The Cuban ballet diaspora is one of the great underwritten cultural exports of the past forty years. The names — Alicia Alonso, who never really left, and then Lorna Feijóo, Lorena Feijóo, Carlos Acosta, José Manuel Carreño, Rolando Sarabia, Yanela Piñera, Joel Carreño, and the longer list of dancers who joined major companies in London, Paris, San Francisco, New York, Madrid, and Tokyo over the course of the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands — represent a remarkable concentration of dance talent that came out of a national school in a country whose economic and political conditions would have suggested no such concentration was possible.
I am not the right person to write the technical history of the Cuban ballet school. There are dance historians who have done that work and whose books I would point readers to. What I want to write about here is a smaller piece of the story that I have always found interesting, which is the dancers who came back. The ones who left, built careers abroad, and at some point in their thirties or forties returned to spend significant time on the island. Carlos Acosta is the most famous of them but he is not the only one and the pattern he represents is more interesting than the single biography would suggest.
How the diaspora started
Cuban dancers began leaving the country in significant numbers in the eighties and especially in the nineties. The reasons were the reasons that most of the Cuban diaspora left during those decades — economic, political, the practical impossibility of building the kind of international career that the talent of the dancers in question warranted within the structures available to them on the island.
The Cuban National Ballet, founded by Alicia Alonso in the late forties and operating continuously since, had developed by the seventies into a school that was producing technical work at the highest international level. The dancers coming out of the school could compete for principal positions in any major company in the world, and many of them did. The international diaspora that resulted was unusual in dance history both for the concentration of talent it represented and for the speed with which the dancers integrated into the companies they joined.
By the late nineties, the diaspora was substantial. Carlos Acosta was at the Royal Ballet in London. The Feijóo sisters were at companies in Boston and San Francisco. José Manuel Carreño was at American Ballet Theatre in New York. Younger dancers were following the same paths. The Cuban ballet diaspora was at that point one of the most internationally distributed national dance diasporas in the world, with the somewhat surreal effect that on any given night during the principal ballet season, the lead roles at half a dozen major international companies were being danced by Cubans.
The decision to come back
What I find interesting is that several of the dancers, having built international careers, chose to spend significant time back on the island starting in their late thirties and forties. Carlos Acosta is the most public example. He returned to Havana in 2015 to found his own company there. He has lived between London and Havana since then. He has used the income from his international career to build a dance infrastructure on the island that did not exist before. He has trained younger dancers. He has produced his own choreography. He has done all of this in a context where the practical logistics of running a dance company on the island are substantially more difficult than running one in London would be.
Other dancers have made similar decisions in less-publicized ways. There are dancers who have not founded their own companies but who have returned for extended residencies, for teaching engagements, for choreographic projects, for what amount to dual-base careers that maintain their international presence while substantially reinvesting their experience and resources in the island's dance infrastructure.
The decisions are individually specific. I am not going to pretend that the dancers I have spoken to over the years all gave the same reasons or that I have a single explanation that covers the pattern. But there are some recurring elements that I have noticed, and I want to write them down because they are not, I think, the elements that the international coverage emphasizes.
What the dancers say
I have spoken, over the years, with three Cuban dancers who came back in the sense I am describing. One is a principal dancer at a major European company who maintains an apartment in Havana and who spends approximately two months a year there, working with younger dancers and occasionally performing with the national ballet. Two are dancers who left their international companies in their early forties and who now work primarily in Havana, with occasional international guest engagements.
What they have said to me, in different words, is that the international career was the career and they do not regret having pursued it, but that the relationship between a dancer and the school the dancer came from is a particular kind of relationship, and that at a certain point in their careers they wanted to give something back to the school that had given them what it had given them. The relationship was not nostalgia. The relationship was a sense of obligation that had developed over the years and that they had become unwilling to keep ignoring.
One of them — the principal still at the European company — described it to me this way. She said that the international career had taught her things that she could only have learned by going abroad. The European repertoire, the choreographers she had worked with, the technical refinement that came from being inside one of the major companies in the world. She said she would not have wanted to do without that. But she also said that the foundation she had brought with her — the training she had received at the Cuban school before she left — was the foundation that had made the international career possible, and that the foundation was not infinite, and that if dancers like her did not return to invest in the foundation, the foundation would eventually erode, and then there would not be more dancers like her.
What the international coverage misses
The international coverage of Carlos Acosta's return and of similar stories has tended to frame the returns in two ways. It either frames them as a triumph narrative — the prodigal son returns to lead the next generation — or as a political narrative, with the returns implicitly framed as commentary on the international or domestic situation depending on the publication's editorial leanings.
Neither framing captures what the dancers themselves say about why they came back. The triumph narrative inflates what is in most cases a more modest and more practical reinvestment effort. The political narrative imposes a frame that the dancers I have spoken to do not, in private conversation, use about themselves. What the dancers describe is a more specific professional relationship to the school and to the next generation, with the political context understood as the context but not as the substance.
The substance is the dancing. The substance is the work of teaching the next generation what the previous generation knew. The substance is the slow institutional work of maintaining a dance school in a country with economic constraints that make the maintenance of a dance school difficult. The substance is what the dancers are doing when they are not being interviewed about why they came back.
The state of the school now
The Cuban National Ballet and the Escuela Nacional de Ballet that feeds it are in a complicated state at the moment, as several of the dancers I have talked to over the years have acknowledged. The institutional infrastructure has aged. Alicia Alonso died in 2019 and the question of how the institution navigates its next generation of leadership has been an open one. The economic constraints have constrained the school in the way the constraints constrain everything else.
The presence of the returnees — the Acosta-generation dancers who have come back to teach, to perform, to invest — is one of the things that has kept the school working through the past decade. The infrastructure they have built around themselves, the funding they have routed back, the international visibility their continued presence provides, have all contributed to the school's continued functioning in ways that the school itself would have found very difficult to produce internally.
I do not know what the school will look like in twenty years. I do not know whether the pattern of dancers leaving and some of them returning will continue. I know that the current generation of returnees has made decisions that go against the standard incentive structure of an international ballet career, and that those decisions have produced material consequences for the school they came from, and that the consequences are part of what allows the next generation of dancers to come out of that school at the technical level they continue to come out at.
Why this matters beyond ballet
I have spent a lot of words on what is, in the scheme of things, a small story about a particular cultural institution. I want to be honest about why I think it matters more broadly. The pattern of leaving and partially returning is a pattern that I see in the Cuban diaspora outside ballet as well. The writers who maintain bases on both sides. The musicians who do similar dual-presence careers. The doctors and engineers and teachers who left and who, in smaller ways, send money and expertise and time back to the institutions they came from.
The diaspora is not a clean break. The diaspora is, for many people, a complicated ongoing relationship with the place they left, which involves both having left and not having quite left, with the two things sitting alongside each other for the duration of the rest of the life. The ballet dancers who came back are doing publicly what a lot of the diaspora is doing privately. The visibility of the dance world makes the pattern more legible, but the pattern is not unique to the dancers.
I am part of this pattern in my own small way. I left in 2018 and I have not left in the sense that I am still in the apartment in El Vedado four or five times a year and I am still doing the work that the apartment lets me do. The Acosta-generation dancers are doing the same kind of thing at a much higher level of visibility and with more institutional consequence. The pattern is the same pattern. The diaspora is the diaspora. Some of us went back. Some of us are still going back. The going back is, in its own way, the part of the story that the coverage has the hardest time telling well.
