Carlos Acosta: a ballet superstar - The wayward Havana boy turned ballet superstar tells our correspondent why he is still fiercely proud of his roots; and, below, an extract from his new autobiography

“When the great Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta left Havana to join English National Ballet in 1991, there were two fears in his homeland: that he would suffer ideological subversion (bone spurs have been a bigger problem), and that his Cuban identity would shrivel in the grip of western decadence. Sitting opposite the 34-year-old as he discusses his new autobiography, if he were chomping a cigar and sipping a Cuba libre, he couldn’t be more the proud habanero. Testosterone courses; preconceptions about ballet’s fey charms crumble. His dancing, famed for its superhero leaps and dynamo turns, used to be called “feral”, and there is still something wild about him as he yawns and stretches on the sofa to the clickety-click of his right patella. “My knee and toes hurt.” He grins. “You learn to live with the pain.” When we part, he will seek out a massage; he has come a long way from the Cuban religion of Santeria, in the name of which a witch doctor once anointed a dance injury with the boiled-up skin of a sacrificial ram. “Never again,” he laughs. “Though it might have worked.”

Acosta’s book is called No Way Home, and for much of his career, that is how he has felt: rootless, isolated, a little lost. “Home was what I was longing for,” he says in his still thick Hispanic accent, “to have my family.” At16, his father told him to forget about them andmake his way in the world, a cruelty hethought would liberate the boy to concentrate onhis career. It was not what Junior, as hewas known, wanted to hear. He was alone and often friendless in his “improved” life in the hyper-competitive world of big-league ballet in England and America (he joined ENB in 1991, Houston Ballet in 1993, the Royal Ballet in 1998), where every new hiring is a potential usurper of leading roles.”

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