14ymedio, Havana, 4 June 2024 — The Cuban sports narrator and commentator Ángel Luis Fernández has been in Miami for days. “He was able to meet his parents and his eldest son again after a long period of not being able to be with them,” confirmed journalist Yasel Porto.
Fernández arrived through humanitarian parole, which as of May has favored 95,000 Cubans since its entry into force in January 2023. Fernández, a star of Cuban Television, will join the team of commentators that will attend the Olympic Games in Paris 2024, as he did in London 2012 and Tokyo 2020. With 25 years of experience and a consolidated place on the Tele Rebelde channel commenting on soccer, baseball, volleyball, basketball, wrestling and boxing games, this habanero “made the decision to start a new life in the United States,” Porto said.
Through the Dporto Sport LLC Facebook account, Porto recalled that his colleague Fernández “also developed a career as a presenter in cultural spaces within Cuba, in the “Gato Tuerto and Rosalía de Castro,” in addition to recently covering the funeral of the singer Juana Bacallao.
“With him (Fernández) I had the opportunity to work from the very beginning of both on the sports station Coco and then on the Havana Channel, being my first systematic appearance on television thanks, precisely, to his support for me to start my path beyond radio,” Porto said.
Fernández joins the long list of recognized announcers who have left the Island. On May 4, Porto himself reported the arrival in the United States of Ángel Andrés (“Andy”)Hernández Vargas. The “iconic” figure of the Coco radio station and especially of the Industriales team, “was claimed by one of his two sons living in Miami.”
Vargas had already retired, but fans remember him for his narrations of the Lions’ games and especially for the matches that led the capital team to win the title in the National Series in 1996, 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2010.
Yasel Porto is another of the sports commentators who left the Island. In 2020 he was expelled from Televisión Cubana and its branch RTV Comercial for his criticism of national baseball, which was in crisis. “My poor compliance with the editorial policy of these media was the cause put forward by the managers of these channels,” he said in a letter he published on his social networks and in Swing Completo.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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