Nicole Durr, second from the right, the creator, director and producer of the "Havana Night Show" listened Thursday as the lead singer of the group gave instructions to the troupe during rehearsal in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS, July 21 - Ending an arduous yearlong journey, 50 Cuban performers were granted political asylum this week after what is believed to be the largest group defection of Cubans in American history.

The musicians, singers and dancers of the "Havana Night Club" revue, which recently changed its name to the "Havana Night Show," celebrated the official statement on Thursday and planned to appear together in another venue on Friday, the local Social Security office. There they hope to begin the process of becoming permanent residents and, ultimately, United States citizens.

"This has been pretty amazing for all of us," said Jose David Alvarez, 24, the host of the stage show. "The United States of America has always been a myth for Cuban young men like me and a lot of my colleagues in the company. It has always meant freedom for us, because in Cuba, it's kind of different."

Members of the troupe have been performing in Las Vegas since announcing their decision to seek asylum in November, and the last one was notified by American authorities Thursday that asylum had been granted. The troupe had defied Cuban government orders in seeking visas to perform in the United States.

A year ago this week, Cuban officials raided the Havana building where the group rehearsed and seized thousands of dollars worth of equipment. They ordered the group to disband and told them they would no longer be permitted to perform. Their founder and artistic director, Nicole Durr, who is German, was arrested and expelled from the country.

But after many delays and pleas to top leaders in Havana, Cuban authorities relented and allowed the troupe to leave Cuba for a series of shows last summer and fall at the Stardust Resort and Casino here. Members of the company defected en masse on Nov. 15. Their contract to perform at the Stardust has been extended until Sept. 4.

"It's historic that 50 artists defected together and made the sacrifice to leave their families at home," said Ms. Durr in an interview before leading a rehearsal in a warehouse east of the Las Vegas airport. "Some of them have wives and children that they haven't seen in a year."

She said that now that the musicians have been granted asylum, they can begin the process of getting family members admitted to the United States.

Ms. Durr said that this week she gathered the troupe together to turn over to them the government documents. "I told them, 'Now it's official. This is something you can't buy. This paper is your destiny.' "

A spokeswoman for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the successor agency to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said the government does not comment on asylum cases. "Because of the very nature of asylum, we are not allowed to discuss asylum cases at all," said Marie Sebrechts, public information officer in the Southern California office.

Pamela Falk, a law professor at the City University of New York, has been the Havana group's legal adviser. Ms. Falk met a number of the performers as they arrived in Mexico from Cuba and escorted them into the United States. She has served as their advocate at the State Department and the immigration service and has enlisted the aid of politicians and celebrities on their behalf.

"It's a great moment," Ms. Falk said. "It's been a very long road."

She said she believed the case was the largest mass defection in the history of Cuba. The troupe, she said, contained a fascinating cross-section of Cuban society, ranging in age from 19 to 38 and representing many of the island's racial groups - Afro-Cuban, mulatto and European.

Ms. Falk said that there was little question that the artists would eventually receive asylum because of the privileged status Cubans have under American immigration law, dating to the takeover of the island by Fidel Castro in 1959. Under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, any Cuban who arrives in the United States, whether legally or illegally, is presumptively granted permanent residency. But the political asylum process often takes years, Ms. Falk said, and never have 50 defectors been granted asylum together.

Mayelin Montes, 24, who goes by the name Lala, said that the official notice of asylum was a huge relief after a year of uncertainty.

"Now we have like a piece of space in this country," Ms. Montes said. "We fought so hard, and now we are very happy."

When the troupe first arrived, they stayed in a seedy motel and lived from week to week. But as their act became a popular at the Stardust, most of the performers moved into an apartment complex about 20 minutes west of the Strip where they have air-conditioning, dishwashers and use of a swimming pool for the first time in their lives, said Ms. Durr, who serves not only as producer and musical director but also as den mother to the young performers.

She said that the artists were paid well, but declined to say how much they make. "Let's put it this way, a lot of dancers in town want to audition for my show," Ms. Durr said. "But what am I going to do with a Russian?"

Mr. David, in addition to serving as host of the stage show, said he also performed in musical numbers. "I dance, I sing, I eat some fruit, too," using a lighthearted Cuban expression for an all-around performer.

He said he was already beginning his study of American history for the citizenship examination. He said there were interesting parallels between the Cuban and American revolutions, although he said he preferred the outcome of the American revolt. He said he intended to continue to challenge society, using his art as an expression of rebellion.

"An artist will always be a revolutionary in the whole sense of the word," Mr. David said, "because he's always trying to change things, but through culture, not politics."

"There's saying in my family

KRAKOW, Poland

THE photograph is one of those sepia-toned images full of suggestions about the unrecoverable past: two women, one young, one older, seated on wicker chairs in a somewhat tangled garden, while lying at their feet is a young girl, maybe 9 or 10, her hand resting in what look like buttercups.

But superimposed on the pastoral image, which is of three generations of the Olczak family of Warsaw and Krakow, there are two strands of barbed wire, suggesting to the viewer the horrors that the women in the photograph are about to know.

The photograph is part of the cover design of "In the Garden of Memory: A Memoir," by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, who is the young girl in the picture.

Ms. Olczak-Ronikier has become well known in Poland, since her book won the country's most prestigious literary award, the Nike Prize, in 2002. The book sold a very impressive 80,000 copies in Poland and has also been published in Britain, France and the Netherlands, and other foreign editions are in the works.

Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's memoir gained its broad audience in Poland partly because the clan described in it is one of Poland's most illustrious, but also because its members were deeply involved in the central events of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Her family left its traces especially in the two interrelated areas of culture and politics, though not only in those. One relative, André Citroën, founded the Citroën automobile company in France; Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's grandfather, whom she calls the hero of her memoir, was one of Poland's most famous booksellers and publishers, and a man who nurtured a generation of Polish writers.

Another member of the almost Tolstoyian dramatis personae was Zygmunt Bychowski, who served as a doctor in the Russian Army during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904. A great-uncle, Maksymilian Horwitz, was a revolutionary, a leader of the Communist International who knew Lenin and Trotsky and was a radical supporter of the proletarian dictatorship and its cruel methods. There is a haunting photograph in Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's book that shows him after he had been arrested and tortured, and shortly before he was executed, by Stalin's police in Moscow in 1937.

In a more recent generation, Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's relatives include Marek Beylin, a commentator for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's most influential newspaper, and Peter Osnos, whose family moved to America and who is now a publisher in New York.

Ms. Olczak-Ronikier lives with her husband, Michael Ronikier, a translator of books and plays from English to Polish, in an apartment in the Salvator district of Krakow, whose stately brick houses have beautiful views of the Vistula River.

Everything is old or, if not old, comfortably worn - the rooms, the books, the furniture. Ms. Olczak-Ronikier is a small woman with dark hair and bright eyes whose life before tackling her family history centered on the Polish theater.

Among her other books is a handsome, lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome on cabaret in Krakow. She is now writing a script based on "In the Garden of Memory," which will be broadcast on Polish television.

SHE said she wrote her memoir because she knew there were good stories in her family history and, as she put it, "good stories should be told." But there were also deeper reasons.

"There's a saying in my family: 'You should achieve something in your life,' " she said. She suffered because of it, feeling inadequate in front of the portraits of the relatives who, in her view, had accomplished so much. Writing her book was an act of redemption, she said, a way of shedding a burden. "I compare it to a sack full of heavy stones that I was able to throw away," she said.

Needless to say, she is part of the story. The girl in the dust-jacket photograph survived the Holocaust, along with the other women pictured there, her mother and her grandmother, and they are central to the tale.

Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's grandmother, Janina Mortkowicz, was the wife of Ms. Olczak-Ronikier's hero, her grandfather Jakub Mortkowicz, who opened what became one of Warsaw's most important bookstores and publishing houses at the end of World War I.

"He was an example of the tragic love of assimilated Jews in Poland," Ms. Olczak-Ronikier said. "He often met with anti-Semitic attacks, but the purpose of his life was to promote Polish literature."