Fototeca de Cuba Opens Exhibition in Tribute to Alicia Alonso and Pedro Simón

August 10, 2025

The Fototeca de Cuba opened this Tuesday at the Museo Biblioteca Servando Cabrera Moreno the photographic exhibition "Umbral Feliz", which pays tribute to Prima Ballerina Assoluta Alicia Alonso (1920-2019) and journalist and researcher Pedro Simón, on the occasion of the celebration of a Golden Anniversary, only broken by the death of the sublime dancer.

The exhibition brings together 32 photographs in various formats, extracted from the book authored by Pedro Simón "Memorias de un umbral feliz", published by Ediciones Cumbres.

These combine color and black and white, and capture intimate moments of the couple throughout almost five decades, reflecting their experiences and travels to countries such as the United States, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and Moscow.

Catherine Roque González, in charge of curatorial assistance and museography of the selection, explained exclusively to the Cuban News Agency that the chosen photographs, works by various authors, were structured based on an analysis of composition, contrasts, and color handling.

In the room are exhibited monochromatic images that dialogue with others in color, seeking a harmony between the various color schemes, detailed Roque González; and added that they include cinematic characteristics in their framing and structure, standing out for their cleanliness and precision in capturing the emotional complicity of the couple.

This fusion of styles enriches the visual experience, inviting the viewer to explore the intimacy of their relationship, concluded the specialist.

For her part, Lissette Solórzano, director of the Fototeca de Cuba, highlighted that, over the years, professional photographers, friends, or even through a cell phone, captured intimate, everyday, spontaneous, and profoundly human moments of this unique couple.

Solórzano pointed out that such images were not conceived to be exhibited; they are portraits born from affection, shots that reveal shared silences, complicit gazes, gestures that speak of a life lived together.

In each one of them there is a trace of trust, of mutual surrender, of history woven with two voices, she added.

This exhibition not only seeks to show photographs, it also aims to share a feeling: that of the happiness found when love becomes home; and art, an indissoluble bond, emphasized the also prominent visual artist.

For her part, the National Literature Prize winner (2001) Nancy Morejón Hernández, described the couple as "lucid and industrious, in a communion not at all frequent, dominated by an alchemy that transmuted into an endeavor marked by the grace and movement that all true dance needs".

Morejón highlighted that Alicia and Pedro forged a sum of virtues not only for their life as a couple, but to give Cuban culture that indelible mark that we are still enjoying today.

There is a silence, that which today transcends their souls, that exist for themselves and for us, like those coins tossed into the air of any city fountain in Havana in summer, commented the poet.

"Umbral feliz" will remain open to the public until September 5 at the institution that honors Servando Cabrera Moreno, located on Paseo Street No. 304, between 13 and 15, Vedado, Havana.