In May 1977, a Cuban dancer took the stage in New York with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. In the audience that evening, actor Harry Belafonte watched the performance and would later describe the evening as a significant historical event. This dancer’s name was María Elena Llorente, prima ballerina and ballet mistress of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. Her career spans fifty years of dance, spent almost entirely with a single company—the one founded by Alicia Alonso in Havana—on an island where, over the decades, classical ballet has become as much a source of national pride as it is an art form. María Elena Llorente, of the Sociedad Pro-Arte at the National Academy It all began at the Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical, a school in Havana where young Cuban women learned the basics of classical ballet even before the official founding of the national ballet company. María Elena Llorente then continued