The Cuban Diaspora: Stories of Defection, Brain Drain, and Brain Gain

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The Cuban Diaspora: Stories of Defection, Brain Drain, and Brain The Cuban Diaspora: Stories of Defection, Brain Drain, and Brain

Gain Gain

Lester Tomé

Smith College

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Chapter 17

“The Cuban Diaspora:

Stories of Defection, Brain Drain, and Brain Gain”

Lester Tomé

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet

(2021), 280-98

DOI:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190871499.013.50

This is a postprint. The published article is available in link above.

Abstract: Since the 1990s, many dancers from Cuba have found work in North American and

Western European ballet ensembles. This chapter describes how their international dance

careers reflect high-skilled labor migration in the global economy, as well as the decentralizing

expansion of ballet’s labor market. Migrant Cuban dancers cite a depressed local economy and

the artistic stagnation of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba as fundamental reasons for looking for

work in international ensembles. Their exodus is also political—extending into the present

practices and discourses associated with the Cold War concept of defection. The numerous

departures constitute a detrimental form of brain drain for Cuban ballet, which loses precious

human capital and is relegated to the subaltern role of labor supplier for the international ballet

community. Yet, this diaspora could also fuel brain gain—a scenario in which émigrés such as

Carlos Acosta return home to reinvest in local institutions the knowledge and resources acquired

abroad.

In the 1990s, Cuban ballet dancers began to make their way into the rosters of international

troupes. The number of Cuban dancers working outside their country has increased in the

twenty-first century, as dozens of these artists have established a worldwide presence in

companies ranging from New York’s American Ballet Theatre to London’s Royal Ballet, from

the San Francisco Ballet to the Béjart Ballet Lausanne. This trend reflects the entry of artists

from several Latin American and East Asian countries into an international labor market that in

ballet has become increasingly global. In the case of Cuba, the dancers’ diaspora has been of

such a scale that it has become a defining element of Cuban ballet—just as massive exodus has

left a profound mark on the nation in the years since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc triggered a

prolonged economic and ideological crisis on the island.

Many dancers cite a dysfunctional

economy and the artistic stagnation of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC) as fundamental

reasons for looking for work abroad. Even though such material and professional motivations are

common causes of high-skilled labor migration in the global economy, the Cuban dancers’

diaspora has been highly politicized—for it extended into the twenty-first century certain

methods of departure and punitive state sanctions associated with the seemingly obsolete Cold

War concept of defection. By international standards the Cold War ended in 1990, but for Cuban

dancers defection remained a practical action and an ideological discourse informing attitudes

toward migration until fairly recently. Not until 2018 did the BNC publicly announce that,

putting behind the Cold War rhetoric, the company would “turn the page” and welcome back

émigré dancers as members of the “family” of Cuban ballet.

From an economic perspective, the exodus of dancers constitutes a detrimental brain drain

through which Cuba and the BNC lose precious human capital—and the resources invested in its

development. Yet, high-skilled labor migration also presupposes scenarios of so-called brain

gain in which expatriates return home to reinvest in local institutions, contributing knowledge

and resources acquired during their international careers. In Cuba, sanctions against émigrés,

such as bans to re-enter and work in the country, have prevented the reinsertion of expatriate

dancers in local ballet institutions and thus precluded brain gain. However, the government’s

growing acceptance of a concept of Cuban nation as a diasporic community promises more fluid

relations between local institutions and Cubans living abroad. The Havana-based troupe Acosta

Danza, founded in 2016 by the transnational Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta, models the artistic and

economic benefits of embracing émigrés as members of the national community.

Attending to the political, economic, and institutional context of Cuban ballet, this chapter

underscores how local state ideology and the colonialist configuration of the world economy

complicate the status of Cuban dancers as transnational workers. Even though the case of Cuba is

unique, the present discussion of labor circulation is relevant for theorizing the participation of

other dancers from Latin America and East Asia in ballet’s international workforce. As artists

from those regions leave their countries to work in Western Europe or North America, questions

arise about how their transnational movement stands for brain drain or promotes brain gain, and

how these two scenarios may reinforce or destabilize assumed notions of a center and a

periphery in the international ballet community. The international trajectories of dancers should

be considered in light of trends in labor migration and against the background of worldwide

coloniality.

Dancers’ Moves: High-Skilled Labor Migration in a Global Labor Market

One of contemporary ballet’s most distinctive features, the extensive internationalization of the

labor market, was prefigured in the 1990s. That decade witnessed an increased circulation of

dancers within Europe and across the Atlantic, including the movement of artists from the former

Eastern Bloc to the West.

In the twenty-first century, ballet’s transnationalism has broadened.

Today, some workers of the ballet economy continue to crisscross Europe and traverse the North

Atlantic, but others carve larger global pathways between East and West, North and South.

Historic locations of ballet training such as Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United

States still feed the dance form’s economy. However, a number of Latin American and East

Asian nations, including Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, China, Japan, and South Korea, have

decentralized ballet training and substantially expanded the field’s labor pool. The prestigious

Prix de Lausanne, from which many European and North American ballet ensembles recruit new

dancers, illustrates the workforce’s expanded internationalism. In 2014, East Asians and Latin

Americans accounted for more than half of the finalists in that competition.

The development of

this worldwide labor supply has gone hand in hand with the internationalization of ballet

ensembles in the Global North. Consider the case of the Boston Ballet. In 2013, half of its fifty-

four dancers came from outside the United States: nine hailed from Latin America, eight from

Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics, five from Asia, and four from Western Europe.

Artistic director Mikko Nissinen explained that these numbers reflected a deliberate decision to

establish the Boston Ballet as an international institution.

For ensembles like this one, recruiting

globally is a way of ensuring quality by hiring the best workers the labor market has to offer. At

the same time, it is also a strategy of institutional diversity: to retain their sociocultural

relevance, ballet companies are increasingly pressed to mirror, in their composition, the

multicultural and global cities in which they operate.

The flow of dancers from Latin America and East Asia to European and North American

companies is consistent with high-skilled labor migration across other fields of the global

economy. Since the 1990s, the most rapidly growing segment of international migration has been

the one composed of high-skilled workers, including those moving from developing to

developed countries.

Discussions of this phenomenon commonly underscore the circulation of

scientists, academics, information technology experts, financial specialists, and medical

personnel. Artists are seldom at the center of these analyses—dancers, in particular, are notably

excluded. Through terminology that equates professionals to brains, studies of high-skilled labor

migration neglect workers who specialize in bodily skills. Dancers, of course, negate this

separation of body and mind. In fact, ballet dancers epitomize the definition of an elite, high-

skilled workforce. Like other specialized professionals, they are precious human capital whose

expertise is achieved at a great cost of time, effort, and material resources.

In Cuba, the state devotes significant assets to training dancers. It absorbs the cost of

facilities, teaching staff, and dance productions, while providing dance supplies and room and

board to most students. In 2017, the government fully subsidized the education of approximately

nine hundred ballet students.

Despite its high cost, training so many students is necessary for

maintaining a broad pool of talent from which exceptional artists emerge. Only the most

accomplished dancers are allowed to advance to the next phase of training, which pushes

students to the limit in terms of preparation. A few from each cohort make it to graduation after

six to eight years of training. By this point they enter the labor market as high-skilled

professionals equipped with formidable technical expertise, artistic knowledge, and work habits.

Latin American dancers have typified high-skilled labor migration since the turn of the

century. In 2005, the New York Times deemed this group the “new soaring force” in ballet,

pointing to the fact that half of American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancers were from Latin

America.

Cuban dancers, reputed for their training, have been particularly sought out by

international ensembles. This became evident in 2008 after three lead dancers quit the BNC

during a tour of Canada. As the news spread, prospective employers made quick arrangements to

recruit them: Hayna Gutiérrez, Taras Domitro, and Miguel Angel Blanco were soon hired as

principal dancers of the Alberta Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, and the Joffrey Ballet Chicago,

respectively.

Dozens of other Cuban dancers have been appointed soloists and principal

dancers at The Royal Ballet, the Bavarian State Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, American

Ballet Theatre, Boston Ballet, and other North American and Western European companies

(table 17.1). Many others have found employment in Australian, South African, and Latin

American troupes. Cuban dancers have also been in high demand as teachers and régisseurs in

institutions including English National Ballet in London, the Béjart Ballet in Lausanne, the Ailey

School in New York, and Teatro Alla Scala in Milan (Table 1).

Table 1

Cuban Principal Dancers and Soloists in International Ensembles (since 1990)

UNITED STATES AND CANADA

Adiarys Almeida

Lorna Feijóo

Nelson Madrigal

Dalay Parrondo

Boston Ballet

Boston

Cervilio Amador

Jorge Barani

Gema Díaz

Edward González

Cincinnati Ballet

Cincinnati

Alejandro Méndez

Annier Navarro

Randy Pacheco

Ballet Arizona

Phoenix

Javier Morales

Humberto Rivera

Amaya Rodríguez

Kansas City Ballet

Kansas City

Adrián Molina

Maraya Piñeiro

Dayesi Torriente

Pennsylvania Ballet

Philadelphia

Joan Boada

Taras Domitro

Lorena Feijóo

San Francisco Ballet

San Francisco

Javier Morera

Gian Carlo Pérez

Oscar Sánchez

Washington Ballet

Washington, DC

Elier Bourzac

Hayna Gutiérrez

Alberta Ballet

Calgary

José Carreño

Xiomara Reyes

American Ballet Theatre

New York City

This is not an exhaustive list of all Cuban artists working as principal dancers or soloists in North American and

European companies. Some of these dancers have held appointments in more than one troupe. For the sake of

succinctness, they are affiliated with only one group in this list. The information has been compiled through internet

searches, primarily of company websites.

Miguel Anaya

Romel Frometa

Ballet Met

Columbus

Miguel Angel Blanco

Ernesto Quenedit

Joffrey Ballet Chicago

Chicago

Randy Crespo

Marize Fumero

Milwaukee Ballet

Milwaukee

Lyván Verdecia

Ballet Hispánico

New York City

Yosvani Ramos

Colorado Ballet

Denver

Carlos Quenedit

Houston Ballet

Houston

Carlos Hopuy

Les Ballets Trockadero

New York City

Jesús Corrales

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens

Montreal

Annia Hidalgo

Los Angeles Ballet

Los Angeles

Carlos Guerra

Miami City Ballet

Miami

Karel Cruz

Pacific Northwest Ballet

Seattle

Reyneris Reyes

Royal Winnipeg Ballet

Winnipeg

EUROPE

Julio Arozarena

Juan Sánchez

Daniel Sarabia

Catherine Zuaznábar

Béjart Ballet Lausanne

Lausanne

Yonah Acosta

Yan Set Chang

Arionel Vargas

English National Ballet

London

Alberto Ballester

Yoel Carreño

Yolanda Correa

Norwegian National Ballet

Oslo

Osiel Gouneo

Alejandro Virelles

Bavarian State Ballet

Munich

Yanier Gómez

Liuva Horta

Compañía Nacional de Danza

Madrid

Rolando Sarabia

Venus Villa

Opera de Roma

Rome

Ernesto Boada

Howard Quintero

Royal Ballet of Flanders

Antwerp

Lienz Chang

Ballet National de Marseille

Marseille

Rafael Rivero

Ballet Zürich

Zurich

Dayron Vera

Corella Ballet

Segovia

Rodrigo Almarales

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Düsseldorf

Amílcar Moret

Hamburg Ballet

Hamburg

Melissa Gutiérrez

Les Ballets de Montecarlo

Monaco

Javier Torres

Northern Ballet

Leeds

Carlos Acosta

Royal Ballet

London

José Alberto Becerra

Víctor Ullate Ballet

Madrid

The political dimensions of Cuban migration have complicated this exodus. In March 2013,

after seven performers left the BNC in Mexico and sought asylum in the United States, the

international media resorted to Cold War rhetoric and categorized the incident as a defection.

Yet, the dancers attributed their action to economic and professional ambitions rather than

political reasons. They wanted to work in the United States—and, effectively, within six months

they had contracts with Ballet Arizona, the Sarasota Ballet, the San Juan Ballet, and the

Washington Ballet.

By this measure, they were no different from other high-skilled workers

seeking professional opportunities in the United States. Nevertheless, their decision to leave

while on tour and request asylum did indeed harken back to a Cold War definition of defection.

The incident took place against the background of critical changes in Cuba’s travel and

migration policy. Weeks earlier, after decades in which Cubans could not leave their country

freely, a new law had eliminated the requirement of a state permit to exit the island and restored

the right to travel for most citizens (with the exception of military and healthcare personnel).

Over the previous few years, the increased flexibility of migration policy under Raúl Castro’s

government had allowed a growing number of Cubans to travel and, in the case of those residing

abroad, return for visits.

Such flows evidenced an official trend to no longer regard migration

through the lens of ideological stigma. However, despite the reforms, the state maintained its

prerogative to punish so-called illegal emigrants. According to the 2013 law, athletes, diplomats,

and other professionals who stay abroad while traveling on a state mission—a criterion likely to

include BNC dancers on tour—face an eight-year ban from visiting Cuba. While authorities have

not always enforced it, the letter of the law warrants ongoing categorization of certain departures

as punishable acts equivalent to the classic defections of the Cold War. Moreover, a history of

politicization of dancers’ migration going back to the 1960s has influenced how, through this

transitional period in migration policy, Cuban institutions, the foreign media, and dancers

themselves have continued to conceive of these departures as defections.

Defections Reconceptualized: Cold War Escapes, Still, or Career Leaps?

Migrant dancers challenge a historic model of patriotism set in the origin story of the BNC.

According to this account, company founder Alicia Alonso gave up a glittering international

career to promote ballet in Cuba. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, she had been a star of Ballet

Theatre and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Simultaneously, she had struggled to keep afloat a

professional ballet company in Havana. In 1959, in the early weeks of the Cuban Revolution,

Fidel Castro authorized the state’s financial support of the BNC. Soon after, Cuba and the United

States turned into Cold War enemies, and Alonso faced the quandary of continuing her

international career, based in New York, or staying in Havana to work toward the development

of Cuban ballet. She chose Havana.

Inscribed in the history of Cuban ballet as an act of

commitment to the BNC and the revolution, Alonso’s personal decision established an

expectation of faithfulness to the company and the government for generations of dancers to

come. The revolution’s generous funding of ballet reinforced that presumption of loyalty.

Not only have exiled dancers defied such expectations of patriotism and commitment to the

government, but, historically, they have also undermined the BNC’s important mission of

cultural diplomacy. In the midst of the Cold War, the company’s international tours advertised

the social, educational, and cultural achievements of the revolution.

To audiences in the

Western Bloc it came as a surprise that Cuba boasted an ensemble of more than seventy dancers,

a company comparable in quality to those of Europe and North America.

Eliciting

astonishment, the BNC proclaimed the success of the Cuban government in sponsoring the arts.

More broadly, the troupe’s excellence signaled that communism enabled Cuba to attain

socioeconomic and cultural indicators equivalent to those of the developed capitalist world.

Nevertheless, dancers’ defections evidenced the human toll of the revolution’s project already in

the first visit of the BNC to Western Europe, when ten male dancers sought political asylum in

Paris in 1966.

As characters of Cold War history, defectors were then at the center of

propaganda battles. Notably, deserters such as the Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev

contributed to imprinting long-lasting notions of communist countries as prison states and of the

West as the free world.

The desertion of the Cuban group, which followed Nureyev’s break

five years earlier in the same city, reinforced such views. The dancers’ motivation was their fear

that in Cuba they could be targeted as homosexuals and interned in forced-labor camps.

Offsetting the potential of the BNC’s debut in Paris for cultural diplomacy, the incident triggered

extensive press coverage that corroborated the Cuban government’s imprisonment of gay men

and other alleged enemies of the revolution.

The end of the Cold War had dramatic consequences for Cuban emigration. Entering the

1990s, Cuba lost its trade partners in Eastern Europe as those countries transitioned to capitalism.

The island’s economy collapsed, and the value of monthly salaries plummeted to the equivalent

of ten to fifteen US dollars during a crisis that the government euphemistically labeled the

período especial, or special period.

To escape economic hardship and its dehumanizing effects,

scores of Cubans fled the country by any means available, including sailing on rafts and risking

their lives at sea to reach the United States. Within a few years, close to one million Cuban

migrants settled in the United States alone.

One indirect effect of emigration during the período

especial was the sudden transformation of Cuba into a supplier of high-skilled labor to the global

economy. Since the 1990s and until today, a significant proportion of the island’s emigrants

arriving to the United States and other countries have been in possession of competitive training

and professional experience in healthcare, technical fields, the sciences, education, and the arts—

the result of the Cuban government’s decades-long policy to make education accessible and

cultivate a qualified workforce.

With the onset of the período especial, the BNC began to customarily lose dancers during

international tours—a phenomenon that continues today.

The total number of dancers who

since the 1990s have left the company while on tour is difficult to establish, but it has been

substantial enough to almost certainly exceed the size of the troupe itself. In 2003 alone, the

company lost twenty artists during appearances in the United States, Spain, Mexico, and the

Dominican Republic.

This exodus illustrates the push-and-pull economic and professional

causes of high-skilled labor migration, as defined by Andrés Solimano. While certain

circumstances push workers away from one location, more desirable alternatives in another place

pulled in this human capital. Salient among these determinants are differences in per capita

income, living standards, and economic security between the origin and destination countries.

Career conditions are an equally important reason for the migration of workers such as scientists,

academics, and artists. Professional isolation, institutional stagnation, bureaucracy, ineffective

leadership, poor infrastructure, lack of funding, inadequate career advancement support, and

professional underrecognition drive talent to locations that offer desirable alternatives to these

conditions.

Cuban ballet dancers often cite material reasons for migrating. In their country, as one

dancer explained in 2003, many of them live in houses with leaking roofs and have to resort to

the black market for food.

Conscious of the paradox of being among the best-trained yet

lowest-paid ballet dancers in the world, they pursue better-remunerated employment in foreign

companies. Artistic ambitions also drive this diaspora, in correspondence with the global

projection of a professional class that, having received world-class training, aspires to worldwide

success. The stagnation that has afflicted the BNC in recent years makes such artistic aspirations

all the more urgent. The performers taking jobs outside the country seek not only international

prestige but also artistic growth. Frustrated with the BNC’s impoverished repertoire, many

dancers seek access to the more diverse and innovative programming of European and North

American ensembles. After staying in the United States in 2001, Nelson Madrigal explained that

he had grown tired of dancing Giselle, Swan Lake, and other nineteenth-century classics on high

rotation in the BNC’s seasons.

Like him, Hayna Gutiérrez complained of the Cuban ballet’s

heavy diet of classics after she stayed in Canada in 2009: “If you’re dancer, choreography is your

food. You can’t eat spaghetti all the time.”

Decades earlier, the BNC had been a pioneer in the cross-pollination of ballet and

contemporary dance that is now a hallmark of choreographic innovation in ballet ensembles

across the world. Dancemakers such as Alberto Méndez, Iván Tenorio, and Hilda Riveros, who

created inventive works for the BNC in the 1970s and 1980s, had started their careers in modern

dance and transferred elements of its groundbreaking aesthetic to their ballets. Additionally,

Alberto Alonso, who had performed with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and Les Ballets

Russes de Colonel W. de Basil, was heir to the twentieth-century ballet avant-garde and carried

over its sense of experimentation in works he choreographed for the BNC until the 1980s. A

golden era of Cuban ballet choreography drew to an end when these artists ceased or reduced

their collaborations with the troupe in the 1990s.

Compounding this problem, the BNC has not been able to pay the licensing fees for works

by international choreographers such as Jiří Kylián, William Forsythe, or Twyla Tharp, who

have set the tone of contemporary ballet. Financial limitations have also kept vast tracks of

earlier choreography out of reach. That has been the case, for example, with the canonic ballets

of George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Frederick Ashton, and Kenneth MacMillan. Many of the

dancers who have left the BNC to pursue careers abroad have relished their expanded access to

choreography. Lorna Feijóo (Boston Ballet) and Taras Domitro (San Francisco Ballet) explain

that mastering the works of choreographers such as Balanchine, Kylián, and Forsythe became the

most rewarding aspect of their careers after leaving Cuba.

Dancers who leave the BNC to work abroad also attribute their decision to dissatisfaction

with the troupe’s governance and artistic leadership. Cervilio Amador and Adiarys Almeida, who

stayed in the United States in 2003, felt alienated by the fact that every decision about their

careers lived with Alicia Alonso, the all-too-powerful director of the BNC.

For decades, until

her death in 2019, Alonso’s leverage with the Cuban government and standing within the

international arts community have opened many doors for the BNC, but her critics accused her of

remaining in her position for too long and therefore halting company renewal by a younger

generation of artistic leaders. Some claim that Alonso, now a blind nonagenarian with limited

mobility, was no longer fit for her job and had to rely on many aides at the expense of a unified

artistic vision for the troupe.

It is apparent that, in comparison to dancers who defected decades earlier for urgent political

reasons, recent exiles have left Cuba due to a set of economic, artistic, and institutional

circumstances more in line with the push-and-pull factors of high-skilled labor migration in an

age of global labor markets. Nevertheless, as indicated earlier, their departures have continued to

be politicized under the Cold Ward rubric of defection. There are several reasons for this. Since

Cuba’s communist regime survived the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, in many ways the relations

between the country and the rest of the world have continued to follow a Cold War dynamic.

This influences how dancers’ departures are perceived internally and externally. One could argue

that, as in the past, dancers’ migrations remain politically motivated, at least to the extent that the

economic, artistic, and institutional problems that now drive dancers to work abroad—from their

country’s economic crisis to the long hold on power of Alonso as the BNC’s artistic leader—

have been failures of the Cuban political system. Moreover, some of the mechanisms of

defection from the Cold War era endure, as it is the case with the dancers’ choice to abandon the

BNC during international tours. Before the government legalized international travel in 2013,

this was their most practical method for leaving the country. But even under new circumstances

that make individual travel possible, quitting the troupe while on tour remains strategic. It spares

dancers the onerous cost and effort of securing passports, visas, and flight tickets on their own.

During BNC tours all of this is managed and provided to them by the ensemble.

Finally, as noted earlier, the government has kept the defection paradigm alive as part of the

new travel and migration law, which maintains sanctions against citizens who desert while acting

as official representatives of Cuba. Of significance to this analysis of labor migration, the law is

designed to partially prevent brain drain. For instance, it stipulates that healthcare personnel, one

of the most valuable assets of the nation’s labor force, must still obtain an official exit permit to

travel abroad. Furthermore, by punishing the desertions of athletes, artists, and other citizens on

official trips, the law aims not only to avoid these departures’ negative effect on the

government’s international image but, presumably, also to curb the emigration of some of the

country’s most talented professionals. In other words, the state’s stigmatization of this high-

skilled labor migration as defection transcends the political arguments of the Cold War to also

act as an instrument of brain drain management.

Effects of Brain Drain for the Subaltern Labor Supplier

The growing presence of Latin American and East Asian dancers in European and North

American ballet troupes destabilizes assumed notions of which nations occupy positions in the

center or the periphery in the world of ballet. The colonialist world order commonly relegates

Cuba to the periphery, yet in the arena of ballet the country produces world-class artists and

demonstrates how, far from those European and North American sites traditionally thought of as

the center, other locations have come to occupy significant positions in the global ballet

community. Cuba not only is home to the BNC and first-rate ballet schools but also boasts strong

regional ensembles such as the Ballet de Camagüey and hosts the reputed International Ballet

Festival of Havana, which in twenty-six editions held from 1960 to 2018 has attracted dancers

from all over the world. The country is also known for its large and knowledgeable ballet

audience. Such achievements warrant Cuba’s claim to being in the center, not the periphery, of

the international ballet community. Yet, this decolonialist gesture is jeopardized by the exodus of

local dancers to the Global North, which casts the country in the subaltern role of a labor supplier

for European and North American institutions. The outflow of talent reinforces the colonialist

structuring of international ballet. It compromises the excellence of Cuban ballet troupes, which,

by losing their best dancers, are relegated to a less competitive international status. Conversely,

the outflow reproduces the dominant standing of Global North ensembles, which benefit from

recruiting talented Cuban artists to reaffirm their stature as international centers that concentrate

resources, opportunities, and cachet.

This situation captures the failure of the neoliberal

market’s promise to decentralize the international economy through globalization. It evidences

that in most regards, including the circulation of high-skilled labor, coloniality continues to

structure the economic relations between developed and developing nations.

Downplaying migration’s negative consequences for the BNC, Alicia Alonso explained that

artists who leave are immediately replaced with new graduates from the island’s ballet schools.

“We have 110 beautiful dancers [in the troupe], and we have more coming up each year through

our school,” she boasted in an interview.

In reality, it is difficult to think of gifted artists with

unique talents and personalities as replaceable workers. Even if they are replaced, the new

graduates who fill the vacated spots become next in line to leave, which generates a fast, harmful

rotation of personnel, especially principal dancers and soloists.

Brain drain turns the BNC into

a training ground in which young dancers are groomed only to leave for other troupes before

maturing and realizing their full potential in Cuba. This dynamic has created a deficit of mature

artists that is detrimental not only to the quality of performances but also to the growth of

incoming company members. The deficit of seasoned dancers—compounded by the migration of

teachers and regisseurs also afflicting the BNC—weakens the transmission of knowledge from

one generation of dancers to the next, a process that is the cornerstone of expertise preservation

and development in any ballet ensemble. Namely, brain drain impoverishes the troupe’s store of

expertise, posing risks of long-term deterioration.

To counter brain drain, the BNC prevents its members from signing work contracts with

foreign troupes, as was the case when principal dancers Rolando Sarabia and Octavio Martín

received respective offers from the Boston Ballet and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. By refusing the

dancers’ petitions of release, the BNC pushed them to decamp during a trip to Mexico—from

where Sarabia and Martín traveled to the United States. They both had hoped that, rather than

resorting to defection methods, they could have left their country through regular channels and

that, instead of breaking ties with the troupe, they could have maintained parallel careers in the

BNC and abroad. “They threw me out,” pointed out Sarabia to convey that it was the negation of

permission to work transnationally that turned him into a so-called defector.

Such conflict of

interests between the institution and its members is one of the reasons perpetuating the dancers’

practice of defection in a post–Cold War context.

The BNC’s retaliatory measures toward émigrés, such as invisibilizing them and banning

them from performing in Cuba, have also contributed to prolonging a historic model of what

defection entails. Consider the case of the former BNC star Lorna Feijóo, a darling of Cuban

audiences in the 1990s. After she left the troupe during a tour of the United States in 2001 and

became a principal dancer of the Boston Ballet, the BNC magazine Cuba en el Ballet rendered

Feijóo invisible. Her name and any mentions of her international career would be omitted from

that publication, which serves as the institutional memory of the Cuban ballet.

Such treatment

of Feijóo by the BNC extended even after the government allowed the dancer to re-enter Cuba.

She publicly expressed her strong desire to dance for local audiences again, but the company

never invited her to do so.

Until 2018, only exceptionally did some expatriate dancers—whose

international careers were sanctioned by the state and the BNC—perform in Cuba. In that rare

category were Carlos Acosta (The Royal Ballet), José Carreño (American Ballet Theatre), and

Yoel Carreño (Norwegian National Ballet).

The example that Alonso set in the initial years of the revolution by relinquishing her

international career has continued to dictate an expectation of similar patriotism for BNC dancers

in the twenty-first century. Supposedly, the country’s ballet community is a family in which

members, having been nourished by the state and previous generations of dancers, assume a

responsibility to work in Cuba for the community’s greater good. This assumption informed

Alonso’s criticism of emigrants. “They are like kites that one builds carefully with rods, and

string and paper. Then you launch them into flight and suddenly they break loose from the cord.

It is sad how they fool themselves,” she declared to a reporter.

In the same interview, Alonso

implied that émigrés were disloyal and stressed that they could compete in the international labor

market only because they benefited from years of state-subsidized studies and artistic mentoring

in the ensemble. Discrediting exiles as unfaithful careerists who put their personal interests

above those of the national collective constitutes another typical response from the Cold War

script on defection.

However, among recent generations of dancers, the push-and-pull factors

of high-skilled labor migration supersede a view of patriotism that conflates love of the country

with faithfulness to the government and the BNC. In a televised appearance in 2013, four Cuban

dancers who had just arrived in the United States acknowledged their indebtedness to Alonso,

the BNC, and the Cuban educational system, but they asserted their right to follow their

professional aspirations on international stages, free from bonds of gratitude to their country’s

institutions.

In 2003, minister of culture Abel Prieto had met with all dancers of the BNC to remind them

of the consequences of staying in other countries while on tour: a ban from re-entering Cuba and

denial of permission to their families to join them abroad. Following the meeting, the Ministry of

Culture took the extraordinary measure of amending the dancers’ work contracts to explicitly

include these stipulations.

At the same time, the government recognized that the dancers’

migration was not simply a political matter but also a problem of high-skilled labor management.

Striking a negotiating tone, Prieto promised that the state would review the cases of dancers who

received work offers from abroad so that these possibly could be authorized through official

channels, without dancers having to take the drastic step of leaving the BNC during tours. In

other words, even while doubling down on its old punitive strategies, the state acknowledged that

such measures perpetuated rather than eliminated the phenomenon of defection, and that a new

approach was necessary. Prieto signaled acceptance of the notion of Cuban dancers as a

transnational workforce, in line with the aspirations of artists such as Sarabia and Feijóo to move

fluidly between international locations and Havana.

Carlos Acosta and Acosta Danza: Transnationalism and Brain Gain

Understood as brain drain, high-skilled labor migration is a flight of human capital that

invalidates the Global South’s investments in education and deprives the region’s countries of

the contributions that émigrés could have made to local development. However, scholars of labor

migration such as Andrés Solimano, Simon Commader, and Herbert Brücker underscore so-

called brain gain scenarios in which this diaspora may revert into benefits to the origin countries.

While the notion of brain drain presupposes a one-way outflow, the brain gain paradigm

recognizes the possibility of a circular movement of professionals, ideas, and resources.

The

latter perspective allows envisioning a dynamic role for Latin American and East Asian dancers

who work in Europe and North America but reinvest in home institutions. Traveling back and

forth between the assumed periphery and center of the international ballet community, these

artists could operate a redistribution of resources and expertise, and thus destabilize such

hierarchical mapping of the ballet world. This means that in spite of having left Cuba, or

precisely because of it, émigrés could make valuable contributions to their country and help

revitalize local ballet institutions. In theory, they could give back knowledge, connections, and

resources acquired through their insertion in international artistic networks. Yet, the Cuban

government and the BNC’s condemnation of these dancers as defectors have foreclosed the

chance of brain gain. The few exceptions to such stigmatization, such as Carlos Acosta, render a

picture of how dancers working transnationally, with one foot in Cuba and the other foot

elsewhere, could offset the damage of brain drain if not fully at least partially.

In 1990, Acosta was still a student at the National School of Ballet when he won top honors

in the Prix de Lausanne and the Paris International Dance Competition. The awards paved the

way for his transnational career. He obtained rare authorization from the government to accept a

position in the English National Ballet. Later, he would rise to stardom as a principal dancer of

The Royal Ballet. While working abroad, Acosta managed to keep uncharacteristic good

standing with Cuban institutions and authorities. Far from ostracizing him, the government and

the BNC recognized him as an ambassador of Cuban ballet who boosted the country’s

international image, as asserted in reports in the state-run media of his achievements on stages

across the world.

It is indicative of Acosta’s privileged position that in 2003 Fidel Castro

attended one of his performances in Havana, and eight years later the artist was presented with

the National Dance Award after a jury declared that he was a son of the revolution who had

brought glory to Cuba.

Given the standard official view that dancers who migrate undercut

cultural diplomacy, it is ironic that the government turned Acosta into one of Cuba’s most

effective cultural diplomats, not by curtailing his ability to work abroad, as authorities tried for

years with other dancers, but, on the contrary, by facilitating his participation in the international

labor market.

Acosta’s officially sanctioned status as a transnational worker enabled the dancer to carry

out valued professional activities in Cuba. He continued to dance in his country as a regular

guest of the International Ballet Festival of Havana. Thus, local spectators were not deprived of

the artistry of one of the world’s best ballet performers. Audiences also benefited from Acosta’s

brokering of a historic visit of The Royal Ballet to Cuba in 2009. Spectators in Havana eagerly

received that company’s performances of Ashton’s A Month in the Country, MacMillan’s

Manon, and Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, works that had never been seen in Cuba and which

constituted a stimulating alternative to the BNC’s heavy rotation of nineteenth-century classics.

Moreover, Acosta enjoyed the opportunity to choreograph in Cuba in collaboration with local

dancers and musicians. His production of Tocororo, which premiered in Havana in 2003,

juxtaposed artists with ballet training and performers with a background in contemporary dance.

The hybrid choreography incorporated those two styles as well as hip-hop, Cuban social dances,

and Afro-Cuban folklore. The resulting product was a piece with a level of commercial appeal

not normally found on Cuban stages, which expanded the range of local offerings. Funded by the

Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, Tocororo followed a production model beneficial for a

country with limited financial resources. The investment of foreign capital generated jobs and

international exposure for the Cuban cast, as the show went on to tour the United Kingdom,

Italy, Austria, Turkey, and Hong Kong.

After retiring from The Royal Ballet in 2016, Acosta redirected his career toward the

development of his own Havana-based company, Acosta Danza. Through this organization, he

has bridged the local and international dance communities. The troupe has emerged as a crucible

for choreographic creativity, while producing rewarding employment for Cuban dancers. Over a

short period the group’s repertoire has grown to include works by Justin Peck, Sidi Larbi

Cherkaoui, and Pontus Lidberg, among other exponents of current international choreography.

Crucially, the company promotes the development of a young generation of Cuban

choreographers, including Ely Regina Hernández and Raúl Reinoso. Created for the troupe,

Hernández’s Avium (2016) cites, deconstructs, and enlarges Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan

for an ensemble of androgynous performers. Her choreography expands the classical vocabulary

through polycentric articulations, while embracing the tension between jagged shapes and fluid

movement. Reinoso produces works that are similarly eclectic. Integrating elements of

contemporary dance, ballet, and Afro-Cuban dance, in Satori (2018) he probes the Zen Buddhist

concept of spiritual awakening through the ensemble’s metaphorical play between nudity and

spectacular costuming.

These and other works in the company’s heterogeneous repertory

regularly demand dancers to transition between dissimilar genres, techniques, and aesthetics,

engaging a versatility that stimulates the performers’ artistic development. By increasing the

range of Cuban ballet, Acosta Danza supplements the BNC’s emphasis on the classics and

consequently repositions Cuba within the international ballet community as a site of not only

tradition but also experimentation.

In the Cuban context, the troupe’s transnational financial model has been equally innovative.

The Ministry of Culture partially subsidizes the ensemble, providing it with studios, offices, and

access to theaters. Yet, Acosta raises operational funds through international sponsorships that he

is well positioned to secure as a result of his past career in London. Building on the model of

Tocororo, Acosta Danza is an international associate company of Sadler’s Wells. This British

institution manages the company’s appearances in the United Kingdom and also arranges tours

of other countries, so far including the United States, Russia, France, and Germany. While state

funding guarantees a stable infrastructure, international sponsorships and engagements boost the

dancers’ incomes far beyond the regular state salaries of most Cubans. Acosta proudly declared

to the New York Times that since joining the group some of the performers have been able to

purchase houses in Havana.

Favorable artistic opportunities and compensation are an incentive

for the ensemble’s dancers to work in Cuba rather than emigrate. Seemingly, the brain gain

typified by Acosta precludes brain drain by creating circumstances that retain high-skilled

workers.

In comparison to Acosta Danza, the BNC has struggled to accept a transnational definition

of the national community. However, the 2018 edition of the International Ballet Festival of

Havana marked a turning point in the relation between the BNC and the diaspora. For too long,

the troupe’s identity as a symbol of the revolution, the weight of Cold War history on the

migration of ballet dancers, and the association of their exodus with brain drain had hindered an

institutional model of collaboration with expatriates. The 2018 festival took distance from this

history. In a press conference convoked to announce the festival’s program, the BNC announced

that invited to perform in Havana were nine former members of the troupe who now worked in

Europe and the United States, including Domitro, Gutiérrez, and Almeida—who years earlier

had abandoned the group during tours. The company’s publicist indicated that, although those

dancers had left the BNC in “improper fashion,” the festival was focusing on the present, not the

past, and sought to reunite the Cuban ballet “family.” He indicated that this reconciliation with

the diaspora was in the spirit of the government’s more flexible policy on migration.

Reporting

on the press conference, articles in two local newspapers announced the visits of dancers from

twenty countries. However, in a sign of the lingering ideological stance toward expatriates, those

newspapers omitted any reference to the Cuban émigrés’ participation.

Even though the cases of Acosta and the BNC appear to confirm that Cuban authorities and

institutions are progressively relinquishing practices and discourses that alienate migrant dancers

as defectors, it is difficult to predict how economic and political developments in a country in

transition—and changes of the BNC’s artistic and administrative philosophy under new

leadership since Alonso’s death—will either sustain or reverse this trend. Endorsing a conception

of the nation as a diasporic entity inclusive of émigrés and enriched by transnational cooperation

between Cubans on the island and those in other locations would facilitate brain gain. It would

also be consistent with the state’s attempt to liberalize travel and migration, as well as with

economic reforms that since the turn of the century have aimed to open Cuba to foreign

investments and strengthen its participation in international markets. Independent of this peculiar

national context, the challenges of brain drain and brain gain are consequential for all actors, not

only Cubans, in ballet’s global labor market. The international circulation of the ballet

workforce, which reflects the workings of coloniality and neoliberal markets, warrants further

analysis at a time of increased scrutiny of ideologies of labor in dance studies. As indicated

earlier, brain grain and brain drain impact the reproduction, or disruption, of the colonialist

organization of international ballet as a hierarchical system in which power and influences are

mapped according to notions of a center and a periphery.

Difficult questions arise in connection with the status of ballet dancers as partakers of high-

skilled labor migration in the global economy. How should dancers and ballet institutions

navigate the economic, political, artistic, ethical, and human factors that cause the globalization

of the ballet workforce and the resulting circulation of dancers? What are the implications of the

drive toward hiring Latin American and East Asian dancers in ballet companies in the Global

North if such initiatives promote much-needed racial and multicultural diversity in those

ensembles, while simultaneously stimulating brain drain? How should individual dancers weigh

aspirations to international careers versus responsibilities toward home institutions? Which

policies, if any, should governments adopt to prevent brain drain or foster brain gain in countries

where the state, by financing dance training, has a stake in these situations? How could any such

policies balance protection of the nation’s human capital and respect of the personal freedom of

dancers to come and go at will? Do the benefits of brain grain offset or merely palliate the

negative effects of brain drain? How can locations in the periphery transcend the subaltern role

of labor supplier? In which other ways can these locations assert their international relevance?

Acknowledgments

I thank Ariana Reguant for comments on a draft of this essay, as well as the David Rockefeller

Center for Latin American Studies, at Harvard University, where I initiated this research as a

visiting scholar.

Notes

Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution, 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 126–148.

“Festival Internacional de Ballet de La Habana reunirá a ‘familia’ de danza cubana,” Xinhua Español, October 10,

2018, accessed on September 10, 2020, http://spanish.xinhuanet.com/2018-10/12/c_137526677.htm.

Helena Wulff, Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers (Oxford: Berg, 1998).

Dance Lines, “2014 Prix de Lausanne Finalists,” http://dancelines.com.au/2014-prix-de-lausanne-finalists.

Boston Ballet, “Company Dancers,” http://www.bostonballet.org/company/dancers/dancers.html.

Mikko Nissinen, interview with the author, Boston, May 29, 2014.

Lester Tomé, “Black Star, Fetishized Other: Carlos Acosta, Ballet’s New Cosmopolitanism, and Desire in the Age

of Institutional Diversity,” in The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, ed. Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett

(London: Routledge, 2019), 298-310.

Fréderic Docquier and Hillel Rapoport, “Quantifying the Impact of Highly Skilled Emigration on Developing

Countries,” in Brain Drain and Brain Gain: The Global Competition to Attract High-Skilled Migrants, ed. Tito

Boeri, Herbert Brücker, Fréderic Docquier and Hillel Rapoport et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),

209–307.

Fernando Ravsberg, “The Secrets of Cuba’s Ballet School,” Havana Times, October 26, 2017,

https://havanatimes.org/?p=128043.

Erika Kinetz, “The New Soaring Force in American Ballet: Hispanics,” New York Times, September 20, 2005, E7.

Mary Ellen Hunt, “Latest Cuban Dancers to Defect,” Dance Magazine 83, no. 1 (2009): 28.

Daniel Wakin, “Citing Art and Money, 7 Cuban Dancers Defect to U.S.,” in New York Times, April 4, 2013, C2;

BBC News, “Cuban Ballet Dancers Defect While on Tour in Mexico,” April 4, 2013,

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-22,023,126.

A Fondo, in America TeVé (Miami), April 1, 2013; Larry Rohter, “Defectors Land on Their Feet,” New York

Times, November 5, 2013, C1.

Decreto-Ley no. 302, in Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba, October 16, 2012, 1357–1387.

Philip Peters, “Migration Policy Reform: Cuba Gets Started, U.S. Should Follow,” Lexington Institute (2012),

http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/library/resources/documents/Cuba/ResearchProducts/CubanMigration.pdf.

Francisco Rey and Pedro Simón, Alicia Alonso: Órbita de una leyenda (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores de

España, 1996), 43–45.

Elizabeth Schwall, “Coordinating Movements: The Politics of Cuban-Mexican Dance Exchanges, 1959–1983,”

Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 4 (2017): 681–716.

John Percival, “Caribbean Classic,” Dance and Dancers, January 1967, 42–43.

For studies of the uses of ballet in Cold War cultural diplomacy, see Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural

Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998); Clare Croft, Dancers as

Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and

Catherine Gunther Kodat, Don’t Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture (New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 2015).

Nelson Almendros and Orlando Jiménez-Leal, Conducta impropia (Madrid: Playor, 1984).

David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003), 468–506; Susan Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape, and

Brainwashing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

For information on the camps, see Marvin Leiner, Sexual Politics in Cuba: Machismo, Homosexuality and Aids

(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 28–31.

“Les dix danseurs cubains qui ont choisi la liberté,” Le Figaro, November 7, 1966, 21; “Dix danseurs cubains

invoquent l’intolérance morale du régime pour justifier leur demande de droit d’asile en France,” Combat,

November 7, 1966, 10.

Ted Henken, Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2007), 154–159.

Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, International Migration in Cuba: Accumulation, Imperial Designs, and

Transnational Social Fields (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Pew Hispanic Center,

“Hispanics of Cuban Origin in the United States, 2011,” June 19, 2013, accessed on September 10, 2020,

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2013/06/19/hispanics-of-cuban-origin-in-the-united-states-2011/.

Not all of the Cuban dancers who have emigrated hail from the BNC. Some were members of the Ballet de

Camagüey or students at the National School of Ballet.

Mirta Ojito, “Fleeing Cuba, Hoping to Soar on New Stage,” New York Times, December 5, 2003, A1.

Andrés Solimano, International Migration in the Age of Crisis and Globalization: Historical and Recent

Experiences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Ojito, “Fleeing Cuba.”

Octavio Roca, Cuban Ballet (Layton: Gibbs Smith, 2010), 146.

Michael Crabb, “The Cuban Dancer Exodus to Canada,” Toronto Star, March 12, 2011, E9.

Hunt, “Latest Cuban Dancers to Defect”; Helson Hernández, “Lorna Feijóo, de las grandes del ballet cubano,”

Havana Times, January 13, 2013, http://www.havanatimes.org/sp/?p=78047.

Ojito, “Fleeing Cuba.”

Erika Kinetz, “The Imperious Vision of Cuba's Other Ruler-for-Life,” New York Times, February 6, 2005, A33;

Roger Salas, “El salto a la libertad,” El País, May 6, 2011,

http://elpais.com/diario/2011/03/06/cultura/1299366004_850215.html.

Tomé, “Black Star, Fetishized Other.”

Octavio Roca, “Alicia’s Choice,” Miami Herald, February 23, 2004, 9E.

Crabb, “The Cuban Dancer Exodus to Canada.”

Enrique Fernández, “Ballet: Split with Cuba Still Brings Pain,” Miami Herald, September 17, 2005, 1E; Carrie

Seidman, “Cuban Defectors’ Story Underlines a Drama Reshaping Ballet in the U.S.,” Sarasota Herald Tribune,

December 1, 2010, A1.

Cuba en el Ballet, 1970–2009, DVD-ROM (Havana: Cubarte, 2009).

Hernández, “Lorna Feijóo”; and Gia Kourlas, “Havana's Sphere of Influence,” New York Times, May 29, 2011,

A17.

Miguel Cabrera, “21 Festival Internacional de La Habana,” Cuba en el Ballet, no. 117 (September–December

2008): 2–23; Miguel Cabrera, “22 Festival Internacional de Ballet de La Habana,” Cuba en el Ballet, no. 121

(September–December 2010): 2–27; Lourdes Elena García, “Joel Carreño: Añoro bailar para el público cubano,”

Trabajadores, November 3, 2016, http://www.trabajadores.cu/20161103/joel-carreno-anoro-bailar-para-el-

publico-cubano/.

Reny Martínez, “Cuban Ballet’s Alonso Pained by Defections to U.S.,” Reuters, November 22, 2003.

Patrick Major, Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2010), 99, 182.

A Fondo, in America TeVé, April 1, 2013.

Ojito, “Fleeing Cuba.”

Solimano, International Migration; Simon Commander, Mari Kangasniemi and L. Alan Winters, “The Brain

Drain: Curse or Boon? A Survey of the Literature,” in Challenges to Globalization: Analyzing the Economics, ed.

Robert E. Baldwin and L. Alan Winters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 235–278; Herbert

Brücker, Simone Bertoli, Giovanni Facchini, Anna Maria Mayda and Giovanni Peri, “Understanding Highly

Skilled Migration in Developed Countries,” in Brain Drain and Brain Gain, ed. Tito Boeri, Herbert Brücker,

Fréderic Docquier and Hillel Rapoport, 15–208.

José Luis Estrada, “Carlos Acosta, el bueno de la película,” Juventud Rebelde, October 3, 2009,

http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/cultura/2009-10-03/carlos-acosta-el-bueno-de-la-pelicula.

“Noticias,” Cuba en el Ballet, no. 101 (2003): 59–64; Consejo Nacional de las Artes Escénicas, Acta Premio

Nacional de Danza 2011,

http://www.cubaescena.cult.cu/global/loader.php?&cat=premios&cont=show.php&premio=&seccion=premio%2

0nacional%20 percent20-%20danza&item=69.

Ruaridh Nicoll, “Cuba Libre!,” Observer, August 9, 2009, 26.

Margaret Willis, Carlos Acosta: The Reluctant Dancer (London: Arcadia Books, 2010).

Acosta Danza, repertory, http://www.acostadanza.com/en/repertorio.

Yuris Nórido, “Ely Regina Hernández: Clásica y moderna,” Trabajadores, September 4, 2016,

http://www.trabajadores.cu/20160904/ely-regina-hernandez-clasica-y-moderna/; and Martha Sánchez, “Acosta

Danza reafirma afecto por tendencias contemporáneas del arte,” Prensa Latina, August 19, 2018,

https://www.prensa-latina.cu/index.php?o=rn&id=203749&SEO=acosta-danza-reafirma-afecto-por-tendencias-

contemporaneas-del-arte.

Brian Seibert, “A Global Star Sets His Heart on Home,” New York Times, April 22, 2018, 11L.

“Festival Internacional de Ballet de La Habana reunirá a ‘familia’ de danza cubana.”

Yuris Nórido, “Un festival, muchas celebraciones,” Trabajadores, October 11, 2018,

http://www.trabajadores.cu/20181011/un-festival-muchas-celebraciones/; and Toni Piñera, “Festival

Internacional de Ballet Alicia Alonso: Paso a la danza,” Granma, October 11, 2018,

http://www.granma.cu/cultura/2018-10-11/paso-a-la-danza-11-10-2018-19-10-46.