COURT RULING LIKELY TO OPEN GATE FOR CUBAN DANCE.

Within little more than a year, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, sometimes held up as a cultural icon of the island's revolution, might be performing in the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts in Miami Beach, Florida, right in the midst of the country's largest Cuban exile community.

"Verbal discussions are under way to bring the company for three performances during the 2001-02 season," announced Judy Drucker, president and founding artistic director of the Concert Association of Florida, the area's premier presenter of high-profile dance troupes.

The feasibility of these future performances by the Cubans is directly tied to a recent Supreme Court ruling on a precedent-setting case with legal parallels in Miami-Dade County. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Massachusetts law restricting trade with Myanmar (the Southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma) or with companies doing business in Myanmar was unconstitutional.

In effect, this nullified a 1996 Miami-Dade County policy requiring organizations using county funds or venues to sign an affidavit declaring they had no business dealings with any party in Cuba or with other organizations that did. This applied even to arts presenters, who faced the denial of funds or exclusion from theaters by the county if they sponsored performances by Cuban artists--despite the federal exemption of cultural exchanges from the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Miami-Dade County representatives argued the affidavit kept taxpayers' money out of the hands of a repressive regime, thus reflecting the wishes of a majority in the community. A group of local promoters, however, had already brought suit against this so-called Cuba policy when U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno ordered it stopped in an edict in July.

"What was particularly irksome was the wording of the affidavit--so vague and far-reaching," said Beth Boone, executive director of the Miami Light Project, a presenting organization that took part in the litigation to end the policy.

In the past, this led her to abstain from programming Dos Alas, a collaboration of Cuban and Puerto Rican dancers whose contemporary slant on folkloric traditions, Boone feels, would have been particularly relevant to Miami. And this season, she had to forgo county support in order to present Grupo Desandann, a spirited ensemble of vocalists and percussionists descended from Haitian immigrants to Cuba. "That sort of cultural embargo is tragic," Boone declared.

The sentiment is echoed by Drucker, who relates how Cuban star Jose Manuel Carreno had to sit backstage on the last visit by American Ballet Theatre dancers to South Florida. (According to Boone, the ruling's wording was vague enough that a Cuban national earning a U.S. income could be suspected of funneling those earnings back to the Cuban government.) And it was lucky that Carlos Acosta held a green card so he could perform with the rest of Houston Ballet during its local production of Dracula. Yet Drucker, along with many in the arts community, is looking forward to a less contentious cultural scene. "Now that there's no legal basis, I think all these conflicts will simmer down," she said. The Concert Association has arranged for the return of ABT with the full-length Don Quixote and mixed bills in February. To stir excitement--one hopes purely artistic--this time, Carreno has been promised as an attraction right on center stage.