The official magazine ’Alma Mater’ analyzes the reasons for the collapse, from “the summit to the crisis”
14ymedio, Havana, 23 August 2024 — The equation that explains the failure of Cuban sport is simple: there is no “muscle” without money, and Cuba does not have – or at least that is the official version – the money they need to invest in the preparation of its athletes. They have to be sent to other countries to train, and very few resist the temptation to escape. The few who return do so because they prefer to escape in Paris rather than in Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic.
Alma Mater, the university magazine that has become lethargic since the defenestration of its director, dares to addresses a thorny topic. In a text that describes the path of Cuban sport “from the summit to the crisis,” the official publication analyzes why, in the last 20 years, sport has ceased to be a priority for the Government.
The two points of comparison are the 2004 Athens Olympics and the 2024 Paris Olympics. In the Greek capital, the Cubans, with a delegation of 151 athletes, occupied eleventh place in the medal table with 27 medals; in France, where the Island was in 32nd place, they only obtained nine medals, the same number as the exiled Cubans who played under other flags.
The problem could be seen coming, and each Olympic event in the last two decades presented louder warning signs
The problem could be seen coming, and each Olympic event in the last two decades presented louder warning signs. It was a “radical turn,” says Alma Mater, which spends several paragraphs praising the “sport power” that Cuba once was before going into the details.
Cuba no longer even has the same level of classification, and officialdom considers “the number of athletes under other flags” a shame. “This constant loss of talent, a well-known cause, distorts any type of medium- and long-term planning with those athletes whose abilities are ideal to offer high performance in more than one cycle. And this affects Cuba like nothing else,” Alma Mater admits.
“Seeing them triumph with other anthems on their lips makes one proud, but it hurts. Moving away is not a sin; it is understandable, and above all if stability in all its aspects is pursued as a reason,” it summarizes.
The key question – which closes the article without an answer – “is not why they leave, but why they don’t stay.” They leave because of the “understandable dissatisfactions of athletes and coaches,” the magazine acknowledges. “It is enough to listen to the statements of those who have remained on the Caribbean island, because it is almost impossible to manage being trained with scarce resources.”
Despite their talent, Cuban athletes are light years away from the type of training that their counterparts receive around the world. They do not enjoy the “strong investment” that all governments offer to the “muscle activity” that will give them important income – economic and prestigious – in the Olympics and other key competitions. “It does not require exquisite knowledge about the economy to conclude that in Cuba this issue goes down the path where the accounts don’t add up,” it argues.
Receiving good training is an aspiration that is, says Alma Mater, using a euphemism, a “distant modernity” for the humble Cuban athletes. It lacks “the technology in the development of plans to finish polishing the capacities, the updating in the methodology when applying the concepts necessary for the competitions and the specialization of the adjacent disciplines in the construction of the athlete.” Against these defects, no talent is worth it. After its analysis, Alma Mater has no choice but to enumerate past glories to give the measure of the debacle.
The flagship of Cuban sport – at least since Munich 1972 – was boxing. Thanks to its star quintet – Yan Bartelemí, Yuriorkis Gamboa, Rigoberto Rigondeaux, Mario Kindelán and Odlanier Solis – the Island took five of the nine gold medals in Athens 2004. Since Montreal 1976, boxers – it was the time of Teófilo Stevenson – had stood up for the country thanks to Soviet money, which Alma Mater remembers with nostalgia: “the context under the five (Olympic) rings was different.”
In Moscow 1980 the Island excelled, partly because “the great powers were absent in those games,” comments the magazine
In Moscow 1980 the Island excelled, partly because “the great powers were absent in those games,” comments the magazine, and the competition was not too strong. Politics continued to mark the paths of the sport and not a few athletes of the Island – the magazine regrets with a certain tone of resentment – were prevented from traveling to Los Angeles in 1984 and Seoul in 1988. The great return, they say, was Barcelona 1992, with 30 medals and the fifth place in the world. These were the last moments of fame.
With the Special Period, the consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union and the entry into the 21st century, Cuban sport went into a coma. In Beijing 2008, the Island was ranked 27th and demonstrated the unevenness of the athletes compared to international parameters. The country was saved by isolated names, such as Félix Savón in boxing, Javier Sotomayor in the high jump and Elvis Gregory in fencing.
It was a sign that the Island’s sport depended on a few exceptional athletes and not on an organized process. The bills will be paid now, Alma Mater evaluates, since the last athlete of that “legendary” era, Mijaín López, has just retired after his fifth consecutive Olympic gold.
The analysis ends with an image that strives to be poetic: the coach who finds “in the most remote place of our Island that boy or girl with the abilities of a future star.” But it will not do much good, because – as the stampede of baseball prospects shows – children and adolescents both yearn for “the usual departure in search of other horizons.”
Paris must be seen as a trauma and a sign of the unequivocal “situation of crisis” that Cuban sport is experiencing, Alma Mater says, although it soon covers itself and apologizes, because “the phrase sounds strong” despite the good intentions.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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