Sports in Cuba in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of the New Millennium
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Source: Table compiled from information available at http://www.cubanball.com/defect.htm and http://www.baseball-reference.com/players. Note that many more Cuban baseball players have defected but have not yet risen above the American minor leagues. ______________________________________________________________________________ It seems fair to say that defections have been the bane of Cuban sports in the post-Cold War era. Measuring the impact of the many defections of athletes on Cuba’s international sports performances is difficult, since some teams have had to contend with more defectors than others, and some sports have had more plentiful replacements than others. However, Fidel Castro himself has stated that the defections have had a major negative effect. In August 2008 he claimed that they would “cost Cuba five sure gold medals in the upcoming Beijing Olympics.” He conceded that Cuba would win fewer medals than in the past, though he argued that the people would “enjoy the medals more than ever.”47 Clearly, the long string of defections that have plagued Cuban sports have become an international embarrassment and a difficult problem for the government and its diplomats to address. The disappearance of so many of its top athletes first muted or scrambled its public diplomatic message and then began to actively counter it. Throughout the first forty years of revolution the central message of Cuba’s assertive sports diplomacy was that the every Cuban citizen, from the lowliest struggling competitor to the most internationally recognized -- had gained considerably from the new revolutionary approach to sports. Few doubted that the elite athletes had gained far more. When Cuba’s best performers -- those who had gained special privileges and a higher quality of life, those who had become favored children of the revolution and international celebrities -- increasingly fled the country when the opportunity presented itself -- observers could not help but begin to question the validity of the regime’s assertions regarding Cuban athletic programs, the revolutionary sports consciencia, and even the quality of life on the island. In this, one can see clearly how Cuban leaders and diplomats have been constrained by the realities of life for a country clinging to a socialist philosophy in a post-Cold War era in which Marxism has been very much on the defensive. The essence of public diplomacy involves a country’s representatives’ crafting and shaping a positive message for foreign consumption. When triumphs taper off and much of the news is negative -- diminished performances and increased defections -- the message loses its persuasive qualities. A once compelling narrative is in danger of being dismissed by critics as transparent propaganda.
As for particular practices, the Cuban government has joined the capitalist market directly by increasing its exports of sports equipment, such as bats, batting gear, and boxing gloves and protective gear. Furthermore, the regime has secured precious hard currency by claiming a large percentage – about 80 percent – of the prize money Cuban athletes have brought home from international competitions.49 While winning the championship of many sporting events brings in little currency, in some cases the awards can be considerable. That has delivered additional hard currency. Moreover, through its newly created CubaDeportes, a public relations and organizational management firm, the Cubans have created a market in which fees are charged for most interviews or autographs.50 Not only is this practice difficult to justify ideologically, but the fifty dollars that INDER requests non-Cubans to pay for an interview is roughly what most Cubans earn in three months.51 In an effort to resurrect its flagging sports diplomacy, the Cuban government has increased significantly the number of scholarships its offers to young athletes from other countries to attend the island’s sports training schools. In 2001 at the inauguration of the new International School of Physical Education and Sports (ISPES) Fidel Castro addressed a group, welcoming 200 new students from Venezuela and others from 43 countries that had been offered scholarships to attend.52 In the speech Castro referred to other similar schools that had taken on a truly international flavor because of the large number of foreign athletes.53 However, Cuban youth may well resent the fact that foreigners now occupy so many places once reserved solely for Cuba’s best young athletes. Of 600 ISPES students, more than half of some classes have hailed from foreign countries.54 With Cuban sports performances declining, one may question whether filling the island’s training institutions with young athletes from abroad is a sustainable strategy or a stopgap measure aimed at squeezing a bit more goodwill from sports diplomacy that is in a precipitous decline. Perhaps most significant, the Cuban regime started to encourage its athletes to retire early, sign on with professional teams abroad, and then send a percentage of their earnings home to the government. Indeed, even the island’s most talented baseball players have been, in some cases, pushed along – in order to make room for new younger talent – and encouraged to help to pay their debts to the Cuban regime. For example, in 2002 five Cuban baseball stars were sent to Japan either to play or coach.55 This was an innovative strategy, though data is lacking on whether Cuban athletes abroad really are donating portions of their foreign salaries to the Cuban state and for how long. Even more recently, in 2013 the Cuban regime decided to permit its athletes to sign contracts with such foreign professional baseball leagues as the Mexican League. The motivation was that the Cuban government would then tax the salaries earned abroad. This would give much greater exposure to Cuban baseball players, enabling scouts from the Major Leagues to watch them closely before committing large sums to their contracts. The opening of U.S.-Cuban relations suggests that more changes may soon be afoot, perhaps bringing more Cuban ball players to the Major Leagues. In this same vein, the Cuban government has also moved to put the talents of their coaches and trainers up for sale. Through much of the post-Cold War period the Cuban government has sent its sports experts abroad in exchange for desperately needed goods and currency. Fully twenty of the countries participating in the 2000 Sydney Olympics had received some coaching or training assistance. These days Cuba sends several hundred sports authorities to more than 50 countries, including Panama, Malaysia, Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Australia.56 Cuban coaches and trainers, working in sports such as baseball, boxing, fencing, taekwando, and volleyball, have provided much expertise at a bargain price. Panama, for example, has paid the Cuban coaches working with its national baseball league $5000 a year plus expenses. “A big reason there are so many is that they come cheap,” commented David Salayandia, sports director of Panama’s local Channel 9.57 Once again, however, the sustainability of this approach to sports diplomacy is open to question. Reading the Public Response to Change in Cuban Sports Cuban citizens today lack access to sports facilities and opportunities to participate in sports competitions. At the higher level, the regime sells the skills of athletes, trainers, and coaches to other countries and charges citizens for autographs and contact with popular sports heroes. While Cuban citizens clung to their revolutionary sports culture for a period, backsliding may well be occurring as the regime has abandoned prior policies for a market-driven (pre-revolutionary) alternative. The embracing of capitalist practices is important since it affects Cuban sports in complex and contradictory ways. On the one hand, selling sports equipment abroad, charging for interviews and autographs, and sending players, coaches, and trainers to foreign destinations to earn money have all helped to finance the programs and facilities that remain on the island. At the same time, the constant export of Cuba’s most talented players and coaches helps to explain why Cuban teams are faring less well, while foreign teams -- often from other developing countries -- are catching up. In fact, in some cases foreign athletes coached by Cubans have out-performed individuals from the island’s own teams. Commenting on this problem, Pedro Cabrera, INDER’s press director, recently said, “We don’t like to lose. But we do like it when the managers we have abroad [succeed].”58 Contradictory impulses thus abound. Second, Cubans themselves appear to be expressing – in quiet, indirect, and non-confrontational ways – their disillusionment with this new strategy. Large numbers of Cubans do appear to continue to be participating in sports on the grass-roots level.59 In fact, according to a recent article annually an average of 8000 Cuban youth participate in the National School Games, a number that seems to increase almost every year. Nevertheless, the quality of grass-roots competitions may have diminished, with eventual adverse consequences for international competitiveness. And, while Cuban children continue to participate regularly in competitions, 60 fewer appear to be attending organized events, such as baseball and soccer games. This may reflect the fact that, in an effort to curb the use of electricity, Cuba no longer offers spectators night baseball and soccer games. Cubans may also feel bitter and angry that the island’s reputation as a sports powerhouse is declining. After the Cuban national baseball team failed to make the finals in the World Baseball Classic in the winter 2009, many Cubans were ashamed. “I couldn’t even imagine us not getting to the final,” one young Cuban commented.61 Granma, the country’s official newspaper, blamed the loss on lineup errors and a carelessly structured batting order: “Hitters seven through nine failed when other possibilities on the roster offered better solutions.”62 The nationalistic tendencies that the regime once harnessed so successfully to whip up fan interest and promote Cuban sports are now in danger of hobbling the country’s sports diplomacy. Cubans may not support the government’s increasingly prominent tendency to earn hard currency by recruiting athletes from other countries to train at Cuban schools, particularly when foreign students replace Cuban children as the primary recipients of Cuba’s expert athletic training. Furthermore, although Cuban citizens have remained enthusiastic and supportive of the historic policy of providing access to sports and opportunities to compete to all citizens, the most recent market-oriented trends may undermine significantly the widespread support of the sports program that the regime has historically enjoyed. The carefully constructed popular views toward sports pressed by the regime during its first decades in power may now prove resilient and unbending. Cubans may not embrace the new market-based approach adopted by the post-Cold War leadership. Though the available data is scanty, some suggests that unorganized sports – sports activities wholly separate from government-managed programs – are increasing today in popularity in Cuba at the expense of organized programs. A recent article from Havana described the widespread popularity of “street games” in which ingeniously creative children improvise and play all kinds of games in unstructured ways.63 Likewise, skateboarding has become wildly popular in Havana’s Metro Park. One source estimated that today in Cuba more than 3000 individuals participate in skateboarding regularly. Skyrocketing in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, the sport came to be associated with troublesome youth in the eyes of the leadership. Today, while INDER tolerates skateboarding, it has not moved to control or advance this new sport through organization and funding.64 The economic crisis and all the hardships in Cuba have not appeared to undermine this deeply held love of participating in sports on the grassroots level. While Cuba’s international performance has dipped considerably and its global status as a world sports power had waned significantly, culture has, as always, remained resilient. The claims of the Cuban government regarding the country’s sports regime -- from its approach to making sports available to all to its procedure for choosing athletes to compete at higher levels to its insistence that performance not be linked to salary -- have become invalid and ignored. For purposes of sports diplomacy, Cuba today can no longer turn so confidently and readily to its athletic successes as an effective symbol of the revolution. What was once one of Cuba’s most reliable sources of soft power and one of its most forceful responses to the challenges of great powers can no longer carry the punch it once carried. As a matter of political philosophy, although political leaders face inherent difficulties in transforming culture, revolutionary regimes sometimes succeed in doing so. However, the Cuban example suggests, the people may eventually look to bring their own government to account for not acting in accordance with new cultural norms.
In the last two decades, however, a combination of factors -- severe economic limitations, a change of leadership, a re-ordering of priorities, and the introduction of market principles in the managing of the sports regime -- has undermined and fundamentally weakened both the domestic revolutionary sports culture and the effectiveness of Cuba’s public sports diplomacy. The economic blow that the collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed in the early 1990s triggered an economic contraction in Cuba that bore upon every decision the Cuban leadership made. The regime quickly realized that the extensive and expensive sports program, the centerpiece of the revolution’s legitimacy at home and its diplomacy abroad, could no long be sustained. Consequently, the government opted to abandon its fundamental revolutionary claim that all Cubans would have free access to sports facilities and competitive opportunities across the island. Instead, the regime turned back to the market place, which it had abandoned thirty years before, as the key to acquiring hard currency and maintaining at least some of the training facilities it had established for the island’s best, international-caliber athletes. By the early 1990s the regime had moved to abandon the goals and rhetoric of the only attempt at social engineering that had, at least in part, succeeded. The prior goals of creating a sports society in which everyone could participate and the talented would move on to better training opportunities were discarded for a new objective of marketing autographs, expertise, and even talent in exchange for desperately needed hard currency. Cuban citizens were left to sort out which values and beliefs were genuinely revolutionary. Ironically, the cultural transformation, the creation of the new man, at least regarding sports conciencia, turned out to be more authentic and lasting for them than their Marxist leaders. They had bought into the “new man” and had come to believe in its advantages. By the turn of the century citizens wondered why the regime had abandoned arguably the best prize for citizens that the revolution had offered up. For the leaders hard currency, not philosophical purity, became the essence of policy. The revolutionary diplomatic message that the regime so long touted with pride, had fallen to the wayside. Cuban sports diplomacy no longer plays an important role in the presentation of Cuban society abroad. Raul Castro has cared measurably less about the global rhetorical justifications for his revolution. More pragmatic than his elder brother, Raul has promoted a more vigorous and unregulated market, a more selective and lucrative sports regime, and an approach that pays markedly less attention to diplomatic messaging and international propaganda. Finally, the Cuban case regarding the transformation of values and attitudes pertaining to sports illustrates conditions under which cultural change may be possible. More important, it shows how even when a regime succeeds in creating a new national attitude, it may find itself struggling to sustain the philosophical and economic foundation upon which such a new attitude can thrive. The Cuban regime found that, in the case of sports, it could not maintain the conditions under which such a policy could sustain itself. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, while citizens appear to be continuing to cling to their newly created revolutionary sports society. the regime has moved to abandon this critical aspect of this revolution and has, in fact, returned to earlier pre-revolutionary practices, such as marketing athletes and coaches, selling autographs and sports memorabilia, and charging citizens for admission to various sports events. The regime has regressed to pre-revolutionary cultural norms while citizens, many of whom initially rejected Castro’s goals, have perhaps ironically, remained loyal to revolutionary goals and values. 1 Kerr and Wiseman have publicized the notion of niche diplomacy, a functionalist diplomacy that draws upon a single and particular aspect of a state’s resources or specific expertise. See Pauline Kerr and Geoffrey Wiseman, Diplomacy in a Globalizing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 199. This seems highly relevant to Cuban sports diplomacy. 2 By public diplomacy, I mean a diplomatic technique in which a government (or an international organization) publicizes the accomplishments of its country in an effort to communicate with the public in a foreign country, advance foreign-policy objectives, and promote positive feelings abroad toward the country and its government. 3 For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Julie Bunck, Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 208-209. 4 I take culture to mean “that distinctive set of enduring values and attitudes, norms and beliefs, often the product of long experience and tradition, that help to guide a group’s actions and orient its behavior.” Michael R. Fowler, “Culture and Negotiation: The Pedagogical Dispute Regarding Cross-Cultural Simulations,” International Studies Perspectives, v. 10 (2009): 341-359. 5 See Richard Fagan, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969) , Tzvi Medin, The Shaping of Revolutionary Consciousness (Boulder: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1979), and Bunck, Fidel Castro and the Quest. 6 In his 1965 essay “Man and Socialism in Cuba” Che Guevara argued that national culture had to be completely transformed with a “new man” created. See John Gerassi, ed., Venceremos!: The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 387-400. 7 For details see Bunck, chapter 2 “Castro and the Children: The Struggle for Cuba’s Young Minds,” chapter 3 “Castro and the Goal of Sexual Equality,” and chapter 4 “The Revolutionary Battle to Transform Attitudes Toward Labor,” pp. 21-86, 87-124, and 125-184. 8 Granma Weekly Review, 18 July 1966, p. 7; see also discussion of this use of sports as a diplomatic tool in Julie M. Bunck, Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 201-213. 9 Granma Weekly Review, 26 January 1969, p. 8. See also Fidel Castro’s 1961 speech, cited in Pickering, p. 149. 10 See Fidel Castro 1961 speech, cited in R. J. Pickering, “Cuba,” in Sport Under Communism, ed. James Riordan (London: C. Hurst, 1981), p. 152. 11 Granma Weekly Review, 26 January 1969, p. 8. 12 Granma Weekly Review, 19 March 1967, p. 3. 13 As Jose Rodríguez, INDER’s former commissioner for highly competitive sports, explained, “We have tests for children.... Many times we go and search for those we believe have some talent.” Boston Globe, 3 January 1988, p. 69. 14 For a discussion of these schools see Paula J. Pettavino and Geralyn Pye, Sport in Cuba: The Diamond in the Rough (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), pp. 67-72. See also Bunck, pp. 191-194. 15 Bunck, pp. 192-193, citing Boston Globe, 3 January 1988, p. 69, Granma International, 13 May 1991, p. 1, and Washington Post, 29 July 1991, pp. A1, A14. 16 Granma Weekly Review, 26 January l969, p. 9. 17 Fidel Castro, 1974 speech, cited in Pickering, p. 150. 18 Granma Weekly Review, 3 April l988, p. 2. 19 For a discussion of the use of sports as a tool for developing a national identity see Jordi Xifra, “Building Sport Countries’ Overseas Identity and Reputation: A Case Study of Public Paradiplomacy,” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 53, no, 4, 2009, p. 505. 20 See Xifra’s discussion of this, pp. 512-513. Also see Joseph Nye’s Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 126.81 Kb. Share with your friends:
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