The Sarasota Cuban Ballet School Is Built on Politics, Determination and Family

Sarasota Magazine ^ | September 8, 2025 | Carrie Seidman

[CondoleezzaProtege]

In 1993, while on tour in Mexico with a Cuban ballet troupe, Cubans Ariel Serrano and his wife Wilmian Hernandez bought one-way tickets and boarded a plane to Miami...

Nearly 32 years since that pivotal day—Serrano and Hernandez will again board a plane, their dreams having expanded infinitely beyond what they could ever have imagined. This time the destination is London, where they will sit in the plush scarlet seats at The Royal Opera House and watch their son Francisco, 28, a soloist with The Royal Ballet, perform his first lead role

The school they initially established to train their son, who started at the late age of 14, has since earned a reputation as the premiere repository of Cuban ballet knowledge in the United States, with direct ties to a storied Cuban system that produced some of the most skilled and exciting dancers in the world.

That system owed its existence to two unlikely partners: Fidel Castro, a dictator, and Alicia Alonso, a ballerina with an equally pugilistic spirit...

Castro’s socialist agenda included promoting ballet as “one of the most elevated and beautiful artistic manifestations” and making it available to “all social classes.” Alonso and and her husband, ballet dancer Fernando, who had struggled for years to establish a professional ballet company in Havana, were the people Castro believed could make that happen.

In 1959, Castro committed the money and the political will to re-ignite the Alonsos’ company and underwrite a program—one that would eventually grow into a network of 24 schools across the 778-mile-long island—to provide children who had potential with eight years of ballet and academic schooling, free of charge. The schools would cultivate dancers for the newly dubbed Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC), an artistic jewel and source of national pride...

[CondoleezzaProtege]

The highly admired characteristics of the Cuban style—the bent leg held so high above the knee in pirouettes; the ability to turn endlessly and finish suspended on pointe; the soaring athletic leaps; the animal magnetism of the Cuban men—have now infiltrated other companies and dazzled other audiences.

But more than the technique, Serrano says, it is “the fire” that underlies the Cuban aesthetic. That drive, he says, was born of a culture of scarcity and necessity.