📍El Vedado, Havana, Cuba
1920 – 1937“I was born Alicia Ernestina de la Caridad del Cobre Martínez del Hoyo in Havana in December 1920, the youngest of four children. My father, Antonio Martínez, was an army officer and veterinarian, and my mother, Ernestina, encouraged my love of music and dance. We lived in El Vedado, an elegant neighbourhood of tree-lined avenues, gardens and grand houses near the sea in Havana, and I was always dancing, to music from the radio or my mother's records. When I was about nine, my father was posted to Spain for a while, and my Spanish grandfather suggested I learn the local dances; I studied flamenco and learned to play the castanets. Back in Havana, in 1931, I began ballet classes at the school of the Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical, held in a mansion in El Vedado, taught by Nikolai Yavorsky, a Russian dancer who had been stranded in Cuba after a tour. I took my first class in street clothes, and I fell in love with ballet at once. On 29 December 1931, at eleven, I made my first public appearance, in The Sleeping Beauty. At the Pro-Arte school I also met Fernando Alonso, who became my husband. At fifteen I married Fernando and moved to New York, where I joined American Ballet Theatre. Even after my eyesight began to fail in my twenties, I kept dancing, guided by the lights and my partners. In 1948 we founded what became the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, and I led it for seventy years. Havana has honoured me by naming its grand theatre the Gran Teatro de La Habana Alicia Alonso.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today