In the 1940s, Alicia Alonso became the first Latin American dancer to achieve international prominence in the field of ballet, until then dominated by Europeans. Promoted by Alonso, ballet took firm roots in Cuba in the following decades, particularly after the Cuban Revolution (1959). This dissertation integrates the methods of historical research, postcolonial critique and discourse analysis to explore the performative and discursive strategies through which Alonso defined her artistic identity and the collective identity of the Cuban ballet. The present study also examines the historical context of the development of ballet in Cuba, Alonso's rationale for the practice of ballet on the Island, and the relationship between the Cuban ballet and the European ballet. Alonso defended the legitimacy of Cuban dancers to practice ballet and, in specific, perform European classics such as Giselle and Swan Lake. She opposed the notion that ballet was the exclusive patrimony of Europeans. She also insisted that the cultivation of this dance form on the Island was not an act of cultural colonialism. In her view, the development of ballet in Cuba consisted, instead, of an exploration of a distinctive Cuban voice within this dance form, a reformulation of a European legacy from a postcolonial perspective. Her rationale for the practice of ballet in Cuba captured the tension between cosmopolitan and nationalist forces that defined the country's artistic production throughout the twentieth century. The cosmopolitanism of Cuban artists was evident in their openness to assimilate foreign artistic languages. Simultaneously, nationalist attitudes within the local artistic community sanctioned such assimilation only if it resulted in artworks that expressed a Cuban ethos. Thus, in formulating the artistic identity of the Cuban ballet, Alonso cast Cuban dancers as both heirs of the European nineteenth-century classics and proponents of a distinctive national aesthetics defined by the accents that they brought to the performance of this repertory and that, in Alonso's opinion, were expressive of the Cuban culture. In her description of such aesthetics, Alonso proposed that, among other elements, a special sense of musicality distinguished Cuban dancers—she recycled the image of Cubans as a musical people, a trope that commonly informs representations of Cubans and their culture. The phenomenon of Alonso and the Cuban ballet redrew the geopolitical boundaries of this dance form, disassociating the notion of ownership of ballet's legacy from its geographic and cultural origins in Europe. In today's dance world, increasingly marked by the international flow of dance genres, the study of Alonso's promotion of ballet in Cuba sheds light on the practices and discourses through which dancers assimilate and take ownership of foreign traditions.