The theft of talent from Cuban sports

By Manuel E. Yepe

The sale and purchase of sports talent among nations damages the self-respect of the people from poor countries (euphemistically called “developing countries”) but is part of a more serious and deeper crime that, in addition, includes the brain drain, the theft of artistic and cultural patrimony, uneven exchanges, asymmetrical integration, economy-driven emigration and many other forms of imperial looting.

At the recent World Championship in Athletics in Berlin, it became evident once more that a great number of triumphant athletes come from poor nations in the South but represent the rich countries of the North.

The globalization of the mass media that characterizes these times propitiates the dissemination in Third World countries of the lifestyles and the consumption levels of the rich countries, which in turn provokes “a universalization of the aspirations,” a factor that encourages emigration in search of spaces that permit people to attain the living conditions that are presumably ideal.

Because this migratory offer is formally rejected by the receiving countries, despite their claims in favor of free exchanges, the Third World’s manual labor becomes cheaper, thus permitting the rich countries to practice selective migratory policies.

The sarcastic apothegm that “money does not make talent but buys it ready-made” is made clear as a sad reality in the drain of athletes, a phenomenon that became notorious in the early 1950s because of the evident harm it causes in poor countries. Sports talent that, through an enormous economic effort are built up by their people, is lost when it is seized by the opulent nations.

Although the commerce in athletes is presented as a logical phenomenon, determined by the desire for upward mobility by young athletes in the southern countries who don’t find an answer in the framework of their own societies, we must take into account other factors that condition it, such as the policies of attraction designed by the industrialized countries.

The programs carried out by some governments in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean to counteract the capture of sports talent and halt the exodus of athletes have not modified the behavior of the phenomenon, which worsens unceasingly.

Cuba has been able to build a shield against Washington’s blows in the field of sports. To do that, it has appealed to the patriotism of Cubans and the identification of a vast majority of them with the program of socialist revolution. But the fact that the island has opted to safeguard to the end the principles of amateur sports, not those of mercantile professionalism, has been used by its powerful enemy to attack it by appealing to the basic instincts that are the foundation of capitalism.

Ever since in 1959, shortly after the triumph of the Cuban revolution, the island forbade any kind of commercialization of sports, the purchase of athletes and coaches became an instrument of the counter-revolution. As the island collected sports trophies that turned it into the Latin American country with the greatest development in sports, the pressure for capture of athletes increased, and the mechanisms for that purpose were perfected.

Thousands of Cuban sportsmen (athletes, trainers, managers) have firmly rejected the enemy’s offers of recruitment, which almost always involve sums of money much higher than those offered by other countries, and the extraordinary privileges granted by the Cuban Adjustment Act to illegal immigrants from Cuba. When the U.S. manages to capture a Cuban athlete, the deed is reflected in the press worldwide as part of a slanderous campaign that is surely the longest and most intense campaign against any country in the history of mankind.

When in the early 1990s Cuba was forced to impose a series of economic measures in the trade sector to deal with the economic crisis provoked by the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries that, by means of a fair commercial exchange, helped the island to confront the U.S. blockade, the entire Cuban society was affected by the application of those elements of capitalism. That fostered an intensification of the offers for the hiring of amateur Cuban athletes, whose sincere support for the socialist project has been repeatedly put to the test. With a few lamentable exceptions, the athletes have confirmed that support.

To properly gauge the merits of Cuba’s policy on sports, we must consider that its advances have been achieved amid an unequal confrontation between the will of a small and poor country to develop its own project for the construction of a socialist society and the irrational efforts of the imperial metropolis to thwart that project.

Manuel E. Yepe Menéndez is a lawyer, economist and journalist. He teaches at the Higher Institute of Foreign Relations in Havana.