinas poised between them like punctuation marks.

Guests are flown in, housed and fed, but they are not paid to appear. It doesn't stop them accepting the invitation. Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo and Johan Kobborg from the Royal Ballet not only had their wages docked while attending the gala, but rumour has it that Covent Garden wanted to charge them for their costumes as well. Their performances were among the festival's greatest highlights.

For those from the US, attending the festival was more difficult. In the past, several US companies have travelled to Havana, but with the tightening of restrictions late last year, the visit of the New York City Ballet was cancelled. Only Leticia Oliveira and Zdenek Konvalina of Houston Ballet were there, and only because neither was a US citizen.

This hardening coincided with George Bush's campaign for re-election, and election night fell in the middle of the festival. So, on 2nd November, I left the theatre to attend a party thrown by Jim Cason, head of the US "interests section." It's easy to forget that Guantánamo isn't the only American presence on the island. Although the interests section is officially a part of the Swiss delegation, in reality it is by far the biggest foreign representation in the city, with 51 diplomats and nearly 120 support staff.

In November, Cuban propaganda had even the most open-minded Cubans believing a Bush victory would bring US troops over the Florida straits. "That's what he is promising the voters in Miami," said one of the dance teachers at the ballet school. I told them that I thought that the US was a little stretched by Iraq, and that, if they fancied it, this might be a good time for Cuba to invade Miami instead. "Why would we want it?" the teacher asked.

The interests section is unlike US embassies in other countries in that it is overtly political. The press officer sat under the famous Korda image of Che Guevara, but it had been doctored to show the hero of a million student walls slicing a baton through a crowd of innocents. Jim Cason looks like a golf club chairman, with his tanned, reflective skin, but this is cover for a sharp, aggressive mind. He has served in El Salvador, and was in Panama for the fall of Noriega.

The mutual Cuba/US hatred affects everything, including ballet. Alonso's company has just finished a tour of the island, showing not only the Nutcracker Suite, but also an original work by Alonso, a tribute to Fabio Di Celmo, an Italian who died in a bomb blast at a Havana hotel in 1997. The atrocity has been linked to Luis Posada Carriles, who, according to the authorities, is "being protected by Washington."

Any warming in relations during the 1990s chilled with Cason's arrival in 2002. Vicki Huddleston, his predecessor, was sent to Mali, and most commentators believe the newcomer has been hand-picked by the Bush administration to stir things up.

This antagonism, of course, is Cuba's greatest difficulty. The island's proximity to the US means that it can never become the social democracy that would suit it so well; it can only be the playground America wants it to be, or else Castro's pariah state.

Alonso's choreographing of such a politically contentious piece as her elegy to Di Celmo perfectly illustrates the stagnancy of her company. Alonso's own choreography is, to be charitable, not very good. Ismene Brown, the Telegraph's dance critic, called it "dreadful." Talk to the Cuban dancers about this and they are in turns polite, evasive and filled with regret. It would be foolish for them to say more—her power is formidable—but there's more to it than that.

Thanks to Alonso, the career of a ballet dancer is one of the most sought after in Cuba. It is a route out paved with pesos and even dollars. When Alonso decides it is time for a young ballet dancer to see the world, he goes off to become an almost mythical figure in his native land, like Carlos Acosta. But go without permission and your name is excised from history.

This is what has just happened to Carreño. Her famous dance at the Gran Teatro turned out to be the last time she graced that stage. She had a child a couple of years ago and Alonso has been unhappy with her weight since. A falling-out has occurred and the ballerina has left the company. At least she has been allowed out of the country. She is to join a small company in the Dominican Republic, and is travelling with her husband and child.

A starker case involves the sisters Lorena and Lorna Feijóo. Both hugely talented, Lorena left Cuba without permission in 1991, first going to Mexico before arriving at the San Francisco Ballet. Despite her success, she regrets that Alonso has never asked her back to Havana to guest star in one of the great classical roles. Meanwhile her sister waited, taking her time with Alonso and dancing the lead in Swan Lake. Now with Boston Ballet, she is welcome back at her home company whenever she chooses to appear.

For dancers used to the coddling of Cuba, exile can feel very cold. "In the States, it's just getting harder for dance to survive," Lorena told the Los Angeles Times some time ago, but she didn't regret her "freedom to manage my life." Although dancers and baseball stars are treated with equal awe in Cuba, the rewards are very different beyond the Caribbean sea. No American ballet company is likely to drive a speedboat into a quiet Cuban bay in order to smuggle a dancer out, as has happened with baseball players.

Yet an equally important part of the dancers' reluctance to criticise Alonso has nothing to do with threat. Cubans are conscious of the power for good she has been. She is credited with reversing the state-sponsored homophobia that once terrified Havana's artistic community, leading to works such as Reinaldo Arenas's book, Before Night Falls, and later, the film by Julian Schnabel.

But what of Cuba's contemporary dance? Has Castro's support for the Ballet Nacional robbed modern dance of its chance to prosper? In the heart of the old town, Isabel Bustos has built a slick modern rehearsal space of glass and bare walls for her Danza Retazos. With short, dark hair and a gaze that cuts into you, Bustos is the epitome of Cuban modernity. With Danza Retazos, she creates stark pieces around the experience of women, in which, she said, she encourages her dancers to "develop styles of their own." She showed me what she meant, having eight of her dancers perform a piece of choreography about Frida Kahlo that the Mexican embassy had commissioned. It was wonderful. All the painter's conflicts and pain were there. Bustos said she had no problem with Alonso. It's foreign bookings she craves.

Similarly, Miguel Iglesias of Danza Contemporánea de Cuba feels free to pursue his vision. As his dancers flirted with each other between gruelling set pieces watched over by a steely-eyed dance teacher, he pointed out that his contemporary group has been in existence as long as Alonso's ballet.

Bustos and Iglesias smiled and said nothing when asked about Alonso's tenure overrunning at the Ballet Nacional. Ask often enough, however, and Cubans will eventually speak, and they say much the same things about Alonso and Castro. Alonso likes to say she will live to 200, while Castro appeared on television shortly after his fall to tell his people he was back at work. Most people roll their eyes when the leader's tenacity is mentioned. Long-time Cuba-watchers say it is remarkable how much Cubans are now prepared to say about the need for change.

"I am 40 years old," one habanero told me. "And I have never been anywhere. I wanted to go to Rome, perhaps Florence. But I am 40 years old and I have lived half my life and done nothing. It has been a wasted life." This is Cuba's tragedy. It educates its people, in dance or in life and, having offered them the promise of better, takes it away.

In the one grand staging of Giselle coming to London, all Cuba's triumphs and troubles are to be found. The ballet is beautiful enough to disturb your sleep. The flair of dancers like Joel Carreño, Sadaise Arencibia and Viengsay Valdés lays Cuba open to view. It is here that the success of the revolution can be witnessed, as well as its decline. For all those who believe Castro's fall will usher in chaos, it is worth taking a trip to Sadler's Wells. The quality on stage is the quality of Cuban people, and in that there is hope.