- HAVANA: The Cuban National Ballet heads to the United States next week for a month-long tour that director and ballet legend Alicia Alonso hopes will bring happiness to US-Cuba relations that have been unhappy for half a century.
The tour is the latest in a series of cultural exchanges that began after US President Barack Obama took office as the longtime ideological foes seek common ground they have been unable to find politically since Cuba's 1959 revolution. The Cuban troupe will perform on Tuesday in Washington then go to New York and Costa Mesa, California before wrapping up in Los Angeles on June 26.
The New York-based American Ballet Theater and members of the New York City Ballet performed before ecstatic audiences in Havana in November, creating good vibes that Alonso said on Friday she hopes to duplicate. "All the people were very happy, so it was a very different change," she said of the performances by the U.S. companies.
"I hope this time we're going there and it's going to be exactly the same - happiness (for) all of us," she told Reuters after presiding over a rigorous rehearsal by the Cuban troupe at its Havana headquarters. Alonso, who is 90 and nearly blind, danced in the American Ballet Theatre in the 1940s and 1950s, but returned to Cuba after the revolution and took over the Cuban National Ballet.