By Victor Greto
NARBERTH, Pa. — “We were so cute,” Margarita de Saá says in a rich Cuban accent untamed by more than 40 years of living in the United States.
They were.
Gazing a half-century into the past, at a sepia-toned image of herself and her pirouetting twin sister Ramona, both wearing silky-sheer tutus and intense expressions, de Saá’s eyes reflexively cut through a thick slice of a Cold War many Americans are quickly forgetting.
In 1964, the young and internationally acclaimed ballerina left the newly Communist island country for good, losing touch with most of her friends and all of her family. Just about all of them ignored her as she, her American husband and 2-1/2-year-old son left in January of that year.
Only her parents and one friend showed up to see them off. She recalls seeing her parents through a glass partition, occasionally waving, as the separated groups waited for hours.
But, most of all, she left her sister, with whom she had shared just about everything, including, since the age of 11, the stage.
“We got good very fast and danced every day,” de Saá says.
Ramona stayed and became an advocate of the revolution, especially after she married one of Fidel Castro’s bodyguards in 1962. She also became the director of the school of the Cuban National Ballet, one of the premier ballet companies in the world.
Nearly two years ago Margarita was reunited with Ramona when documentary filmmakers, intrigued by the sisters’ stories, arranged a meeting.
The ambivalence of that meeting remains with her today. Although their identities as ballerinas and artists always will keep them together, the politics of the ongoing Castro regime will keep them apart.
“We didn’t talk politics,” Margarita says of the week she spent with her sister and her family in Cuba. “I was afraid we might have the same attitude we had when we left.”
***
Sitting in the small front room of the Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet, which she started with her husband 30 years ago in this tiny town less than 10 miles west of Philadelphia, de Saá says she has no regrets about leaving Cuba forever.
None, despite the esteem held for the ballet by the Cuban government and people. “It was the only good thing Castro ever did,” she says of his financial support of the ballet.
No regrets, despite the stark contrast of the U.S. attitude.
Here, ballet often is considered esoteric, something for little girls with pliant bodies to do. Many Americans only see the ballet around the time they choke down pieces of fruitcake, during the holidays when the ubiquitous Nutcracker is performed.
And, of course, there’s the stigma that ballet is only for girls. “We have three younger boys here out of 300 students,” Margarita says of her school.
In Cuba, however, even after four decades, “People still recognized us,” she says of herself and her husband, who also was part of the Cuban Ballet in its formative years. “Ballet in Cuba is so popular.”
Many of her former and current students in the U.S. knew hardly anything about her sister before the PBS documentary aired last month.
“I didn’t know the extent of the rift between them,” says former student Marsha Borin, who briefly ran a ballet company in Wilmington. “The loss for her was the grade of ballet there as opposed to here. She lost all of that.”
But she did not leave because of art. She left because of politics.
Although it did not sour the sisters’ tentative reconciliation, politics still has not left them, even after four decades.
“I was apprehensive of saying something that would hurt her,” Margarita says of their reunion. “I always feel not free there. I wanted to ask if she really believed in the revolution.”
But no recriminations crossed either’s lips. “I am not angry and she’s not angry,” Margarita says. “She understands the choices we made.”
***
Through their later childhood and teens, Margarita and Ramona were the choice-makers.
The first and perhaps most important choice occurred at the age of 11, when Margarita and her sister decided to audition for a ballet scholarship.
Encouraged by their music teacher, the de Saá sisters were successful, and loved the art.
“The music, the discipline,” Margarita explains simply, her voice trailing off: “The artistry.” Flowing with the music, limbs, feet and hands stretching, spearing through the air, the sisters found they also were artistic twins.
They joined the “Ballet Alicia Alonso,” the precursor to the Cuban National Ballet. When they were 14, they went on a South American tour.
In the late 1950s, there also were summer tours in the U.S. It was there she met her future husband, John White, a native Californian and athlete turned dancer.
But there was no attraction at the time, he says.
“She had her activities, and I had a girlfriend at the time,” says White.
But after a couple of summer tours, White and some friends were invited to join the Cuban ballet in the summer of 1959.
“We didn’t know much about Cuba, nor about Castro,” says White. Castro had taken power in January of 1959. “There was no political implications of where he might be headed, so we decided to go.”
White became interested in Margarita soon after, he says, although he admits he had a hard time at first telling the physical difference between her and Ramona.
He knew no Spanish, and she knew no English. Even so, she agreed to marry him only a few months after they started going out together — always accompanied by a chaperone, of course.
Part of the price White paid for wanting to marry Margarita involved enduring an hour-long talk, in Spanish, from her father, most of which White didn’t understand.
It was a 7-month Soviet Union/East European tour that changed their lives artistically and eventually set them on a course away from Cuba. During the tour, a CIA-led exile army tried to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, and was defeated.
“We came back to a different Cuba,” Margarita says. She also came back pregnant.
“After that, everything took on an obvious political face,” White says. “Everywhere, everything was based on the estrangement between the U.S. and Cuba. The embassy closed down, and I was advised to leave.”
But they didn’t. Margarita’s ties to both the country and her sister, and the couple’s ties to the ballet company, were too strong.
***
Because of Cuba’s incipient communist revolution, the Cuban ballet became more exposed to the Russian Bolshoi Ballet school, considered to be the best in the world. Their tour became an integral part of their education.
Both White and Margarita thrived under Russian teachers, and soon became teachers and advocates themselves of the Russian “Vaganova” technique of highly structured dancing, which they still teach today.
But the pressures of the burgeoning revolution continued. The beginning of the end of Margarita’s relationship with her sister began with a toothache.
During a reception the ballet company attended for Castro, Ramona complained of a headache caused by a bad tooth. She got an aspirin from Santiago Bello, a Castro bodyguard and confidante.
The meeting sparked a relationship that turned into a marriage the following year and revolutionized Ramona politically, Margarita says. As Ramona’s passion for the revolution intensified, so did Margarita’s brother Jovito’s, who joined the military and even fought against the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Her family’s revolutionary fervor, the escalation of anti-Americanism after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 all came together in the couple’s mind when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.
“I saw the reaction of the Cuban people then,” White says, characterizing it as “euphoric” for some. It stirred within him a latent patriotism, he says.
Margarita was more worried about her child, who, shortly after his second birthday, was slated to attend a state nursery school. “We didn’t want our son to learn only one thing, socialism,” Margarita says. “If he wanted to be a communist if he chose, fine, but we didn’t want it imposed.”
By the end of 1963, everyone knew they were thinking of leaving. “Friends would walk down the street, and cross to the other side not to talk to me,” Margarita says. “It was very hurtful.”
Her friends and family knew what Margarita even admits now, after all this time.
“I probably would have stayed if I had not married and had a child,” Margarita says. “It was a good ballet company.”
***
When they left Cuba and moved to White’s parents’ home in California, they wanted to have nothing to do with ballet, Margarita says.
White even tried joining the C.I.A., but was refused because he had lived in Cuba and traveled through eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He taught Spanish for a while. “But everyone wanted us to teach ballet,” Margarita says.
Margarita even danced in two movies, “Funny Girl” and “In Like Flint,” and joined a dance company. But in 1969, the couple, now with another child, Melinda, born the year before, were invited to Philadelphia join the Pennsylvania Ballet Company.
Five years later, they started their own school in nearby Narberth.
Marsha Borin became both White’s and Margarita’s student. Wanting to be a ballerina all her life, Borin put her dream on hold to marry and have two children, and then decided to become a lawyer.
While attending law school, she attended Margarita’s ballerina classes.
“Margarita is passionate and focused,” says Borin. “You are in there to work, and I like that atmosphere, I liked her clarity. She’s a very lyrical dancer.”
Pam Kubiak, who lives just up the street from the academy, says she’s been taking lessons from Margarita, White and their daughter Melinda since she was five.
“She taught me how to perform,” says Kubiak of Margarita. “When to smile, whatever it is in your character, to feel the movement of the music and interpret it in your own way.”
Jeanille Tumey, of Kennett Square, Pa., was so impressed with the school, which she attended in the early 1990s, that she later wrote a Masters Thesis at the University of Delaware on John White’s dancing experience in Cuba.
“We had heard vague stories of his dancing in Cuba, about Margarita and her sister, and Alicia Alonzo, who directed the ballet in Cuba,” she says.
All that vagueness has become only a little clearer over time, even after the sisters’ reunion.
“She feels very American,” White says of his wife. “Before we started with the documentary and reunion, she was less Cuban in a sense. But since the documentary, all things Cuban have come back. But she has no desire to go back and live in Cuba.”