Dance Week: Cuba, Ballet, and the Preservation of Glamour

Cristian Rey is a 32-year-old nursing student in Miami and an active participant on the  BalletTalk discussion forum, where he upholds traditional notions of elegant comportment and dress. “I’m a firm believer of that Felia Doubrovska’s mantra about ‘walking like a ballerina, dressing like a ballerina,’” he commented during a discussion of glamour among contemporary ballerinas. Iin this guest post, he looks back at how in his childhood ballet was connected to the lost glamour of pre-revolutionary life, even as the Cuban National Ballet represented Castro's revolution.

My memories of beauty and glamour begin with growing up in Cuba during the  1980s—not what people think of when hearing about Cuba, Castro, and the whole communist ordeal. In my childhood, the hotels were open to the nationals, American currency did not circulate, and the stores, while not overstuffed, had many products, mostly from the Soviet Union and the eastern communist countries. My mother had an old 1956 Chrysler, inherited from my grandfather, and gas wasn’t expensive. 

And then there was ballet. Ballet stories were common at home. My mother had studied at a local ballet academy, which was a natural thing to do for a girl of the middle class. Here is when I first heard about this surreal and magic world…more than a simple art or entertainment vehicle, but truly a lifestyle. Thinking back, now I understand what an important role did ballet played in my imagination as a child. There were black-and-white pictures in which my mother would be smiling at the camera dressed in classical tutus. And then the stories…in which she would reminisce about the ballet studio, the mirrors, her former teacher, and the performances. Everything was beautiful, glamorous, and, yes, somehow deliciously decadent. Then, 1959 came, along with a Revolution that was to suppress the “old regime vices,” with its “decadent bourgeoisie” and its way of living. Private clubs, religious institutions, and domestic servants, among other things, were prohibited. The old ballet studio was confiscated, the mirrors destroyed, and the teacher would eventually exile herself 90 miles away, just as her former student, my mother, did many years later.

So here I was, as a kid, listening to all this stories, looking at the pictures, hearing my mother and my grandmother describe with sorrow and pain how all was destroyed, banned, erased. I came to understand how difficult it is to give up a whole lifestyle. Inside our house they tried their best to preserve the old world. The table was set with all the silverware—even when the food for which was intended was absent—and religion was preserved against my atheist official education. Stories about “before” were passed to me in low voices. My grandmother had a whole beauty ritual, in which she would sit in front of this piece of furniture called “coqueta” (dressing table) with huge long vertical mirrors and drawers for her makeup. The process took her one hour, and I found it fascinating. She was very specific about her looks, and up to her old age, she insisted in dyeing her hair every month and wrapping it in rollers at night, just in case “I die during the night and have to be dragged out of the house in front of everybody.” Meanwhile, the official “new woman of the socialist society” dressed in work pants and traveled on top of trucks to work on the cane fields, hand in hand with the men.

The Cuban National Ballet fit uneasily into the new world. On the one hand, it was an official vehicle of the Communist government, and Fidel Castro himself showed interest in the company’s development as far soon as he took power in 1959. The artistic director and prima ballerina assoluta Mme. Alicia Alonso (right) decided that she needed to trust Castro, and her support for the revolution remains strong to this day. She created the company in 1948, but struggled until Castro’s revolutionaries arrived 11 years later with a grant to support the company. As her group became stronger, 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. Alonso’s dancers continue to be a vehicle for exporting the idea of the revolution.

The ballet's first generation of Cuban dancers, however, had been a product of the previous government. I will always remember the famous “Four Jewels”: Mirta Pla, Josefina Mendez, Loipa Araujo, and Aurora Bosh (left). These were women who had been raised before the revolution, and hence, their education and even their off-stage projection were quite different than those who were born and raised after 1959. When I started going to the ballet as a kid, three of these dancers were still active within the company, and very often they used to make appearances in festivals and special performances. They were very refined ladies, who carried the weight of being the glamorous face of the company, and they did so with style and grace. At times I got to see them at the theater, and they certainly looked from another time, another era. The hair, makeup, conversation, everything exuded elegance, refinement…in other words, old school glamour. 

After 1959, a new generation of dancers began to develop. Little by little, the ballerina was no longer a “lady,” separate from the rest of us mortals. The ballet school started to make its best efforts to “integrate” its students, and the “ladies” became “comrades.” Or at least that was the idea. New choreographies were created, like “Avanzada,” in which the dancers, guided by a uniformed woman, portrayed military forces in the process of building the new communist society.

As time passed, however, it became obvious that this project wasn’t going to succeed, as ballet is based, by nature, in grace and refinement. Eventually the old Petipa princesses came back to life, and regained their previous position. Ballerinas went back to being “different,” and class and distinction were back in fashion. This tradition is still alive. Cuban classical dancers are fully aware of their role, and they show it with pride.