Sancti Spiritus Writer Honors Prima Ballerina Alicia Alonso

The book contains an annex with more than 60 stock photographs and deals with passages from Alonso’s childhood to certain current experiences

Julio Miguel Llanes, renowned writer from the central Cuban province of Sancti Spiritus, presented a book based on the life of Alicia Alonso but it mixes biography, testimony and fiction, in celebration of the legendary ballerina’s 97th birthday.

Alicia, the Flight of the Butterfly is an unprecedented work whose chapters are named as several of the ballets that marked the career of one of the leading figures of the Cuban and universal ballet.

The book contains an annex with more than 60 stock photographs and deals with passages from Alonso’s childhood to certain current experiences.

The author told Prensa Latina that in the book he talks about joys but also about some sadness of the human being such as her period of convalescence in the United States, where she had to stay about a year in bed for a retinal detachment.

Then she was very young, she was just beginning her career and the artist who emerged, after the mishap, fascinated everyone in an unexpected debut at Giselle and continued an ascending professional path.

According to the specialist of the National Museum of Dance, José Ramón Neyra, the licenses that the author naturally uses do not contradict the rigor of the information related to recognized facts of the artist’s career.