Cuba is often expected to punch above its weight at the Olympics. Cuban boxers, for example, have won the second-highest amount of medals in Olympic history at 78, with 41 of them gold.
Since the 1972 Munich Games, Cuba has consistently ranked in the top 20 medal-earning countries. Far wealthier countries like Canada, New Zealand and Belgium — a country with a similar population size to Cuba — routinely rank below.
The Paris 2024 games may change this. Only 62 athletes will compete under the Cuban flag at this year’s Games. However, 21 Cubans will compete under other flags, including the refugee Olympic team.
This delegation is the smallest Cuba has sent to the Olympics since 1964 in Tokyo. It is also the first time a Cuban gold medal winner will represent the refugee team. It is a telling revelation about the current state of sport in Cuba. It also reveals how serious Cuba’s current socioeconomic crisis really is.
Global solidarity
Since 2021, nearly 500,000 Cubans, or five per cent of the population, have left the country. Many of these migrants are young, highly skilled professionals. Cubans, athletes included, are voting with their feet by leaving the country in droves and finding new homes in the United States, Europe and throughout the Americas.
Cuba routinely sends professionals abroad, notably in health care and sport, to work through state-sponsored delegations. Since the 1960s, Cuba’s internationalism has bolstered solidarity and economic co-operation with dozens of countries.
Read more: Economic crisis in Cuba: government missteps and tightening US sanctions are to blame
Cuba made bold co-operation efforts in the early days of COVID-19 to assist other countries in coping with the virus. Passengers in quarantined cruise ships were treated in Havana. As the world locked in, most of Cuba’s solidarity partners failed to reciprocate with adequate financial support.
As a result, the country’s economy broke down. While rationing was able to keep food on the table for some Cubans during the “special period in peacetime” of the 1990s, today’s meagre salaries are unable to keep up with gross inflation. When inflation soars, shortages emerge and political unrest grows.
In 2024, fewer and fewer Cuban doctors are going abroad for their country’s medical delegations. The Biden administration has called Cuba’s medical delegations “forced labour,” despite international praise for Cuba’s transformative development program.
But now, these highly trained Cuban health-care workers are heading to the United States. Many took the arduous journey beginning with a flight into Nicaragua and then going overland through Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico to the United States border.
A brief history of Cuban sport
Emerging from the pandemic, Cuba’s partners are currently heavily sanctioned nations like Russia, Iran and Venezuela. Goods and supplies remain lean, as Cuba depends almost entirely on shipments from Moscow. Russia’s heavily sanctioned merchant fleet does not help matters by adding costs and delays to shipments.
In exchange, Russia expects greater political loyalty from Cuba. Russian warships continue to arrive in Havana harbour. Some 200 Cuban mercenaries are fighting with Russian forces, while Russia leans on Cuba’s intelligence services to collect information about the United States.
The Olympic podium will reflect these changes. Since the 1960s, Cuba has made sport a “public good” through the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education, and Recreation (INDER).
In 1961, Cuba’s government nationalized all sporting clubs. Broad community-level participation in sports became a national right, if not an obligation. Cuban leader Fidel Castro committed to innovative elite sport recruitment. Boxers, baseball players, gymnasts and others would be identified early by government coaches. INDER built dedicated training centres and schools for prospective elite athletes.
Despite brutal resource shortfalls, Cuba has invested in human resources for sports since the 1960s. By the 1990s, Cuba became a top Olympic delegation.
Even amid economic chaos from the collapse of the Soviet Union — which it later recovered from — Cuba placed fifth in medals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. That year, 176 athletes took home 31 medals, including 14 gold. Under the auspices of South-South solidarity, by the early 2000s, Cuba offered free elite sports education to 1,900 students from 80 countries.
Cuban athletes abandoning national team
Cuba’s solidarity is meant to bring mutual benefit, but the pandemic demonstrated how quickly partner nations can cut ties and lock in. Without remuneration and support for its international co-operation, Cuba’s economy cracked. And some of their top athletes are letting go of national brand loyalty.
Triple jumpers Pedro Pichardo, Jordan Diaz Fortún and Andy Díaz will represent Portugal, Spain and Italy after they abandoned their delegations in 2021. Javelin thrower Yulenmis Aguilar and boxer Enmanuel “The Prophet” Reyes are now citizens of Spain and will carry that country’s flag.
The Olympic refugee team includes Fernando Dayán Jorge Enríquez, who took gold in canoeing in Tokyo in 2021, and Cuban weightlifter Ramiro Mora. The refugee team comprises 37 athletes from 11 countries participating in 12 sports. These athletes are assumed to face conflict or persecution if they were competing of their home country.
For this reason, Cuba is demanding both be removed from the refugee team. They argue that “none of these Cuban athletes are uprooted by war or persecuted.” Having gold medal athletes from Cuba at the Paris Olympics under the banner of refugees may be one insult too far for the Cuban government.
Sports are a critical pillar of national pride for Cubans and are deeply embedded in the country’s culture and society. Sandlot baseball and the veneration of Olympians build a strong culture of national pride. Sport is a reminder of Cuba’s impressive accomplishments, despite all its economic hardships and political strife.
Now, Cuba’s top athletes are raising and competing under the flags of other nations, and seemingly abandoning national pride in sport. Many politicians in Washington claim their case to be equivalent to that of displaced and persecuted persons. Others, like Marco Rubio, question how Cubans could be considered refugees when many regularly travel back to Cuba for short visits.
In fact Cuba has been the host country to the biggest number of refugees in the Caribbean. Today, with 500,000 Cubans currently living abroad, Olympians included, it seems it’s now Cuba’s brand of international solidarity that will be taking the punches.
Robert Huish received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
