In 1993, while on tour in Mexico with a Cuban ballet troupe, Cubans Ariel Serrano and his wife Wilmian Hernandez bought one-way tickets and boarded a plane to Miami. They spoke no English, knew no one in Florida and had no idea how they would find work after defecting from their home country. But they knew if there was ever a chance of realizing their dreams, it would not happen in Cuba.

This month—nearly 32 years since that pivotal day—Serrano and Hernandez will again board a plane, their dreams having expanded infinitely beyond what they could ever have imagined. This time the destination is London, where they will sit in the plush scarlet seats at The Royal Opera House and watch their son Francisco, 28, a soloist with The Royal Ballet, perform his first lead role in a full-length ballet in Christopher Wheeldon’s Like Water for Chocolate.

The years between those two flights have been filled with aspiration and disappointment, challenge and compromise, dedication and difficulty. This fairytale finale, the kind of made-for-Hollywood ending that rarely happens in real life, is still hard for them to grasp.

Heavier, grayer, but still exuding the same Cuban charisma he radiated the day he left his homeland, Serrano shakes his head in wonder at what has transpired.

“How much my son has elevated what we did. It blows my mind,” he says, classical music from a nearby rehearsal at his Sarasota Cuban Ballet School filtering through the air. “What I could only dream to do then, he is doing now. His dream has become my dream, too. It is my own dream come true.”

Until he left home to study in London at 18, Francisco Serrano had never lived anywhere but in the United States. But the instruction he received at the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School, the school his parents founded in 2011, was as Cuban as that of his parents, who were born, grew up and trained on the Caribbean island. The school they initially established to train their son, who started at the late age of 14, has since earned a reputation as the premiere repository of Cuban ballet knowledge in the United States, with direct ties to a storied Cuban system that produced some of the most skilled and exciting dancers in the world.

That system owed its existence to two unlikely partners: Fidel Castro, a dictator, and Alicia Alonso, a ballerina with an equally pugilistic spirit. When Castro and his revolutionary forces marched into Cuba in 1958, ousting for good the American-backed Fulgencio Batista regime, part of Castro’s socialist agenda included promoting ballet as “one of the most elevated and beautiful artistic manifestations” and making it available to “all social classes.” Alonso and and her husband, ballet dancer Fernando, who had struggled for years to establish a professional ballet company in Havana, were the people Castro believed could make that happen.

In 1959, Castro committed the money and the political will to re-ignite the Alonsos’ company and underwrite a program—one that would eventually grow into a network of 24 schools across the 778-mile-long island—to provide children who had potential with eight years of ballet and academic schooling, free of charge. The schools would cultivate dancers for the newly dubbed Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC), an artistic jewel and source of national pride.

Using the training developed by Fernando Alonso, which combined the best of Russian, French and British ballet techniques, the schools quickly began to produce polished, disciplined and gifted dancers; the company, in turn, presented spectacular performances of 19th-century ballet classics at a charge so nominal even Cuba’s poorest residents could attend. Ballet had now joined baseball, another Castro obsession, as a national pastime.  

Years later, one of the students chosen to study at the school in Havana
was Wilmian Hernandez.  At 10, Hernandez—petite, extremely flexible and irrepressibly active—was selected as a student for the government-run National Ballet School in Havana (a different entity than the company). For eight years, she spent up to 10 hours every day in ballet or academic classes, held in an old building with rippled wooden floors. Lunch was provided by the government, as were shoes, leotards and tights. The quality of everything but the ballet instruction was subpar.

When Hernandez graduated at 19, in 1984, her fate lay in the hands of Alicia Alonso, who alone picked the privileged few to join the highly regarded BNC in Havana. Instead, she was sent to perform with the Ballet de Camaguey, a day’s journey east of Havana.

Serrano, meanwhile, was one of two boys selected at the age of nine by recruiters who came to his elementary school in Santiago de Cuba to attend the government school there. He could move well and jump beautifully, but he initially hated everything about ballet. A mischievous child, he chafed at the discipline and bristled at the taunts of other boys, who called him a sissy or worse. But his single mother, who was grateful the program paid for her son’s education and supplies, insisted he remain until he graduated at 18.

By the time he did, Serrano had recognized the perks and privileges a ballet career in Cuba could provide. He moved to Havana to finish his training under Ramona de Sáa, the director of the national government-run school, who allowed him to train and perform for a year in Italy before he was also sent to Camaguey in 1989.

There, he was paired to dance with Hernandez, and it immediately became
more than just a dance partnership. It was a happy time for them both. They loved the simplicity and clean air of the seaside town and flourished under the guidance of Fernando Alonso, who made them principals and cast Serrano in his first
leading roles.

Eventually, Serrano and Herandez married and were invited to join a group
of Cuban dancers touring Mexico. They flew to Monterrey, where the local
company offered Serrano a contract for $1,200 a month, more money than he had ever seen. However, not long after the couple settled into a cheaply furnished
apartment, a Cuban official showed up demanding they remit half their earnings to the government.

That was enough to force their hands. They packed up what little they’d brought with them, headed to the airport and boarded a flight to Miami.

They had no idea if they would ever see their families again.   

Those first months in the U.S. were difficult and discouraging.  After nine months of sporadic guest appearances and life on a shoestring budget, in the fall of 1994, Serrano was offered a principal’s contract by Robert de Warren, who had just been hired to take over The Sarasota Ballet. The couple moved to Sarasota, where Serrano was heralded as an exotic addition to the company’s lineup and Hernandez danced for a year in the corps de ballet before becoming pregnant with their son. Francisco—instantly nicknamed “Panchi” (or the diminutive “Panchito”) because of his small size—was born in 1997.

Two back surgeries ultimately cut Serrano’s career short. After three seasons, his contract with The Sarasota Ballet was not renewed. He reluctantly accepted a teaching and performing position with a small company in West Virginia, where Hernandez soon became pregnant with their daughter Camilla.

Shortly before Camilla’s birth in April 2000, Serrano learned his mother had died. Crazed with grief, he went on a “kamikaze mission with a Hail Mary,” he says, and flew back to Cuba, not knowing if he would be allowed to return. When he did, it was without any enthusiasm for ballet or much of a will to go on. The couple moved back to Sarasota, and Hernandez began teaching at a local studio, but Serrano, now plunged into a serious depression, refused to set foot in one.

Instead, he taught himself to do handyman work and eliminated all traces of the ballet world from his home. Occasionally, Hernandez would encourage him to return to teaching. Once, she even got as far as to get his signature on a contract for a potential studio space before he abruptly withdrew his support.

For the next decade, Serrano honed his handyman skills, built a small nest egg and tried to heal his heart. His waist became thicker as his arms grew stronger. Even when Hernandez started Camilla in ballet classes, he refused to watch.

For him, ballet was his past. It was over.

When Francisco was about the age his father had been when the recruiters came to his school, he asked his parents if he could join Little League. For his father, the request brought a sense of relief. It was far easier to embrace the idea of his son pursuing the “other” Cuban pastime. He signed on as a coach, and father and son bonded over hours of playing catch, going to batting cages and watching games on TV.

“Then one day [my son] said, ‘This is not for me,’” Serrano recalled. “It hurt when he quit.”

Instead, Francisco, who’d been spending time hanging around ballet studios waiting for his sister, told his mother he’d like to take class, too. She was thrilled.

“No way. No, not this one,” Serrano remembers thinking. “Because if you quit this one, it will kill me.”

Besides, he thought, Francisco, at 14, was too old to begin ballet. “He can barely touch his toes,” he dismissively told his wife. Publicly, Hernandez accepted her husband’s hard-hearted stance, but out of sight, she began coaching their son.

Soon she realized Francisco had inherited the best physical traits of each of his parents—her elasticity, Serrano’s buoyant jump and facility with turns. For two years, she worked with him on her own, only infrequently dropping a mention to her husband about his progress. Serrano remained recalcitrant.

Francisco, painfully shy, remembers little about those first classes. As one of the few boys at the studio, he was talked into participating before he ever really knew what he was doing. What he did enjoy was the warm welcome he received.

“I don’t really know what it was that piqued my interest,” he said recently, during a visit to his parents’ school in July to guest star, with his girlfriend and fellow Royal Ballet soloist Letitia Dias, in the school’s annual performance at the Sarasota Opera House. “I’d always been that kid who wanted to do things but I was too shy. Here, I was being encouraged.”

When Serrano at last accepted that the “ballet worm” had invaded his son’s brain, he gave in to his wife’s pleading. He began to coach Francisco and quickly saw his potential. Knowing no one else could give him a foundation stronger than the one he had received, Serrano finally opened  his own studio and plowed the couple’s entire savings—close to $26,000—into the project.

The school opened in April 2011 with three students, one of them Francisco. For the first nine months, they made just enough money to cover the electricity and water bills, receiving a reduced rent from the building owner in exchange for renovation work. The economic success of the new enterprise was hampered by Serrano’s and Hernandez’s generosity. They rarely said no to a promising student who needed a scholarship and they often had multiple young dancers sharing their Sarasota home.

Things took a dramatic turn in 2013, when Serrano took a group of students to the Atlanta regionals of the Youth America Grand Prix competition, the world’s largest ballet scholarship contest. The Sarasota Cuban Ballet School was named “top school” at the competition, and Francisco ended up winning the Gran Prix—the top overall award of the entire event, male or female. He was offered a scholarship to study at The Royal Ballet School in London.

Realizing their son, at 16, was hardly equipped technically, practically or emotionally to fend for himself in a foreign culture, Serrano and Hernandez requested and were granted a postponement of the offer for a year. During that time, they continued to coach Francisco, not only in ballet, but in the skills he would need to manage living so far from home and family.

In spring 2014, they realized a long-buried dream to return to Cuba, taking Francisco, Camilla and a half dozen students from their school to an international ballet competition in Havana. Serrano had facilitated the exchange through de Sáa, the longtime director of the Cuban National Ballet School and the beloved professor from whom he’d received his own ballet training. The two envisioned an enduring collaboration and partnership that would not only perpetuate and spread Cuban ballet artistry in America, but foster improved relations between the two countries after years of hostilities. The competition yielded another triumph, one that ended with Francisco winning a gold medal.

The trip left an indelible impression on Francisco. He felt immediately “at home” and reveled in the camaraderie he found among the other male students and the atmosphere of non-competitiveness, so unlike ballet studios in America. “It was amazing—the people, the energy, the dynamic in the studio,” Francisco said recently. “It was a very different culture. I was obsessed.”

At the end of the trip, he told his father he wanted to stay. Serrano, far more cognizant of Cuba’s restrictions and deprivations, was horrified at the thought and dissuaded him of the notion, but not without noticing the transformation that had occurred during the trip.

“I saw him grow in just those days there,” he recalls. “I could see the fire inside. That’s one of my best memories, seeing him become fearless.” 

It’s hard for his parents to believe it has been almost 11 years since they sent Francisco, their Panchito, off to London. He was a boy of 17 when he left; he is a man of 28 now. Francisco’s memories of those first months are of transition and challenge, but he never regretted his choice.

“It was different, a learning curve,” he says, comparing the accelerated training he’d received from his parents to the traditional Royal Ballet School crawl. “There was so much new information and it was frustrating. But to be honest, the hardest days were probably here, with my parents. It was a very intense, quick course in how to do ballet. I would never have gotten here without them.”

Letting their son leave home at such a young age was difficult, especially for Hernandez. Serrano and Hernandez understand from personal experience the struggle with a new culture in an industry that can be harsh.

But Serrano also realized others were seeing the world of possibility he saw in his son, so he sent him off with these words: “Do what you know, do what you love. Give the best you can. Follow your dream and it will become my dream, too.”

“And when he comes home,” he adds, “we just open our arms.”

Francisco’s march up the Royal’s ballet ladder has been steady, if not explosive. After training at the Royal Ballet Upper School, he was accepted into the company’s Aud Jebsen Young Dancers Programme at the start of the 2016-2017 season. He became a full-fledged member of the company for the 2017-2018 season and was promoted to First Artist in 2023 and to soloist last year. He has also been cast in many featured roles, including at the end of last season, when he was chosen by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to partner a principal ballerina, Fume Kaneko, in the pas de deux from Wheeldon’s The Two of Us.

Earlier this year, Francisco went to The Royal’s director, Kevin O’Hare, to ask if he might be excused for a few days in October to perform as a guest in Costa Rica. O’Hare put him off, saying he was still making casting decisions. When he asked again later and O’Hare again deflected, Francisco allowed himself to imagine Wheeldon might be considering him for a secondary role in his full-length ballet, Like Water for Chocolate, scheduled for October.

Ultimately, O’Hare pulled him aside to apologize.

“He said, ‘I don’t think I can let you go. Sorry, that’s not going to work out,’” Francisco recalls. “And then he immediately said, ‘But it’s because you’re going to be doing Pedro.’”

Pedro is the male lead in Like Water for Chocolate, and Francisco will be alternating the role with Marcelino Sambe, one of the Royal Ballet’s most distinguished principals.

“It’s an amazing break,” Francisco said in July, hardly believing his good fortune. Sitting in his parents’ studio, enjoying a few days of relaxation at home before Dias joins him to begin rehearsals for the July performance at the Sarasota Opera House, he was lulled into a time and a place miles away from his life in London.

“Sometimes I feel like I have imposter syndrome,” he added. “I feel like I live in two different places. I’ve grown to enjoy London and I do have a sense of home there now, but I forget about London when I’m here. This will always be home. But I live somewhere in between.”

For the Serranos, it’s never easy to find the money for a trip to London, or the time to be absent from their school, which now has a reputation that draws students from around the world. Though there are other Cubans teaching in America, the Sarasota Cuban Ballet School is known as the premiere hub of Cuban training in the U.S.

Meanwhile, since Castro’s death and the withdrawal of support for the government-run ballet system, the training in Cuba has broken down. Many of the government schools have shut down and the program no longer enjoys the funding it received in the past. Alicia Alonso, who maintained her stranglehold on the national company to the end, died in 2019 at age 98. De Sáa, who’d been largely stripped of influence and respect after Castro’s death, died in 2024. The beautiful
Spanish-style school in Havana that once sang with the notes of pianists accompanying ballet classes has fallen into disrepair, and the company now produces dancers who are only eager to flee to other countries.

For four years following the Serranos' first trip to Cuba with students in 2014, he and de Sáa organized an annual exchange between their two schools, culminating in a summer performance in Sarasota with the best students from both. But there has been no exchange since 2017 and, given political and financial realities, Serrano doubts there will be again.

“Now they are exporting dancers,” he says, recalling the names of students who performed here who are now dancing in Australia and the Netherlands. “There are Cuban dancers all over the world. But there are few left in Cuba.”

The highly admired characteristics of the Cuban style—the bent leg held so high above the knee in pirouettes; the ability to turn endlessly and finish suspended on pointe; the soaring athletic leaps; the animal magnetism of the Cuban men—have now infiltrated other companies and dazzled other audiences. 

But more than the technique, Serrano says, it is “the fire” that underlies the Cuban aesthetic. That drive, he says, was born of a culture of scarcity and necessity.

“We’re used to getting by in Cuba, doing the best with what is available,” Serrano says. “That’s the way we do ballet, as well. We come from necessity, so you have to pull out everything you have. It’s the difference between resolving and pushing beyond. That’s who we are.”

Nowhere is that legacy more in evidence than at the Sarasota Cuban School’s headquarters on Cattleman Road, where classes take place in a striking modern building with a soaring ceiling tucked into a pocket of thick Florida vegetation. There you may see a protégé from Cuba, a striking young ballerina from Venezuela, even some refugees from a local professional company taking advantage of Serrano’s generosity in offering them classes without charge.

When Serrano is asked why he and his wife continue to work so hard since the son who was the impetus for creating the studio is now fully launched into his own career, he simply shrugs and says, “They keep coming.”

“What we have that no one else has is the program Ramona [de Sáa] gave to us,” he says. “She gave us the Cuban program but adapted it for the American culture. It is amazing to see a blonde, blue-eyed girl doing turns like a Cuban, like we did in school. I laugh and tell her, ‘You have been Cubanized!”

When Francisco was taking class recently alongside his parents’ students—dancers as young as he was when he began—Serrano noticed all the new “tools” that have been added to his son’s repertoire, techniques and styles that weren’t part of his own training.

“It is fun for me to see the metamorphosis in Panchi,” he says. “Some complicated things I could only dream to do, now my son is doing them. He’s walking through the big door now, and we are just spectators and fans. Just a proud mother and father.”

But every so often, he reminds Francisco that he must never lose sight of his lineage.

“I tell him, ‘Good! But don’t forget the culture. Don’t forget the Cuban.’” 

At top: Francisco in Christopher Wheeldon’s The Two of Us, at The Royal Ballet. Photo courtesy The Royal Ballet.