Before the U.S.’s recent embrace of Cuba, the island nation was widely known for its cigars and talented baseball players and also for international ballet stars who had defected.
What sets Cuban ballet apart so much so that companies covet their dancers? It’s the pliant sense of movement, rooted in a pristine combination of the world’s major techniques — mostly Russian strength and vocabulary along with Danish beats and a French elegance — baked in the warm climate and gentle Caribbean waters.
Now Pittsburgh is warming up to a pair of National Ballet of Cuba dancers, Cynthia Castillo and Damien Martinez Coro. Ms. Castillo came to America legally, lucky enough to emigrate as a winner of a lottery system. Her longtime boyfriend, whom she met at the Cuban National Ballet School, was left behind. But a year or so later, he joined her via a much more treacherous route aboard a do-it-yourself boat with a group of men collectively anxious for a better life.
The pair brought with them a sunny Caribbean disposition and a strong work ethic that allowed them to juggle as many as three jobs at a time. Sitting at a window seat in Sewickley’s Starbucks, Mr. Martinez Coro said in an interview that they came “to improve life, to have better opportunities and get the best out of everything. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but we still try.”
“When one door closes, we open the next one,” Ms. Castillo brightly inserted with her engaging smile.
They have opened a whole corridor of doors since arriving in Pittsburgh in 2009. Those years began with a year-long stint at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, which didn’t work out. But the area’s vast network of dance studios (most in the South Hills but as far away as Ohio) embraced them, not only as teachers, but also by using Mr. Martinez Coro’s experience as a partner for their most talented young girls.
That was only the beginning.
A staff member from the Columbia Classical Ballet in South Carolina, where they briefly danced prior to Pittsburgh, invited them to a Thanksgiving dinner with her relatives in Pittsburgh that first year. There the couple met people who would become their second family, Ernest and Rosella Trello and Mark and Elizabeth Mortimer.
The Americans couldn’t believe how, from the very beginning, the Cuban dancers “had a vision,” according to Mr. Martinez Coro. “They never met people who stuck to what they had in mind.”
So they invested in the Cubans. They took them to auditions with other companies. And when that didn’t meet with success, they sent them to school. Ms. Castillo graduated from Community College of Allegheny College with an associate’s degree in business and Mr. Martinez Coro with one in physical therapy.
It’s the reason they opened their own school, West Point Ballet, in Coraopolis last year. They now live there and their family lives there. It’s a neat building with two spacious studios, a lobby, a dressing room and a snack area. Upstairs is “the future,” as Ms. Castillo puts it, with room for expansion. Always the visionaries, they immediately did a “Nutcracker Suite” in December and a “Sleeping Beauty Suite” this past spring.
The couple, of course, teach the Cuban style of ballet, which Mr. Martinez Coro thinks “is cleaner. You understand it better. It has the best of everything out there.” Ms. Castillo teaches, runs the school and attends to the books. Sundays find her in Ohio instructing at another school. In her spare time, she is working toward a full degree in business at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Martinez Coro is a physical therapist for Fritz Physical Therapy & Sports Medicine in Bridgeville, where, three days a week he works from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., then teaches an evening class at West Point. His boss also rearranges his schedule to allow him to perform in the area. On days off and short work days, he is at West Point, teaching. In his spare time, usually early morning or late at night, he indulges in a new-found love for running and trains for the Pittsburgh Marathon (which he has twice completed).
They still make time for family, not only American but also Cuban. It’s why Mr. Martinez recently added Coro to his name, to acknowledge both sides of his family. He can contact them now in Cuba, although it took him eight years to tell his parents of that arduous boat journey, chapter by chapter.
For four years, he had nightmares of that trip, reliving it with changing characters. But then, defectors dealt with an eight-year ban barring them from returning to their families. The nightmares only ended when he saw his twin brother, David, then a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Cuba (and now searching for a job in Florida), perform in Canada.The two also saved enough to bring Ms. Castillo’s family to Pittsburgh, although they didn’t like the weather and relocated to Miami.
However, this pair loves the Steel City. Mr. Martinez Coro, in particular, says that the green hills and water remind him of his birthplace in Matanzas. And they are making much more than the $30 a month that dancers receive at the National Ballet of Cuba.
They no longer have to work 10-hour days at a supermarket, as they did in Miami, he as a butcher and she in the bakery. They took English classes at night. Both are now U.S. citizens. And they each have a car, a step up from the 1950s antiques found in Havana due to the U.S. embargo.
Life is good and, most likely, a new door is opening.
Former Post-Gazette critic Jane Vranish: jvranish1@comcast.net. She blogs at pittsburghcrosscurrents.com.
First Published: August 12, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
