“She throws overboard what she thinks are bundles of incriminating letters but which are actually white armbands meant to distinguish the rebels when they got to the shore,” Dunton said. The files show that Fonteyn panicked at this point. She would return to Panama City, try to put people off the scent.” And she agreed with Roberto the best thing was to come back to the shore. Dame Margot used her yacht as a decoy to lure off some of these forces. The plotters “were out at sea collecting arms and rebels in fishing boats, and the Panamanians were chasing them. “The Panamanian military authorities got wind of the coup attempt, so it all falls into disarray pretty quickly,” said Mark Dunton, a National Archives historian. The cables suggest that her adventure had more in common with Woody Allen’s 1971 farce Bananas than with Castro’s historic landing of his small force on the shores of Cuba. But the newly released files offer a wealth of detail on her participation, including her claim to British authorities that the plot was backed by Fidel Castro, who had recently taken over Cuba.Īs a guerrilla, Dame Margot proved to be a terrific dancer. The broad outlines of the attempted coup, in which the ballerina and her Panamanian husband, Roberto Arias, used a fishing vacation as cover to land arms and men on Panama’s shores, made news briefly soon after it failed in April 1959. government of Panama in 1959 was all but forgotten-until recently, when Britain’s National Archives released formerly classified British diplomatic cables on the matter.
Her role in a plot to overthrow the pro-U.S. Dame Margot Fonteyn is still remembered as one of the greatest ballerinas of the 20th century, revered worldwide for her duets with Rudolf Nureyev and still seen as a national treasure in her native Britain.
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