Britain’s Royal Ballet with their principal dancer, Cuban-born Carlos Acosta, comes to Havana and performs with the National Ballet.  This article from the Observer explores the significance of ballet in Cuba, its history after the revolution and the role played by Alicia Alonso, now 90, as it reports on the week long series of performances and celebrations occasioned by the meeting of these two companies.

The week-long tour is a massive undertaking, with a 150-strong crew of ballet teachers, stage crews, costumers and wiggers, conductors, pianists, physiotherapists and, of course, dancers, 80 of them. Battling heat, antiquated theatres and even an outbreak of swine flu, the company is performing several excerpts, a couple of short ballets, and a full three-act staging of Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 classic Manon, the vast majority deliberately taken from its modern repertoire.

It is Manon that Acosta and Rojo are now rehearsing – the tale of a young girl who chooses money over love and suffers for it. Practising the finale, they slip to the floor, Rojo down Acosta’s shoulder to end up lying still, exhausted, like love defeated. And then he laughs, leaps up and shouts, “She whispered: ‘Carlos, we must get up for the bows.’” Unlike those around about, I suspect Rojo’s suffered enough of Acosta’s sweat over the years.

With the rehearsal over, I join Acosta in the truck given to him by the Cuban government. He has the stereo playing salsa and is singing along, while on the dashboard a statue of a white-clad figure looks on. “The patron saint of Havana,” he shouts. In his 2007 autobiography No Way Home, between sex scenes, he suggests the gods have made him lucky, imbuing him with talent and the opportunity to rise from a childhood in Havana’s slums to the point where his name can sell out the world’s great theatres. Now they may be going further, making him the man to give Havana back its artistic edge.

The night before, Acosta and Rojo’s performance of Le Corsaire had been projected on to an outdoor screen so that Habaneros could watch for free. Thousands turned up, packing on to the steps of the Capitolio, and I was amazed to see urchins sitting transfixed at my feet. I tell Acosta this, and he grows ever more animated: “Can you imagine? People are concentrating. And it’s ballet… ballet! It’s not a world cup, it’s ballet.”

He sees this tour as one of the highlights of his life. “One of my biggest accomplishments. You cannot dream of having the Royal Ballet in Havana.” Lack of resources and the suspicion of those in authority could have killed the dream, but it did happen, and the story of how is, in the words of one of those involved, astonishing: “Nothing ever happens in this country – but this did.”

There is a belief in Cuba that high art can exist at the heart of any nation’s life. It’s a belief that we in Britain seem to have lost and yet which, by asking the Royal Ballet to visit, Cuba appears to be attempting to regain. “Dance is the true religion,” Acosta says. “You put your health at risk, and the money’s no good.”

Alicia Alonso is the prima ballerina assoluta of the National Ballet of Cuba and, at almost 90, plays the part. She is guided into the British ambassador’s residence in Havana by her younger husband, her head swathed in a scarf, her lipstick bright red, her sightless eyes covered by large sunglasses. (Blind from an early age, she used to – as she once told me – throw herself across the stage not knowing if someone would be there to catch her.)

The Royal Ballet has spent much of the week paying tribute to this woman. On the second evening of performances, Monica Mason, the Royal Ballet’s director, met her on stage, bowed deeply and proffered up flowers. It was noticed. “It was a very good thing to give homage to Alicia,” says Miguel Barnet, a novelist who heads up the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists and is one of the most powerful men on the island. “I was impressed to see Dame Monica bow to Alicia as if she were the queen of England. Of course, she’s not – she’s the queen of Cuba.”