Cuba libre!

He's Cuba's second most famous son, but when principal dancer Carlos Acosta brought the Royal Ballet home, there was a shock in store for Havana's classical dance lovers
Carlos Acosta in Cuba
Leap of faith: Carlos Acosta during a performance of Le Corsaire at the Gran Teatro of Havana, 14 July, 2009. Photograph: Sven Creutzmann

At a high window set in the baroque walls of Havana's National Ballet School, one of the great stars of dance wrings out his T-shirt so that the sweat pours like water on to the street below. From the expressions of some of those watching, you'd believe they wished they were showering beneath.

Behind Carlos Acosta, on the rehearsal floor, his partner revolves slowly, as if caught by a breeze the rest of us simmering in the heat cannot feel. Tamara Rojo, mischievous, exquisite, is the Spanish ballerina who is Acosta's partner of choice.

"We understand each other culturally," Rojo tells me. "It's instinctive, and that makes it easy." More than anyone else on the Royal Ballet's tour of Cuba, Rojo knows what bringing this company home means to Acosta: "He has improved Cuba's reputation so he deserves the love Cubans have for him. I am so happy for him."

The week-long tour is a massive undertaking, with a 150-strong crew of ballet teachers, stage crews, costumers and wiggers, conductors, pianists, physiotherapists and, of course, dancers, 80 of them. Battling heat, antiquated theatres and even an outbreak of swine flu, the company is performing several excerpts, a couple of short ballets, and a full three-act staging of Kenneth MacMillan's 1974 classic Manon, the vast majority deliberately taken from its modern repertoire.

It is Manon that Acosta and Rojo are now rehearsing - the tale of a young girl who chooses money over love and suffers for it. Practising the finale, they slip to the floor, Rojo down Acosta's shoulder to end up lying still, exhausted, like love defeated. And then he laughs, leaps up and shouts, "She whispered: 'Carlos, we must get up for the bows.'" Unlike those around about, I suspect Rojo's suffered enough of Acosta's sweat over the years.

With the rehearsal over, I join Acosta in the truck given to him by the Cuban government. He has the stereo playing salsa and is singing along, while on the dashboard a statue of a white-clad figure looks on. "The patron saint of Havana," he shouts. In his 2007 autobiography No Way Home, between sex scenes, he suggests the gods have made him lucky, imbuing him with talent and the opportunity to rise from a childhood in Havana's slums to the point where his name can sell out the world's great theatres. Now they may be going further, making him the man to give Havana back its artistic edge.

The night before, Acosta and Rojo's performance of Le Corsaire had been projected on to an outdoor screen so that Habaneros could watch for free. Thousands turned up, packing on to the steps of the Capitolio, and I was amazed to see urchins sitting transfixed at my feet. I tell Acosta this, and he grows ever more animated: "Can you imagine? People are concentrating. And it's ballet... ballet! It's not a world cup, it's ballet."

He sees this tour as one of the highlights of his life. "One of my biggest accomplishments. You cannot dream of having the Royal Ballet in Havana." Lack of resources and the suspicion of those in authority could have killed the dream, but it did happen, and the story of how is, in the words of one of those involved, astonishing: "Nothing ever happens in this country - but this did."

There is a belief in Cuba that high art can exist at the heart of any nation's life. It's a belief that we in Britain seem to have lost and yet which, by asking the Royal Ballet to visit, Cuba appears to be attempting to regain. "Dance is the true religion," Acosta says. "You put your health at risk, and the money's no good."

Alicia Alonso is the prima ballerina assoluta of the National Ballet of Cuba and, at almost 90, plays the part. She is guided into the British ambassador's residence in Havana by her younger husband, her head swathed in a scarf, her lipstick bright red, her sightless eyes covered by large sunglasses. (Blind from an early age, she used to - as she once told me - throw herself across the stage not knowing if someone would be there to catch her.)

The Royal Ballet has spent much of the week paying tribute to this woman. On the second evening of performances, Monica Mason, the Royal Ballet's director, met her on stage, bowed deeply and proffered up flowers. It was noticed. "It was a very good thing to give homage to Alicia," says Miguel Barnet, a novelist who heads up the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists and is one of the most powerful men on the island. "I was impressed to see Dame Monica bow to Alicia as if she were the queen of England. Of course, she's not - she's the queen of Cuba."

This small party at the residence - a gorgeous hideaway of cool shady spots, covered pool, soft English grass and delicious canapés - was yet another tribute. Alonso was invited to sit in front of a small British audience and tell her story, of the 1940s spent with the American Ballet Theatre, of trying to found a company in Cuba in the days of the Batista dictatorship, and of Fidel Castro turning up at her door in 1959. She became her own type of revolutionary, for El Comandante wanted her to take dance to the masses and his new government gave her a grant of $200,000 to do it.

In the spirit of the age she and her then husband Ferdinand travelled the country, dancing on the back of trucks. "The guajiros [cowboys] would come down with their wives and see them dance, and would never get off their horses," says Rojo. "There is a belief here that everyone has the right to high culture."

With Castro's blessing, the Alonsos spent the 1960s setting up ballet schools so that classical dance was instilled in Cuban life. Acosta's father, a lorry driver, whose in-laws treated him unkindly because he was black, saw the ballet and was entranced, and so to keep his wayward son off the street and out of knife fights he terrified him into the ballet school. And it was through this system that Acosta would rise, not always easily, and not without facing prejudice. Certainly his biography doesn't suggest Alicia Alonso went out of her way to help.

As the revolution aged, Cuban ballet became a metaphor for Cuba itself, a beautiful dream presided over by a singularly powerful, unchanging figure. Now, half a century on, Alonso retains her power over the company, demanding that her dancers concentrate on great white ballets such as Giselle and Swan Lake. As Fidel ails, and his brother quietly starts to transform the nation, Cuban ballet remains caught in heat-softened aspic - technically brilliant but creatively moribund.

Cuba's finest dancers surround the prima ballerina assoluta at the ambassador's residence. They mingle with the Royal Ballet's wealthy supporters, the bejewelled folk - like the top-hatted men in the Degas paintings - who have financed the tour. Viengsay Valdés is there, a ballerina who, the previous night, danced the evil black swan. I ask her if, alongside the classics, she would like to dance Chroma, a slick, violent, passionate exchange choreographed less than three years ago by Wayne McGregor and which must be the most modern piece in the Royal's repertoire. "Of course I'd love to do Chroma," she replies, as if the question was absurd. "Alicia Alonso must see how the world dances."

On the main stage of the 170-year-old Gran Teatro de La Habana, the Royal Ballet's technical magicians have constructed the set of a country house. Sensually shocked by Chroma, the audience is now taking in Frederick Ashton's A Month in the Country, a piece first performed in 1976. Alexandra Ansanelli, an antiseptically beautiful American ballerina, is performing for the last time, for she has decided to retire at the age of 28.

Kate Spicer is playing the piano. When she saw the 7ft Steinway the Cubans provided, she was delighted: "It was beautiful and shiny, but then I discovered there were no pedals, just two rods hanging down." One of the documentary makers following the tour is complaining about bites on his ankles, suggesting fleas in the auditorium. A principal dancer joins me at the back of the auditorium. "Camp as Christmas," he says of the show.

The Royal Ballet on tour is fabulous, a carnival. Somewhere behind the scenes is the delightful Mara Galeazzi, holder of the Italian equivalent of a knighthood, the Cavaliere del Lavoro, but shamefaced about her behaviour the previous night: "It was murder. With the heat the floor gets very sticky. My temper! I shouted at the assistant stage manager. Sometimes we expect too much, and I had to go and apologise."

Outside, in front of the big screen, younger members of the company watch. These women, surplus to requirements until Manon, are fresh from dinner at La Guarida, a private restaurant set in the eaves of a millionaire's ruined home in the most rundown section of the city. The barman had wandered over and asked if they could get him tickets to that night's show. Laura McCulloch, a rising star whose boyfriend flies Chinooks in Afghanistan, tells me, amazed, that she keeps getting accosted in the street: "'Welcome Royal Ballet,' people shout. 'Welcome to Cuba.'"

On the outskirts of the city, in a low-slung house, six dancers, including the stars Marianela Nuñez and Steven McRae, desperate for news from the theatre, are recovering from swine flu. The company is terrified, for illness could have destroyed the tour. But the sickly are glad to be out of the hotel rooms in which the Cuban authorities had isolated them. "I looked out of the hotel window at the pool below and cried all day," one tells me.

Elsewhere, in a palador belonging to an artist, flu-inspired hypochondria battles with a determination not to join the imprisoned colleagues. A ballerina points across the table at a fellow dancer and sighs: "He threw up all over my room last night." Through all this, Monica Mason remains calm about her dancers' antics: "When you look at the average 20-year-old, they are very responsible," she tells me. "It makes you grow up in a different way."

On stage, Ansanelli takes her bows to a divided audience before returning to her dressing room clutching flowers and plaudits. She is retiring, she says, to have "a chance to understand" herself. As the week goes on, and the company grows affected by its surroundings, there isn't much sympathy for self-indulgence. Mara Galeazzi spoke for many when she said: "We have everything, but for the Cubans, the only way to survive is to give themselves to ballet. It's one of the few things that makes them happy."

By the big screen, that sentiment drills deep. Loipa Araujo, a famous Cuban dance teacher, has been discussing the score with the man next to her. The stranger speaks of his love of Chopin, talking with great knowledge. As Ansanelli leaves the stage to find herself, the man stands up, dusts himself off, walks to the street, and climbs on to his pedal rickshaw to resume his trade. He passes the 10 huge shipping containers the ballet brought with them, that carried everything from 800 costumes to instruments, scenes, 22 swords, a couple of revolvers, an entire lighting rig and an entire dance floor.

Later, there are parties, where Cubans show off. The Royal Ballet's dancers, if they dance salsa at all, shift about in the shadows, self-conscious not about their bodies, which they treat with the casual brutality afforded loved old cars, but their moves. All of them, that is, except for Fernando Montano, who spent much of his adolescence here and can pulse his hips with the best of them. I pass a swimming pool just as two ballerinas emerge. "We've just realised we're sharing the pool with several frogs," says one. There is a loud ribbit from the darkness.

The red-coated waiters at El Floridita, the bar where Hemingway enjoyed a refreshing daiquiri or two, aren't shy with their shoulders when they want to get past, but they offer space to the small group of men hunched together near the centre of the party. The tall one with dark hair is Heriberto Cabezas, an increasingly powerful figure in the National Ballet of Cuba; the second, and clearly a former dancer, is Kevin O'Hare, administrative director of the Royal Ballet, and the third is a smooth American businessman who prefers not to be identified but exudes a Gatsbyesque aura of mystery. Across the room are Acosta and Barnet. Between the five of them, and the wealthy British sponsors mingling about, they made the tour happen.

Much of it comes down to Acosta who, while his colleagues defected, held faith with his country and never criticised Castro. Partly this is because of his determination to remain close to his family. "Carlos is the boy born in Los Pinos, a poor slum on the outskirts of Havana," says Barnet. "And however much he travels, he remains there; the boy who stole mangoes from the trees."

Every two years Acosta would bring something unusual in for Havana's International Festival of Ballet. I remember seeing him rehearse the finale from Mayerling with the Australian Leanne Benjamin in the private rooms of the National Ballet of Cuba in October 2006. It's a scene of spectacular violence as Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary fucks (sorry, there is no other word) Mary Vetsera before shooting her and himself. Mad, certainly, but a moment of theatre I'll never forget.

"I felt the responsibility to educate, to make Cubans understand - because, here, ballet is stuck," Acosta tells me. "They know everything there is to know about the classics and they wait just for the classics. They need to know there is something like MacMillan. Not all ballets have the wonderful tricks they like. When I went back to England, I'd tell Monica of my dream to bring Manon, and so she must have had it in the back of her mind."

With the idea implanted, it found life when O'Hare was asked last year by a friend of Acosta's why the Royal Ballet had never toured Cuba. "It made me think: why wouldn't we?" he says. "I feel very strongly that if you call yourself an international company, you've got to be seen out there." Before O'Hare went in search of the necessary £500,000 in private funding, he needed the Cubans to issue the invitation, a trickier prospect than it sounds.

"Trust me," an insider will tell me. "There were those who didn't want it to happen. There was jealousy." So Barnet was enlisted: "We spoke to Alicia. She was concerned that there had been hurricanes but finally saw it would be a very important event. I spoke to the minister [of culture, Abel Prieto], a very cultured man, and he said OK, it would be the most important event of the year."

Such easy words, for this was an amazing feat of diplomatic skill. Around the Gran Teatro you still hear, at nightfall, the griteria - the shouts of those on the street up to those in the high flats. Monsters from 1950s Detroit still chunter along potholed roads. But the reality is that Cuba is changing, and fast. There are hundreds of Chinese cars, higher buildings, and there's the renovation of the old town. The danger was that Alonso would feel threatened by the tour, believing her authority could be undermined if the people saw what they were missing.

And of course no one wanted to offend the great woman. Alonso's ballet offered hope through the worst days of the early 1990s, the so-called special period when the money from the former Soviet Union ran out and Cubans had nothing but black beans to eat. Alonso ensured her dancers had food; Acosta tells of how his teachers would give up their ration so he had the strength to dance. "If there were no ballet, the world would still turn, but art saves people from a deeper unhappiness," Sarah Lamb, another Royal Ballet principal, says. "Art helps you escape from reality."

So Alonso would be feted, and the tour would become a tribute, but the point would still be made; that "only to dance the classics is not enough", in the words of Valdés. It would take someone with a public profile to match Alonso herself to see that happen - Acosta. As Barnet says: "Carlos is not an icon - he's more important than that. He's an idol."

It's evening, and the city has failed to cool. Beautifully dressed Cubans fill the road outside the Karl Marx theatre. Cuba's high society, those who live "life in the pink", are here. Amid the 5,500 audience, I spot Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Cuba's equivalent of Ian Rankin, and Fernando Alonso, the man who accompanied Alicia around the country all those years ago. And there is Alex Castro, Fidel's son, with his charming wife. Yes, it's La Vie en Rosada. But there are many more who have queued for days and paid $1 a ticket.

Behind the scenes, Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta are preparing for one of the most extraordinary performances of their careers. There are yells when they first appear on stage, and at the end, when Rojo falls and Acosta follows, the crowd leaps up, many in tears, clapping until their hands ache. It turns out that Cubans adore Kenneth MacMillan's choreography.

Everything is there on stage. Not just the beautiful music and the gorgeous sets, but grace, that fluid emotional beauty that belies a lifetime of brutal effort. Michael Nunn, a dancer and one of those filming the tour, had summed this feeling up the previous day as we watched a Cuban ballerina rehearse and I asked how good he thought she was: "There are only a few dancers in the world who can do those steps, and she makes it look effortless."

I find myself having a beer at the top of one of Havana's tallest buildings with Edward Watson, a man who resembles a young David Bowie. He is one of the Royal Ballet's truly extraordinary dancers. From Dartford, he has come up through the Royal Ballet School, taken a fair time to reach principal, but now, at 33, creates roles for the resident choreographer, Wayne McGregor.

Next month Watson will appear on the Covent Garden stage to play Mayerling in front of an audience made up entirely of readers of the Sun as part of the Royal Opera House's attempts to broaden its reach. It's slightly clunky (when they tried it with the Royal Opera, the Sun parked a bus outside advertising "opera babes"), but intriguing. After all, the link that exists between real life and high art in Cuba exists in Britain too, only it's smothered by money and reeks of the expensive leather interiors of the Bentleys lined up outside the Royal Opera House at the end of a show.

Those who run Britain's other arts institutions have had an easier time of chasing popularity. Free access has made the British Museum astonishingly successful and allowed passers-by to drop in to the National Gallery. Theatre is taught in every school, and so if your child is performing, the most execrable script becomes tolerable. Bad pop is loved, just as poorly executed contemporary art can remain affecting. But you've got to be a masochist to put up with poorly executed dance. Ballet requires brilliance.

"Sometimes as a dancer you feel victimised," Rojo tells me. "While it's a privilege to dance, in our society irrelevant things are well rewarded. In Europe we produce cheap television that is unchallenging. It has become a way for uninspiring people to turn into celebrities of nothing. Dancing is not so well rewarded. You give 20 years of your life, but you will walk away with nothing. Just memories." She pauses and smiles. "Which are beautiful."

Rojo is perhaps the closest to a complete artist I meet on this journey; someone who sees life as an artistic endeavour. She points out a similarity between the National Ballet of Cuba and its British visitor: both companies came of age in adversity. "The Royal Ballet grew in importance during the second world war, because they kept dancing when the bombs were falling. If you can give pleasure when people are suffering, then you have a great impact."

The question is, what happens after the suffering? Sitting above Havana, gazing over a city slowly being rebuilt, Watson suggests that back in Britain the link between dance and reality has become tragically worn, that in our wealth we've lost the understanding of what a tour like this should mean. "Here, people come to be entertained," he tells me. "In London, too many come to criticise, to form their opinions, but here they just come for a good time."

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