History

The story of the Gran Teatro begins with the Galician immigration to Cuba in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Galicia — the Atlantic region of northwest Spain — sent hundreds of thousands of emigrants to Cuba, where they formed one of the most organised immigrant communities on the island. Their mutual aid society, the Centro Gallego, was founded in 1879 and by the early twentieth century had accumulated enough resources and cultural ambition to commission a building that would serve the community’s social, educational, and cultural needs while also presenting to Havana the spectacle of Galician collective achievement.

The commission went to the Belgian architect Paul Belau, who designed a building in a freely interpreted Cuban Baroque Revival style — elaborating the Baroque tendencies already present in Havana’s colonial architecture with the ornamental density of the Belle Époque. The building replaced the Teatro Tacón, which had been the city’s principal theatre since 1838; Belau’s structure incorporated the Tacón within its larger programme, giving the new Palacio del Centro Gallego a theatre at its core while wrapping it in ballrooms, meeting rooms, and the administrative spaces of the Centro. The building opened in 1915.

The political changes of the early 1960s nationalised the building and transferred it to the state. In 1950, Alicia Alonso (1920–2019) — the Cuban ballerina who had trained in New York and performed internationally before returning to Cuba — founded the National Ballet of Cuba and established it in the Gran Teatro. She directed the company for nearly seven decades; in 2015, on her 95th birthday, the Cuban government renamed the building in her honour. Alonso died in 2019 but the company and the festival she created continue.