Houston liftoff: Cuban-born Carlos Acosta is making an international career at Houston Ballet and Britain's Royal Ballet.

Houston Ballet principal Carlos Acosta stretches out his elegant five-foot-eleven inch frame along a green sofa. A recent performance may have wreaked havoc on his left thigh, but as HB principal dancer Lauren Anderson drops grapes into his mouth, a physical therapist works on him. It's a familiar company vignette of a pampered ballet prince -- if you discount the biker shorts and clunky shoes and the fact that not so long ago Acosta was just another poor, dirty urchin roaming the streets of Havana, stealing mangoes, skipping school, and going nowhere fast.

Only in Dickens or Horatio Alger -- or in a fairy tale -- could someone like Acosta propel himself so quickly out of a Cuban barrio and onto the international ballet circuit by the age of twenty-four. Today he is heavily in demand all over the world, called "spellbinding" by critics, and compared, inevitably, to Mikhail Baryshnikov by just about everyone. He has polish, power, and ease when launching himself into the air with apparently no preparation, tossing off yet-to-be-named steps that leave audiences dazzled. His turns are marvels, both for their number of revolutions and their control: After speeding up at will, he often slows the ending in an insolent display of cool. His fellow dancers at Houston Ballet admiringly call him "Air Acosta." "He came out of the womb dancing Don Q," marvels Janie Parker, Houston's former star ballerina.

This rise to the top has not been nearly fast enough to suit Acosta. Although established and well funded, Houston Ballet remains relatively obscure and cannot give him the visibility he craves, although costarring with the Bolshoi's Nina Ananiashvili in a lavish, new Snow Maiden should help. Even frequent international guest performances leave him unsatisfied. Last March, after making a brief, electrifying appearance at a Dallas gala that featured Ananiashvili, a somber Acosta could be found wandering about at the postperformance party saying woefully, "I want to dance more."

This fall he'll get his wish. He'll be joining Britain's Royal Ballet as a principal dancer, while retaining his position with Houston Ballet. That arrangement makes him one of the few leading dancers to hold dual membership. "I love Houston Ballet," he says, "and I want to continue to work in Texas. This company is like a family to me. At the same time I'm really young, and I'd like to work with other people. My gift is a responsibility. You have to share it with everybody."

He might not have had anything to share if it not been for his father, Pedro, a truck driver and a character half ogre, half fairy godmother, straight out of the Brothers Grimm. He saw his ten-year-old hanging around with kids who skipped school and stole fruit, and resolved to take drastic action. He enrolled Carlos in Cuba's National Ballet School. There was just one problem. The lad hated ballet. Too sissy, he thought. Too tedious. "One and two and grand plie," Acosta recalls, rolling his eyes at the memories of boredom. "I was used to --" He snaps his fingers, recalling the much greater joys of break dancing, soccer, and raids on mango groves.

So Acosta skipped class. Often. After the school called his father to ask about Acosta's whereabouts, there would be hell to pay: "He beat me with a belt, one time with a machete., another time with a cable. Man, I was scared. I wanted to quit, but my father wouldn't listen. One time I told him, `I want to be a normal person.' He took me to the balcony of our apartment and pointed to the people on the street below. `You want to be like them, with no future?'"

His father, indeed, had every reason to want something better for his son, the youngest of ten children. The family was desperately poor, the neighborhood was rough, the playmates less than desirable companions. Acosta had no toys, no birthday presents -- he was twenty-three before he had even a birthday cake -- and, sometimes, no shoes. He often went hungry. To this day he seldom eats breakfast, having grown up drinking sugar water and lemonade to stave off hunger pangs. On one memorable occasion, he came home, asked for sugar, and learned there was none in the Acosta household -- in sugar-rich Cuba.

But poverty wasn't the worst of it. He remembers when his mother, Maria Quesada, required a brain operation and his father was jailed because of a traffic accident. Although there were two older sisters living at home, he was still left to get himself off to school as best he could. "I would go to school dirty, and I'd get teased about that," Acosta recalls. "My teachers would say, `Oh, you smell bad.' It was awful."

Ballet now offered an escape route, but getting to class was an ordeal. He got up at 5:00 a.m.; after school he took three buses, with long waits between transfers, to get to ballet class. "I used to fall asleep on the bus and wake up at the end of the route. So I'd go to the river and fish, or go play soccer with my friends." When he did make it to ballet class, which wasn't often, he didn't get home until ten o'clock in the evening -- sometimes even eleven. "It was hard to keep on track," he says.

When he was thirteen, the ballet school kicked him out. Some parents would have thrown in the towel, but not Pedro Acosta. He hauled his son to an affiliate of the National Ballet School in the distant town of Villa Clara. The Havana school had told Acosta that he could transfer, but when he got there, he discovered no one had heard of him. Even worse, they had no classes for his level. "It was awful," he remembers. "You never do that to anyone." He and Pedro spent the next two nights sleeping on the floor of the bus station, waiting for the next bus home.

Determined as ever, his father traveled to Pinar del Rio, where most of Acosta's brothers and sisters lived. He talked the teachers at the local ballet school, always doubtful about Havana students, into accepting his son. The school gave Acosta a month to prove himself. It would feed and house him during the week; on the weekend, he'd stay with an older brother, sleeping on the floor.

Pinar del Rio was the turning point. By this time Acosta realized that there was no evading his father's will; more important, he discovered that he enjoyed ballet. He had terrific natural ability, and shot to the head of his class. "Once I had the capacity to understand what I wanted," he says, "I worked for it."

After that, there was no stopping him. He began entering ballet competitions when he was sixteen, winning the gold medal at the Prix de Lausanne in 1990, six months shy of his seventeenth birthday, and then in short order the Spanish Vegnale Dance Prix, the Grand Prix and gold medal at the Fourth Annual Competition of Ballet in Paris, and the Grand Prix in the third Juvenile Competition of Dance.

Acosta joined the English National Ballet as a principal dancer when he was eighteen, but spent most of his first year out with injuries. Houston Ballet director Ben Stevenson first came across Acosta when in London to rehearse ENB in his Cinderella and Nutcracker. "I've seen just about all the young dancers," Stevenson says, "and I think he's by far the most exciting." Later, when Acosta was dancing with the National Ballet of Cuba in Spain, Stevenson flew over to take another look at him. "I thought he was remarkable," he recalls. "He had amazing technical skills. He also had charisma." Stevenson signed him up this time .

In November 1993, at age twenty, Acosta made his debut as the newest principal dancer with Houston Ballet and dazzled everyone with his bravura. "He was a big, athletic, explosive dancer," remembers Tiekka Schofield, the principal dancer who is now his girlfriend. "Carlos has a very genuine quality. He loves salsa dancing, he loves to have fun. He's very vivacious and passionate. He's also a fabulous partner. Dancing with him feels effortless." Despite his lack of English, he charmed everyone with his warmth and openness.

"You see this young boy who is technically amazing," marvels Barbara Bears, a principal dancer. "You wonder if he's sold his soul to the devil. But Carlos is so humble it's amazing. He has no ego."

Acosta knows that he's been lucky, and he's quick to acknowledge those who have helped him. Naturally, he feels grateful to his father for pushing him into ballet. "He means everything to me," Acosta says. "He never gave up on me." He also feels grateful to teachers who not only challenged him but in some cases fed and clothed him and filled in when his mother was ill: Ramona de Saa, Juan Carlos Gonzales, Lazaro Carrenio, Mirta Hermida, and Maria Dolores.

His biggest frustration is being separated from his family and from Cuba. Cubans are much less reserved than Americans, he says, and he misses being able to walk into any neighbor's house without knocking. He goes home whenever he can, sends his family money ("They would still go hungry without my money"), and dreams of bringing them to visit. He splurged on a BMW 318 convertible. only to trade it in for an older BMW 325i. "What's the use of buying a fancy new car," he asks, "if I can't share it with my family?"

When he does return to Havana, it's salsa dancing every night, visiting with his family, and -- what else? -- hanging out with those same old pals Pedro tried so hard to pry him loose from.