Lorena Feijóo is on top of the world. It’s just not the world she expected. 

Feijóo is in San Francisco rehearsing to star in the United States premiere of John Neumeier’s ballet version of The Little Mermaid with the San Francisco Ballet. She’s also fielding offers for a Don Quixote in Miami, and for other guest spots in London and around the globe. She had a featured role in Andy García’s 2006 The Lost City, a melancholy love letter of a film about Havana, Feijóo’s native city. Magazine covers, appearances everywhere from talk shows to Sesame Street, and a dance card that’s filled for the next few seasons. By her own admission, she’s been “lucky—lucky that the San Francisco Ballet repertory is so eclectic, that I’ve had so many opportunities in this country.”

Still, she’s not home. 

Home is Cuba, and that’s the one thing she can’t have. The San Francisco Ballet star is, without a doubt, at the front of a platoon of Cuban dancers who are leaving their homeland and changing the face of ballet. Along with her sister Lorna Feijóo, as well as fellow exiles José Manuel Carreño, Joan Boada, Taras Domitro, Xiomara Reyes, Rolando Sarabia, and dozens more, the Cuban ballet diaspora is giving Cuba a cultural importance that is spectacularly disproportionate to the size of the island: the entire population of Cuba could, after all, fit comfortably into greater Los Angeles or New York. 

In ballet, Cubans are, in some respects, the new Russians, comparable to what the world of dance experienced at the dusk of the Soviet empire. The Cubans’ distinctive style and technique inform the principal ranks of, among others, the San Francisco Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, the Boston Ballet, the Miami City Ballet, the Houston Ballet, and of course, that scrappy exile troupe, the Cuban Classical Ballet of Miami. As Mikhail Baryshnikov told me recently, “It’s impossible not to notice when a Cuban dancer walks into the studio.”

As the great Cuban poet and patriot José Martí once stated: “Hacer es la mejor manera de decir.” Doing is the best way of saying. This applies directly to the Cuban ballet dancers. They do not specifically speak out in political overtones. They do not try to educate you about the dark Cuban history. But their voices are heard anyway. They are Cuban artists, they dance with a Cuban accent, and they are free. And freedom, as Jean-Paul Sartre said, is what you do with what has been done to you. 

In the San Francisco Ballet studio, Feijóo’s rehearsals with John Neumeier are as feverish as they are unorthodox. Echoing the philosophy of earlier dance theater masters such as Antony Tudor and Kenneth MacMillan, Neumeier insists again and again on  dancers bringing their own emotional baggage to the movement. And letting the rest take care of itself. “John’s a man with a heart, and a man of the theater,” says Feijóo. “The first thing he explains is not the steps, but the emotions. That is the way to build a role, then the steps come naturally.” 

Just don’t tell her The Little Mermaid is a children’s tale, and please don’t mention Walt Disney. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s popular 1836 fable, and set to a new score by Lera Auerbach, the ballet has more in common with, say, Giselle or Carmen than one might guess. Or that’s how Feijóo sees it. “It is a tragic love story, a very mature story of two different worlds, of an impossible love.” In this, she is able to give the classic tale an emotional depth. She means love; love is wielded in every step.

It helps that she is working with one of the most celebrated choreographers in the world. Neumeier’s movement language is something dancers can sink their teeth into. It goes from anti-classical to academic in the blink of an eye. Knowing that working with new choreographers is one thing Cuban dancers in Cuba seldom, if ever, get a chance to do, Feijóo especially relishes how Neumeier’s dense and brave new steps are far from the conventional ballet exercises. No deep arabesques here, no bourrés, no grand battements, only bizarre new steps that the cast, in rehearsal, dub with names like “the fried egg” or “the seahorse.” 

“Every step I’m learning for The Little Mermaid is so human,” says Feijóo, “even if it is a little strange. The music is so strong, it carries you. And the last dance for the Mermaid and the Poet is just so beautiful. I can’t wait.”

Is it very different from rehearsing an established role like Giselle? 

“Not really,” Feijóo counters, emphasizing that no two of her performances are alike, “because you always try to learn with every role. Every role is new, every time. Or else you shouldn’t dance it.”

In truth, Feijóo hardly notices anything except her actual dance when she dances. In the wings as she is about to step on stage, she thinks of nothing. “De verdad,” she says, which roughly translates to the truth. “I only think of the dance I am dancing. After all the work and all the rehearsal, after all the learning that came before, I only think—if I think at all—of the moment. The great moment when you are on stage. The beautiful moment.”

For Feijóo, there is a transient past that afforded her the opportunity to create this suspension of the moment. She danced professionally in Cuba starting at 16. “Then I left home at 20,” she shares. Her path since then is a travelogue of the ballet world: she carried her Cuban sabor, or flavor, to the Ballet de Monterrey, then the Royal Ballet of Flanders, then almostto Los Angeles in 1995 after signing a contract with the Los Angeles Ballet—which promptly went bankrupt before Lorena stepped on stage. The Joffrey Ballet snapped her up, and she stayed with that company in Chicago four years, until she “got restless repeating the same repertory.

“It was time to move on,” she says.

And move on she did. In 1999, just eight years after leaving Cuba, Feijóo became a principal with the San Francisco Ballet, the country’s oldest ballet company. Her career there, which allows her time for prestigious guest gigs, as well as film work, has been scandent. She portrayed the classic role of Giselle to great success in a version by Helgi Tomasson that managed to be even more note-complete than Cuban ballet legend Alicia Alonso’s own. There was the unforgettable take on La Bayadère coached by Natalia Makarova opposite fellow Cuban exile Joan Boada. And there was the now-historic adaptation of Don Quixote, also with Boada. There were the starring turns in repertory staples like Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. The litany of first-rate performances has piled high—she has done American masterpieces by Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and George Balanchine. Legends such as Alexei Ratmansky, Yuri Possokhov, Christopher Wheeldon, and Val Caniparoli have even created dances for her. Now, The Little Mermaid is giving her the chance to work with a choreographer she has long admired. 

In every one of these ballets she dances, Feijóo displays everything that makes the Cuban School of Ballet unique: the disconcertingly slow turns and all the control these imply, the strong back and sensual neck, the arms and hands that are at least as eloquent as the feet, the effortless changes mid-combination, and the jumps seemingly out of nowhere, but actually springing from perfect demi-pliés. The serene balances. The soul. Like Alicia Alonso (the aforementioned famous Cuban ballerina, 89, who was partially blinded at nineteen and continued to perform) before her, Lorena Feijóo is a born classical ballerina who has willed herself into the romantic mold, a transition that is rare in the world of ballet.

But all this prestige and prominence means nothing when she returns to her native soil. Unlike other contemporary Cuban dancers such as Royal Ballet star Carlos Acosta and ABT star José Manuel Carreño, Feijóo and her sister Lorna are most definitely not welcome back on stage in Cuba. Baryshnikov, who knows a thing or two about dance defectors and has been to Cuba to observe its young dancers recently, told me the situation reminded him “a lot like my country when I left. Some people were given permission by the government to travel, some were not—it made no sense. I hope Cuba will open up some day.” 

And true to her demeanor, Feijóo takes a more modest tack. “I don’t think it’s just political,” she explains. “I think Alicia is gentler to the men, frankly. But you know I have only the deepest respect for her. Whenever I am asked for my political opinion in interviews I refuse,” she quickly adds, keeping to her strict rule of not discussing her model and teacher, let alone the politics of her country, on the record. The monumental irony here is that the example that Feijóo and her fellow exiles are emulating is none other than that of the indomitable Alonso herself. Just as Alicia Alonso once and often famously refused to recognize her blindness as a brutal limitation for her art, dancers in the Cuban ballet diaspora refuse to recognize the loss of their homeland. 

While avoiding any judgments of Alicia Alonso, Lorena does speak most fondly of Fernando Alonso, Alicia’s first husband and the teacher who hand-picked Lorena from the corps and dubbed her his “Tropical Beauty” at 16. But despite her vaunted status, distance and a yearning for escape stunted Feijóo’s life. Once she defected in 1991, her career bloomed in ways that are now the stuff of ballet lore. In this, she became the epitome of the free Cuban dancer. Free to be Cuban in her art after leaving her embattled homeland. 

Still, until her sister Lorna left Cuba with her dancer husband Nelson Madrigal in 2000, Lorena was on her own and longed to be near her family. Twenty years later, her mother, the dancer Lupe Calzadilla, was finally given permission to leave, after some humanitarian, political maneuvering by California Senator Dianne Feinstein. “If it hadn’t been for that beautiful woman,” says Lorena, “my mother never would have gotten out. Period.”  

Finally, her father, the popular Cuban actor José Lorenzo Feijóo, was allowed to leave in 2007. She was going to finally have her whole family in America. Then, tragedy struck: José was in a car accident on his way to a Miami television talk show the day after he landed in the United States. It caused a downward spiral that ended in terminal cancer. Lorena cannot talk about that. “The truth is,” she says before pausing, attempting to stop tears. “It’s not easy. It’s not easy.” The truth is that she can barely talk about her own return to Cuba, not to dance, just to visit her aunts and cousins. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the situation in Havana has been nothing short of a permanent crisis, the tensions unbearable, the desire for change overpowering. Not for the first time, the ballet is the one thing that still seems to work in Cuba. Even that, Feijóo admits, is heartbreaking. 

The great obscenity is that tourists from all over the  world can afford to go to Cuba and enjoy its many delights. They can bask on the beautiful beaches in Varadero and ignore the de facto apartheid that keeps Cuban citizens from its blazing white sands; they can enjoy terrific food and drink in luxury hotels where Cubans are not welcome; they can experience the best tropical entertainment in the city’s many cabarets, blissfully ignorant of the terror backstage. They certainly can still witness the miracle of Cuban ballet, even if life for Cuban dancers is increasingly toughened as they are ground down by the Castro dynasty. And Cuban ballet is suffering because of it, as the best and brightest continue to leave every chance they get.

Feijóo is not a tourist when she returns to Cuba, and she is not a tourist when she goes to the theater in Havana. She is recognized, almost a celebrity. People come up and tell her how much they hope to see her dance again. “You have to remember I was onstage when I was 13,” she says, 13 being the same age Alicia Alonso made her own debut. “There are people in Havana who know me, who have known me, who remember my graduation performances. [Performing in Cuba] is different. The applause is different. The reception is different.” What she means is that there is a different understanding of ballet in Cuba. It is a part of their cultural fabric, whereas in America, the general public largely ignores the art of dance.

Reminded that she doesn’t exactly lack for fans in the United States and Europe, she says “Of course there is a beautiful public in San Francisco, in Miami, a lot of beautiful people who love dance. Sometimes I watch the videos of a performance and I’m really taken aback by the loudness of the ovation, the length of the applause—I really don’t notice it when I’m dancing. [But] I feel Cuban wherever I dance. I always will. At least in Miami, I’m never told that I’m not Cuban, which I get a lot in California—I don’t know why.”

But, it is just plain different in Cuba.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” she says, pausing to collect her emotions a bit before talking about her trip to Havana a few months earlier. “It’s not just the dance. There’s sensuality in the air, in the country. One breathes differently. Truly, it feels different than anywhere else. It’s something we Cubans have. I can’t explain it, but I miss it.”

Finally, Feijóo breaks her own rule about political tongue-holding, declaring: “I’ll tell you what I want. I just want Cuba not to be a world apart. I want it not to be so very far for everyone. I want what everybody wants, the possibility of freedom.  I want to dance for our people again, for an audience that knows us a little better. And I am optimistic. I want our Cuban people to have the art they deserve, without all the hardships and oppression they have suffered. Someday we will have that.”

But until then Feijóo must make her mark in a foreign country. Like her fellow exiled dancers, she has a remarkable adaptability. Feijóo helps create a public version of her own Cuban culture through dance and, in the process, she and her contemporaries are enriching the land where they arrived as strangers. That American dance is better for this is something American’s seem to take for granted. There is an artistic fervor in these intensely lived lives, and it is something wholly Cuban. 

But this level of intense cultural and emotional detachment takes a survival strategy; Lorena simply prefers not to cry. In this she emulates her earliest model, Alicia Alonso, who once told me: “Las lágrimas nunca las he contado.” Tears I’ve never been one to count. And yet Feijóo’s turmoil, her longing for a home, comes out in her dance. Like two million other Cubans, Lorena Feijóo lost her country. But she became all the more Cuban for it. 

Could things have been different? The prospect of perennial mourning for the path not taken is a dangerous, paralyzing temptation for exiles. Lorena will have none of that. In fact, she wishes she had been “even more of a gypsy.” 

“I guess there’s a lot to be said for planting roots,” confesses Feijóo, “and I know I have this love-hate relation with San Francisco. The repertory is wide, and I have a chance to dance so many different things. But I also know how much you pick up traveling, working with different people, learning, always learning. I know I’ve been lucky—I just miss Cuba. And I know it’s good to have so many Cuban friends in San Francisco.

“I learn a lot from Jorge,” she adds, her voice filling with emotion about Jorge Esquivel, perhaps Alicia Alonso’s finest partner and now, at 60, principal character dancer and teacher with the San Francisco Ballet. “Even now, that man—my god—when he dances the role of Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker he steals the show. Everyone looks at Drosselmeyer. How could they not?” 

That Esquivel turns the classic Russian character into a Cuban simply through movements is the teller. It tips the hand that the Cubans have long known: Cuban ballet is Cuba’s introduction to the globe that they are citizens of the world, that once they are free to travel and return home without consequence, Cuba will make themselves known as skilled executors of the finest of fine arts. “He’s a great Cuban artist” is all Feijóo has to say about Esquivel, or any of the other dancers living here. Her friends, her compatriots. The Cuban dancers of San Francisco.

Maybe she’s home after all in San Francisco. Or maybe, just maybe, Lorena Feijóo is simply at home in the world.