Sports in Cuba in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of the New Millennium

With time, however, the grim economic realities resulted in significant budget cuts. Although in 1988 Cuba had spent an estimated 8 percent of its total budget on sports, by 1993 the Cuban government had reduced INDER’s share to well below one percent, only slightly above the 0.5 percent of the overall budget allocated to sports by the pre-revolutionary Batista government.²⁷ While by the end of the 1990s INDER’s percentage had rebounded to above one percent and then continued to climb slowly throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century to a high of slightly above two percent, the much more lavish funding has not reappeared and may never do so. In the post-Cold War era Cuban leaders have not been able to spare their sports program serious budget cuts.

First, the economic crises -- reflecting poor management, a series of natural disasters, enhanced regional economic isolation, and falling levels of worker productivity -- forced the regime to abandon the upkeep of many important sports facilities. Even the showpiece Sports City in Havana was hit hard. As funding bottomed out, the regime further neglected local facilities – created for the people – and instead directed more of its limited resources to support Cuba’s international teams. This may have reflected the fact that the more compelling public diplomacy arguments involved international achievements by elite athletes, rather than mass participation by ordinary citizens. As a consequence, in various parts of the island, once nicely tended soccer fields grew up in weeds, and some swimming pools were emptied and abandoned. In recent years the country’s boxing training center, located on Havana’s outskirts, has been intermittently closed, while the dilapidated condition of its dormitories has gained unwanted attention.²⁸

Indeed, since the mid-1990s Cuba has even been compelled to rely on the charity of other countries to support its sports teams. For example, the Italian government paid the expenses of the Cuban baseball team at the 1996 Barcelona Olympics, and Australia picked up most of the tab for the Cuban athletes who participated in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.²⁹ By the end of the twentieth century the regime’s attention and funding focused predominantly on international competitions. But this neglect of sports on the grass-roots level meant that Cuban scouts and other experts attended fewer local events and recruited fewer promising young athletes.

Perhaps more important, Cuban diplomats discovered that their sports-centered public diplomacy, which for more than four decades had hailed this aspect of the country’s culture, could no longer make the same claims about the phenomenal successes of Cuban athletes. In the post-Cold War period Cuba had become a recipient of international charity that would enable its teams to compete. The performances of Cuban athletes at international competitions began to decline. The lack of sustainability raised questions, in turn, about whether the Cuban model would be such a great one for other countries to emulate. And, while the many Cuban stars who defected to foreign professional leagues attested to the continued skills of the island’s athletes, it also highlighted the grim drawbacks of life in post-Cold War Cuba. Thus, the once resoundingly positive message of Cuban sports diplomacy became increasingly complicated to manage, with a host of nettlesome topics best avoided.

In the first instance sports diplomacy is contingent on outstanding performances that officials can point to, make arguments about, and read deeper meaning into. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, the record of Cuban athletes at international sports competitions has deteriorated. The regime’s problems in maintaining its revolutionary sports conciencia have been exposed. Although Cuba has long dominated sports in the Caribbean Basin, its position as the regional athletic hegemon appears to be slipping. While Cuba won 227 gold medals at the 1993 Central American and Caribbean Games (CACG), that number fell to 191 at the 1998 CAC Games. Then, Cuba fell further, earning 131 gold medals at the 2006 CACG, only 31 more medals than did Mexico, the runner-up. In the previous CACG Cuba had managed to win 130 more medals than did Mexico. Much the same story has been evident on the larger stage of athletic competitions in the western hemisphere. In particular, Cuba’s performance at the Pan American Games (PAG) has steadily declined. Cuba brought home from the 1991 Games 140 gold medals. That number fell to 112 in the 1995 PAG, and 69 in 1999. After a small rebound to 72 gold medals in 2003, Cuban athletes brought home a mere 59 in the 2007 PAG and 58 in the 2001 PAG.

Cuba’s Olympic showings paralleled this decline. It remains true that, after so many years of successes at the summer Olympics, Cuba has brought home more gold medals than the rest of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean combined. Nevertheless, a sharp downhill trend has been plainly evident. After its fifth place finish in the 1992 Olympics, Cuba slipped to 8^th in 1996, 9^th place in the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and 11^th in the 2004 Olympic Games in Greece. As the 2008 Beijing Olympics approached, the Cuban government made it very clear that the island’s athletes and teams were under much pressure to perform impressively and demonstrate to the world once more that Cuba really was thriving again and not faltering. The government publicly set as its goal to be ranked among the top fifteen countries in the world and to maintain its supremacy in Latin America and the Caribbean.³⁰ Now ailing, Fidel Castro called on the Olympic delegates to “come back with their shields on.”³¹

Despite the exhortations, Cuba emerged from the 2008 Olympics well short of its stated goal. Its athletes plummeted to 28^th place, by a very large margin the country’s poorest showing in forty years.³² Cuban athletes won only two gold medals and in the Olympic rankings placed behind Brazil, something that had never before occurred. Also, for the first time since the Revolution, Cuba failed to secure a single gold medal in boxing,³³ long a signature sport for the revolutionary regime’s athletes. “The Beijing Olympics were an embarrassment for Cuba,” said Roberto Quesada, a former trainer for the champion Cuban boxing team. “I don’t know if they can recover in these difficult economic times.”³⁴

Yet, if these athletic setbacks caused consternation in Havana, the signs that Cuban dominance in baseball might also be faltering may have been the most demoralizing development. Drawing on its long history of success, Cuba throughout the first four decades of the Revolution made the finals 40 consecutive times in the International Baseball Federation (IBAF) World Cup, the Intercontinental Cup, the Olympics, and the World Baseball Classic (WBC).³⁵ In fact, until 2010, Cuba’s national baseball team had reached the final of all 50 major amateur baseball tournaments it had entered since 1959. As Alan Schwarz of the New York Times recently wrote, “Winning 43 of those [50 tournaments] established Cuba as the most feared team in international baseball.”³⁶ On account of the extraordinary string of successes by Cuban ballplayers on diamonds across the globe, the regime has long wielded baseball as one of its most potent and effective sports diplomacy tools. Baseball triumphs have been touted as one of the great successes of the revolution.

However, Cuba’s national baseball team has also been adversely affected by budget cuts, the official reordering of priorities, and an extraordinary string of defections to professional baseball clubs abroad. After winning Olympic gold in baseball at the 1992, 1994, and 2004 Olympics, Cuba finished second at the 2006 World Baseball Classic, took second at the 2007 World Cup, and fell to South Korea, while securing the silver medal at the Beijing Olympics.³⁷ In 2009 the team could not make the WBC finals. Its loss to Japan marked the first time since 1951 – just short of six decades – that Cuba’s baseball team failed to secure a game in the championship of a top international competition. The Cubans played Japan twice at the 2009 WBC. They lost both games by shutouts, with the Japanese outscoring the Cubans by a total of eleven runs to none.³⁸

Moreover, the shift in the region’s leadership, and consequent focus and attention, may also have undermined Cuban athletic performances. The deteriorating health and increasing marginalization of Cuba’s number-one sports fanatic, Fidel Castro, amounts to another notable factor. Raul Castro informally took the reins of power from his ailing older brother in the summer of 2006 and officially did so in February 2007. In stark contrast to the effervescent enthusiasm of Fidel for athletics and his view that sports served as a potent tool to promote revolutionary goals, Raul cannot be said to have displayed a comparable interest in Cuban sports. While directing the Cuban armed forces, Raul Castro never clearly articulated a view that sports were integral to military training or any other goal of the Revolution. In fact, the younger Castro rarely showed the enthusiasm of his elder brother for using international sports victories as an effective tool of public diplomacy. Raul Castro has rarely expounded on the theme that Cuba’s international sports successes were models to be admired and followed by other aspiring revolutionary movements across the developing world. He has appeared to be markedly less enamored with the view that sports had become Cuba’s newest form of soft power. The drop in the quality of Cuba’s international performances may reflect, in part, this change in leadership. Certainly, the lesser role of sports diplomacy within Cuban foreign policy in recent years appears to illustrate Raul’s priorities, which in some respects differ in striking fashion from those of Fidel.

It is true that, as his health has improved, Fidel Castro was – at least for a while - considerably more visible and spoke publicly about Cuba’s intention to reverse its athletic decline. In January 2009 Angel Matos, a leading Cuban practitioner of taekwondo, was disqualified from an international martial arts competition and later banned from the sport for kicking a referee in the face and spitting on the mat. Fidel Castro lashed out at the referee, claiming that the match had been clearly fixed and condemning the judges as racists and cheaters. At the time Castro promised Cubans that the leadership would reassess “every discipline, every human and material resource that we dedicate to sport.”⁴⁰ However, it remains unclear how much money was actually reallocated and whether any struggle occurred within the regime’s leadership over the extent of the resources to be devoted to sports.

Perhaps most alarming of all, over the last decade Cuban athletes have been defecting at an unprecedented rate. An important dimension of the revolutionary sports conciencia was the notion that Cuban athletes would shun the riches of a professional career abroad and instead accept much more modest compensation on the island, while basking in the admiration of the Cuban people and its government. This, in turn, was a key part of the message the Cuban government exported, particularly within other Third World societies. To the leadership, revolutionary Cuba stood as a shining example of a non-capitalist approach to the ‘good life,’ which, from the regime’s perspective, ought not be equated with monetary wealth.

Although in the 1970s athletes such as boxer Teófilo Stevenson fulfilled this expectation, in the post-Cold War era a wide range of Cuban athletes have escaped abroad, when opportunities to defect arose. For example, in March 2008 Cuba’s soccer team lost seven players in a single pre-Olympic tournament in Tampa, Florida. The following October two more members of that team defected in Washington, D.C. after arriving to participate in a World Cup qualifying match.⁴¹ That same year, several members of the Cuban volleyball squad also fled the island.⁴² Over a two-year span the Cuban boxing team, formerly ranked at various times as the world’s best, lost four competitors that were former Olympic and world champions.⁴³ In July 2007 another four Cuban athletes defected while in Brazil for the Pan American Games. The loss of so many top competitors and the fear of more defections by members of the Cuban international delegation led to the Cuban government’s decision in the fall 2007 to send a mere seven athletes to the World University Games in Thailand, at which the Cubans finished in a dismal 40^th place. Cuban defections have also included coaches and even sports journalists, taxing expertise and enthusiasm further.⁴⁴

No Cuban teams have been more grievously affected by defections than the national baseball squads. As Table 1 shows, in the post-Cold War period top Cuban baseball players have regularly opted to leave behind their socialist society to become wealthy professional athletes abroad. Worst of all, from the regime’s perspective, they have most frequently headed straight to the United States, signing contracts, some of them extraordinarily lucrative, to play with American major league baseball clubs. This, of course, means that American professional coaches have taken over the training and development of Cuban baseball stars, a bitter pill to swallow for a regime that once touted its own coaches as the world’s best.

Furthermore, while a few Cuban players defected before 1991 -- such as Barbaro Garbey, who left Cuba in 1980 to play for the Detroit Tigers and Texas Rangers -- the pace has increased to an extraordinary extent in recent years, with fully 21 players defecting in 2009 alone.⁴⁵ Among the most important Cuban ball players to leave, first baseman Kendry Morales, a 2004 defector, rose through the Los Angeles Angels system to start at first base and in 2009 capitalized on 34 home runs and a .569 slugging percentage to finish in second in the American League Most Valuable Player Award voting. After his 2007 defection, Alexei Ramirez, once the top hitter on Cuba’s national team, finished second in the American League Rookie of the Year voting. In 2009 Aroldis Chapman, the finest Cuban pitcher in 40 years, defected. He currently serves as a relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds and holds the Major League record for the fastest recorded pitch at over 105 miles per hour.⁴⁶ In 2012 Cuban star Yoenis Céspedes defected to become the starting center fielder for the Oakland Athletics. Despite some injuries and trades to the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers, Céspedes has shown extraordinary talent in the regular-season, in All Star games and related festivities, and in the post-season, and his best years may still be ahead of him.

Table 1.Major League Baseball Players who Defected from Cuba, 1991-Present