The sports fair exhibits the balls, rackets, nets and bats that the athletes of the Island lack
14ymedio, José Lassa, Havana, 1 March 2025 — A young man with patched-up sneakers, doing a pirouette to land between old mats and jute sacks: this and many other images sum up the divorce between the International Sports Fair in Cuba and reality. The event concluded this week at the Coliseo de Ciudad Deportiva, in Havana, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of coaches and athletes who have been demanding supplies for months for decent training.
For many of those present – most of them linked to the world of sport – the Fair was “a circus” designed to promote the sector’s links with MSMEs or with foreign companies dedicated to the sale of sporting goods. Rogelio, a former coach interviewed on site by 14ymedio , illustrates this with an example.
“In my province, when a small business was interested in making the clothing for the athletes of the Eide (Sports Initiation School), the answer was negative. So, what Fair are they talking about?” he asks.
On Thursday, the last day of the event, the Fair opened to all types of people, not just athletes. Recreational activities were held, with music, food sales, an agricultural fair, domino tables and even a promotional entertainer. Success was limited and people, listless, tried to keep up with the pace demanded by the entertainer under the midday sun.
Several barefoot children also ran around the Ciudad Deportiva tracks.
At the bottom of the coverage by Jit, the official specialized media that reported on the event, a user asked the question: “What is on display at this Fair? The disaster of Cuban sport?” The reader underlined the incoherence of celebrating with great fanfare a sector where every level, from the student to the professional, suffers a “clear deterioration.”
Packed into several pavilions inside the Coliseum, some 92 entities – 15 foreign and the rest national – participated in the Fair. Of the Cubans, 26 were private companies with a stand dedicated to exhibiting their products. The greatest interest was not in the sale of sports equipment, but rather in a small/medium-sized company that sold honey.
Another attraction was the presence of glories of sport on the island, such as Javier Sotomayor – recently involved in a financial scandal with the Cuban treasury from which he has tried to disassociate himself – who posed for the cameras of his admirers.
The Inder (National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation) Marketing and Importing Company displayed balls, rackets, nets and bats that its athletes do not have. From the state-owned Acopio are fruits and vegetables that have not reached the provincial Eide canteens for years. In other booths, sports shirts and suits were sold for between 3,000 and 5,000 Cuban pesos.
Next to the Ciudad Deportiva fairgrounds, another ironic image: that of the Cuban National Circus, another symbol of what propaganda once presented as an “achievement” of the Revolution.
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