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NEW RULES TO THE OLD GAME:CUBAN SPORT AND STATELEGITIMACY IN THE POST-SOVIET ERAThomas F. Carter aa Chelsea School of Sport, Faculty of Education andSport at Chelsea School, University of Brighton ,Brighton, UKPublished online: 01 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Thomas F. Carter (2008) NEW RULES TO THE OLD GAME: CUBANSPORT AND STATE LEGITIMACY IN THE POST-SOVIET ERA, Identities: Global Studies inCulture and Power, 15:2, 194-215, DOI: 10.1080/10702890801904610

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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 15:194–215, 2008Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10702890801904610

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New Rules to the Old Game: Cuban Sport and State Legitimacy in the Post-Soviet Era

Thomas F. CarterChelsea School of Sport, Faculty of Education and Sport at Chelsea School, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

After the collapse of the socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, theCuban state faced its greatest crisis. How the state managed to maintain sufficientlegitimacy in light of the growing economic hardships and class restructuringCuban society underwent in these initial post-Soviet years remains somewhatmysterious. A crucial element of the legitimating discourse of the Cuban state,domestically and internationally, has been the relative success of its sports teamsin international competition. As symbols of the strength of the state and one of thefew remaining “successes” of the Revolution, Cuban sports performances remainvital symbolic capital for current and future administrations. The problem thatstate officials continue to face is how to transform that symbolic capital into eco-nomic capital without sacrificing ideological principles. Drawing on ethnographicfieldwork conducted in Havana during the late 1990s and on interviews with sportsofficials, athletes, and coaches since then, this article examines Cuban officials’efforts to transform Cuban sport from a modern, centralized bureaucratic institu-tion to a revenue generating industry within the neoliberal, capitalist, competitive,and post-Soviet world. In particular, I concentrate on the strategies pursued byCuban sports officials in their efforts to maintain world-class sporting excellenceand the ramifications of the emergence of Cuban sport as an export industry toprovide a small suggestion of how legitimacy of the state was maintained andwhat the future of Cuban sport may hold.

Key Words: state legitimacy, sport, symbolic capital, Cuba

Two grandmotherly ladies, Inéz and Amelda, sit on their balcony over-looking one of Havana’s main thoroughfares sharing their experiencesand wisdom with me over a cup of tea. Inéz turns to me and asks if Iknow what the three successes of the Revolution are. She gravelyinforms me that those three successes are health, education, and sport.Then, her eyes beginning to twinkle, she asks if I know the threefailings of the Revolution. Amelda starts clucking in disapproval,apparently knowing what is coming. Inéz tries to solemnly tell me thatthe three failings are breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but her smirk givesaway the joke and she starts cackling as she finishes the punch line.

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Cuban Sport and State Legitimacy 195

This joke was a common one retold in quiet company throughoutHavana during my ethnographic fieldwork there in 1997 and 1998. Itwas a well-worn and well-known piece of humor by that time becauseof the economic crisis the residents of Havana faced during the 1990s.Inéz and Amelda probably first heard it in the nearby agriculturalmarket because the two elderly ladies did not go out much. The jokeidentifies both the immediate failings that undercut claims to legiti-macy and also social programs that clearly provide weight to stateclaims of representing the national interests of all Cubans. The heartof the joke itself cuts to the core of the matter: how do states obtainand maintain legitimacy?

It is these successes that interest me here. They remain three pillarsupon which state legitimacy rests amongst the Cuban populace.Cuban health care is renowned worldwide with lower death rates perbirth than many major United States cities. Its education system iswidely regarded as excellent with basic indicators among the highestin the world. Cuban sport, especially its track and field, baseball, andboxing, is also recognized as world-class. While health and educationare important and have relatively straightforward benefits, how sportlends itself to the legitimacy of state rule is not as obvious. Yet socialiststates in particular drew upon and continue to use sport as an impor-tant aspect of their legitimacy. It is the third of these successes that isexamined in greater detail here.

Data for this examination draw on ten years of multi-sited ethno-graphic research. Two extended stints of fieldwork conducted in 1997–1999 and in 2006–2007 in Cuba—along with shorter research in avariety of sites throughout North America, the Caribbean, and Europe—provided the core of the data. The extended fieldwork conducted in thelate 1990s centered upon the permutations of and contestations overCuban identity as embodied and expressed within Cuban baseball(Carter in press). More recent fieldwork in Cuba has focused uponCubans’ understandings and experiences of the transnational connec-tions of Cuban sports migrants, the impact these lengthy absences haveon family members, and the state policies and controls of transnationalsport migration. Fieldwork involved attending as many baseball gamesas possible at various skill and age levels; participating in the debatesheld in various peñas deportivas (Carter 2001; Eastman 2007); and con-ducting interviews with journalists, officials in the Comisión Nacional deBéisbol, Cubadeportes SA, and the Instituto Nacional de Deportes,Educación Física y Recreación (INDER), as well as athletes, coaches, andfans. These interviews focused on a number of baseball-related topicssuch as state controls, migration, athlete and coach development, ethosand values taught through participation, and other related topics.

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196 T. F. Carter

This article considers the problem of legitimacy faced by socialiststates and their relationship with and use of sport by using the cur-rent Cuban state as a case study. Of particular concern in this articleis the use of sport to support revolutionary claims of state legitimacyand the importance of state control over the infrastructure and prac-tices of sport. The problem of state legitimacy, the roles sport played instate socialism, and the post-Soviet changes to Cuban sport structuresare considered. In particular, it is argued that Cuban sports officialshave created a system of control that encourages a small proportion ofsports professionals to display socialist ideals to reap fiscal rewardstoward the end or after their athletic careers have ended. The articleconcludes by discussing the current status of Cuban sports programsand possible future strategies for maintaining its position as a promi-nent symbol of the Cuban state.

On socialist state legitimacy

Socialism is a uniquely modern form of organizing a state. Its secular-ist ideology draws upon ideals, symbols, and practices that are specificto the twentieth century even as those remaining socialist states evolvein the early part of the twenty-first century. Because all socialist stateswere revolutionary—meaning they emerged out of armed struggleagainst an existing state—the symbolic capital of national historieswas sometimes invalid as legitimating discourses of the new socialiststates. Revolutions, by their very nature, are social, political, and eco-nomic upheavals, often destroying existing power hierarchies in favorof new configurations. These upheavals are major obstacles for nascentrevolutionary states precisely because they require reconstituted socialrelations. A major aspect of the challenge a revolutionary state faces isthat the discourses informing the symbolic capital legitimating aformer state’s rule cannot be used to justify its own legitimacy pre-cisely because the justification for the revolution is predicated upon theoverturning of the former state. The symbolic capital that validatesany state is created in a dialectic process between official ideologicaland popular discourse in which divisions and commonalities are natu-ralized so that both become part of the taken-for-granted daily life yetremain sufficiently flexible to respond to changing political andeconomic circumstances. This process is part of what the state masks,of course; to make this a transparent process would render the stateseemingly inept at best and impotent at worst (Abrams 1988). Conse-quently, the legitimating symbolic capital of socialist states was predi-cated more upon the control and employment of discourse than onhistorical practices which were illegitimate and therefore could not be

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Cuban Sport and State Legitimacy 197

used in the new political economic system. Ironically, this struggle wasnot ordinarily contested within the hallowed halls of government but ineveryday social life where consensus is built. Furthermore, becausereorganization was inevitable (according to socialist ideology), the pro-duction of such discourses, including reinterpretations of earlier histo-ries, takes on tremendous significance (Watson 1994).

The socialist reorganization of society resulted in state legitimacyresting precariously upon a self-consciously constructed control over thediscursive realm (Verdery 1991; Burawoy and Lukacs 1992). Europeanrevolutionary leaders could not legitimately draw upon the historicalnationalist discourses of statehood because it was these very dis-courses that they had challenged and overthrown.1 Eastern Europeanstate socialism developed along a specific historical trajectory thatbelies any sort of universal model for socialist revolution. In othersocialist revolutions around the world the dynamic differed. Manycoalesced out of anti-colonial movements and involved the overthrowof imperialist powers. Cuba was one such revolution.

The initial challenges for the Cuban Revolution’s leaders, then,were the establishment of a discourse that legitimated their over-throw of the existing state, the establishment of revolutionary prac-tices that reorganized social relations, and the creation of the requisitesymbolic capital legitimating all of these changes (Medin 1990; Bunck1994). Revolutionary leaders could and did draw on historicaldiscourses that legitimated struggle against a tyrannical ruler, oftenseen as a puppet of a foreign power. These contemporary leadersframed their struggles as the continuation of earlier nationalistprojects of independence, struggles that began against the Spanishbut were co-opted by the United States during the 1898 War for Inde-pendence (Pérez 1988; Thomas 1998). In each case, despite Cuba’sdemocratic constitution, the Cuban state was ruled by a singular dic-tator with the extensive and explicit support of the United States.Drawing upon earlier failed revolutionary moments in Cuba, espe-cially the 1898 and 1933 Revolutions, revolution became an unfulfilledhistorical process until Castro’s forces succeeded in driving Batistafrom the country and consolidated their victory. In constructing a dis-course that stretched back through failed historical struggles, theCastro-led Revolution presented itself as the latest and ultimatelysuccessful struggle for independence from foreign rule. Quite simply,the Cuban Revolution was the culmination of the centuries-long strug-gle for national independence and not a singular event that invali-dated the historical struggles that preceded it. But that revolutionwas nationalist in character, and the turn toward a socialist revolu-tion required the recasting of some Cuban symbolism.

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The utopian aspirations of socialist states presented an acute prob-lem of how to bridge the chasm between ideological rhetoric and livedreality. Three basic strategies were open to socialist leaders: (1) initiateradical transformations of reality to bring it closer to socialist ideology,(2) make the populace accept the difference between the two as inevi-table and normal, and (3) convince the populace with the help of sym-bolic discourses that reality actually corresponds to socialist ideology(Lane 1981: 27). Although all three strategies were used by socialiststates throughout the twentieth century, the last option was particu-larly apt because it could portray the present as “actually existingsocialism” and society as a happy reality. It also stabilized power with-out the risk of radical change by presenting ideas in sensual formrather than in direct statements about lived experience. Consequently,socialist leaders had to find new symbolic discourses and practicesthat edified and reinforced the reorganized society. One highly signifi-cant symbolic practice that the Revolution harnessed was sportbecause it had no historical connections with any previous Cubanstate, yet it played a prominent role in independence struggles againstthe Spanish (Pérez 1999: 75–83). Much of the leaders’ attention wasfocused upon inculcating new bodily practices and values in thepopulation.

The concern over the formation of proper socialist persons necessitatedthe penetration of various everyday activities not normally associatedwith political supervision of the state. Sport was one of those activitiesthat drew particular interest precisely because of its ambiguousnature that could be harnessed by any ideological discourse. Top-downsport structures are by no means unique to socialist states, but social-ist states in particular made explicit use of sport.2 The recent academicinterest in Chinese sport illustrates both the contested ideologicalnature of sport and the implementation of a top-down approach usedby a post-Soviet era socialist state to shape national identity and con-sumption practices, as well as the production of elite athletes (Hwangand Jarvie 2004; Morris 2004; Maguire 2005; Lozada 2006; Zhang andSilk 2006).

Socialism and sport

It could be argued that humanity’s most reliable, continuous, and com-prehensive metaphor for life and its meaning is the body. As a symbol,the body is a rich reservoir of meaning but is not inherently political initself. Rather it is an “ideological variable” (Hoberman 1984: 53) thathas the capacity to express the positive feeling of community andsocial solidarity as well as racial intolerance and class struggle. The

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ritualistic display of bodies serves to represent society as a whole andlegitimates the leadership of that society as the promoter, protector,and creator of such a society. Multiple bodies moving in concert pro-ducing prearranged, choreographed forms en masse become saturatedwith political meaning. The ritual parades of socialist workers andother members of the proletarian state played an important role in allsocialist states, whether as part of an annual ritual cycle, such as theMay Day parades at Red Square in the Soviet Union or FelvonulásiSquare in Hungary, respectively, or as an independent event such asthe Turnund Sportsfests in the GDR (Roubal 2003: 2). Mass perfor-mances involving thousands of bodies certainly served to reinforcesocialist ideology, yet it was the individual athlete competing in sportthat proved especially iconic for socialist leaders.

Sport was an ideal vehicle for the inculcation of socialist ideals andtransforming people into model socialists. Socialist leaders’ use ofsport transformed its ludic qualities into a compulsory activity neces-sary to overcome mental and material obstacles in the pursuit of autopian socialist future (Girginov 2004: 27). Whether through massgymnastic performances (Roubal 2003; MacDonald 2004) or via thepreeminence given to international sporting success, the strength,youth, beauty, power, and discipline of athletes’ bodies were trans-formed into symbols of the socialist state (Brownell 1995). In doing so,sport fulfilled four vital functions in the reformation of socialistsociety: (1) it served as a means of ensuring the state had healthy andobedient citizens, (2) it provided a form of group identification and pro-moted a collective culture, (3) it acted as an engine for urgent social andcollective action, and (4) it (re)produced allegiance to the party-state byensuring everyone’s place in the society (Girginov 2004: 34). These fourfunctions served to advance the notion of a “people-as-one” image equat-ing the people with the proletariat and the proletariat with the party,thereby allowing the party-as-the-people to be identified with stateleadership. This process of dual identification is best captured via thesymbolism of the body.

It is an old strategy linking the symbolism of the body with thestate. The health of Medieval monarchs was frequently taken to liter-ally be the health of the state; if the monarch was ill, so was the coun-try. Modern body symbolism across the political spectrum, fromfascism to democratic capitalism, follows the same equation of linkingleaders’ health with the health of the state (Hoberman 1984: 11). Butit is also the physical prowess of a country’s athletes that politicalleaders draw upon to create the link between corporeal and statepower in the modern era. It is evident in the old Leni Riefenstahl filmsglorifying the Nazi regime; in the demonstrated health of American

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presidents when they jog in public, throw out the first pitch to start abaseball season, and invite American champions in all sports to theWhite House; and in Castro’s greeting of Olympic champions at theairport. The dynamism, energy, power, and discipline evident in ath-letes’ bodies become the dynamism, power, and strength of not juststate leaders but the state itself.

The use of athletes’ bodies as iconic representations of the vitality ofthe state was not directed solely at a state’s population. It also provideda vehicle for legitimization among other states in the global politicaleconomy. A principal means for accomplishing state recognition in thelate twentieth century was to excel in an international sporting com-petition, most especially the Olympics (Hoberman 1984). It wasthrough this route that socialist states initially gained internationalrecognition in global political bodies. East Germany’s dramaticsuccesses in the 1948 Olympic Games led to its recognition by otherinternational bodies such as the United Nations. Similarly, the SovietUnion’s emphasis on sporting achievements not only reproduced therivalries of the Cold War but provided a tangible result in which it reg-ularly outperformed its rivals (Riordan 1999). Indeed, it was the onlyarena in which the Soviet bloc was able to demonstrate superiorityover the world’s industrialized capitalist nations (Riordan 1993: 42).Defeating an athlete from a rival country provided a ready-made sym-bolic discourse articulating the superiority not only of one athlete overanother but the superiority of one political and economic system overanother within the Cold War context.

Like all socialist states, from its inception Cuba has relied heavilyon the symbolic capital of its sporting prowess, most especially itsathletes’ international successes, to legitimate the state’s presence inthe global community of states. The Revolutionary Cuban state madeexplicit use of sport from its early days and continues to make explicituse of sport in a variety of ways. Victorious guerilla leaders demon-strated their Cubanness by engaging in exhibition baseball games andattending the International League Championship finals betweenHavana and Minneapolis in the first heady months of the Revolution’striumph. These initial symbolic gestures of leaders’ participation inpopular sporting events reinforced the discourse that the revolutionwas in fact Cuban. Indeed, the leaders credited sport for training themfor guerrilla warfare.

Do you know how we learned to fight the war? You can’t believe that welearned to fight the war in the Sierra Maestra; we learned to fight thewar when we were young men like you all. Do you know how? Do youwant me to tell you? Well, we learned to fight the war playing baseball,

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Cuban Sport and State Legitimacy 201

playing basketball, playing soccer; we played all sports, swam in the sea,swam in the rivers and climbed mountains (Castro quoted in RuizAguilera 1991: 93).3

The Revolutionary state did more than just use sport in a symbolicmanner, however. Prior to the Revolution, sport was racially,geographically, and economically segregated across the island withmore opportunities for the urban, white elites in Havana than anyoneelse. The new government created the Instituto Nacional de Deportes,Educación Física y Recreación (INDER)4 on 23 February 1961, to over-see and develop all aspects of sport and recreation, from children’sphysical education to the development of international championshipquality athletes.

One of INDER’s first acts was to organize a national baseball teamto play in the 1962 World Championships in San José, Costa Rica.Cuba dominated the tournament, reinforcing the sentiment at homethat Cuban baseball was the best in the world. Cuba had never wonan international tournament in any sport before the Revolution.Cuba’s previous success was limited to a handful of professional base-ball players and a couple of boxers. The only Olympic success came atthe turn of the twentieth century from a Cuban fencer, Ramón Fonst,who lived and trained in Paris. Successful international athletessimply were not plentiful on the island because sporting facilities andopportunities were not readily available to the majority of the Cubanpopulace before 1959. Sport as a system was virtually nonexistent atthe advent of the Revolution. Starting with a few hundred facilitiesscattered throughout the major cities of Cuba, INDER has methodicallyconstructed sport facilities throughout the country to provide a venue forall aspiring athletes. With nearly 10,000 venues built by 1990 for a vari-ety of sports, the state literally constructed the infrastructure required toinculcate the bodily practices and values Revolutionary leaders desired.Concentrating particularly on youth sport and children’s physicaleducation, many of these facilities cater to a broad age range and culti-vate not only necessary physical skills but also help to instil socialistideals, such as volunteerism, dedication, and sacrifice.

In addition to providing numerous mass participation programs forthe Cuban populace, since 1960 INDER has used those programs toidentify likely talent for development into world-class athletes, whowould demonstratively prove the vitality of the Cuban state. Sincethat initial success in San José, Cuban sport has dominated interna-tional tournaments, frequently winning medals and championships ina variety of disciplines. Men such as Teofilo Stevenson and AlbertoJuantorena and women like Ana Fidel Quiroz became more than simply

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Olympic medalists. The personal qualities of Cuban athletes becomequalities of the state embodied in the athletes. They are no longer per-sonal attributes but social attributes—attributes of all of socialistCuba.

Embodying the Revolution, Cuban athletes represent the power,strength, tenacity, and youth that is required for world-class sport.The twentieth-century socialist world was always presented as ayoung one that stood at the brink of a “happy era . . . that belongs tochildren” (Roubal 2003: 21). It is no coincidence that Cuba’s interna-tional athletes are euphemistically and ideologically referred to andrevered as the “Children of the Revolution.” The state begets theseathletes upon the nation who become the product of this union whilesimultaneously these “children” become the fetish of the state. As chil-dren, these athletes are stripped of any social power their individualbodies may be able to produce in Cuban society while simultaneouslycoming to represent a broader affirmation of the nation-state asauthority figure. In a dialectical manner, the athletes’ youth, power,tenacity, and dynamism become emblematic of the social processes thestate is attempting to engineer, which are in turn confirmed by thesocialist system’s ability to produce world-class athletes whose skill,determination, and strength are the result of their upbringing, train-ing, and overall love of the state. Furthermore, the state retains anauthority over athletes’ lives that renders the athletes politicallysilent and powerless precisely because the state makes all importantdecisions for them as any child’s parental figure would do. This discur-sive construction remained unchallenged until outside circumstancesforced officials to reconsider the roles sport plays in Cuban society andathletes to reassess their position in Revolutionary society.

New rules: The post-Soviet era

The Cuban state’s position changed rapidly and dramatically in the1990s. The sudden shift in the global political economic contextdramatically affected domestic Cuban affairs resulting in what becameknown as El Periodo Especial or The Special Period in Times of Peace.This crisis became a struggle for survival at every level of Cuban soci-ety, from the state down to the everyday concerns of individualCubans, as it effectively amounted to war-time rationing withoutstate-level hostilities. Individual responses resulted in increasinglydiverse strategies involving the movement of capital away fromcentralized state control. Responses to the implosion of the Cuban econ-omy also varied widely from industry to enterprise. Some processesbegun under the Rectification Process were accelerated while others

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Cuban Sport and State Legitimacy 203

were abandoned (compare Azicri 2000: 20–49 with Cole 1998). Thesestate-led adjustments in the 1980s were a response to shifting globaland domestic economic contexts and included the diversification of for-eign trading partners and of foreign investment in Cuban industryand the creation of new enterprises to specifically attract and exploitforeign investment, capital, and expertise.

The demise of the Soviet-led economic bloc resulted in the loss offrom 80 to 85 percent of Cuba’s external trade and 50 percent of itspurchasing power (Carmona Baez 2004: 86). All previously existingtrade agreements had been shredded, and everything was open torenegotiation thereby accelerating and rapidly transforming a processof change already under way. Foreign investment strategies concen-trated primarily on activities related to the use of natural resources,such as tourism, mining, petroleum, and agriculture (Domínguez2004; Monreal 2004; Pérez Villanueva 2004). Newly created enter-prises, while remaining state-owned, were not centrally controlledentities; rather, they represented diverse strategies in which minis-tries competed with one another for highly sought after hard currency.Tourism replaced sugar as the island’s primary source of hard cur-rency (Monreal 2002). Tourism in particular became a major field ofcompetition between the armed forces and the Ministry of Interior,both of which set up companies (Gaviota and Cubanacan) to developCuba’s burgeoning tourism trade. Prices were mandated by the stateso that these companies could not compete domestically for tourists’money while they are in Cuba. Instead, each competes with its rivalsfor transnational corporations’ financing and expertise within the glo-bal tourism industry and through the marketing of tourist packagesoutside of Cuba. Despite this shift from an agricultural to a serviceeconomy, the country essentially remains an exporter of naturalresources.

The Cuban state positioned itself, through its various institutions,to act as the primary distributor of imports within the domestic econ-omy while maintaining a monopoly of exports in the global economy,thereby functioning as a “gatekeeper state” (Corrales 2004). Suchstates fragment the economy into different sectors of varying profit-ability and then determine which citizens shall have access to eachrespective sector. By doing so, state officials solidify and even increasetheir control of the small and profitable sectors connected to foreigncurrencies. As a gatekeeper, the payoff for cooperating with the stateelicits loyalty by controlling access to those sectors involved in foreigntrade (e.g., tourism, agriculture, music, and biotechnology).5 Theestablishment of such a state requires a transformation of partyapparatchiks into business managers of their specific industry, and

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behind such reforms high-ranking government officials concentratetheir own power by determining who can benefit from market activitiesand by how much.

Managers pursued a variety of strategies both to increase efficiencyand to create hard currency income for their specific industries. Thesesame state-owned institutions also controlled all hard currency earn-ings of Cuban products sold overseas, including labor, by acting as thecentral employment agency for foreign firms desiring Cuban laboreither in or outside Cuba. In so doing, state institutions tapped intoessential products vital to the Cuban economy, such as remittancesand tourism, through the introduction of dollar stores providingscarce goods, and by entering into joint ventures with foreign firmswilling to invest in Cuba, again with an emphasis on tourism (Espino1994; Henthorne and Miller 2003.) By 1993 all state-run enterprises,including sport, had to become economically viable or face being shutdown.

All sport industries were supervised directly by INDER until 1993when INDER officials decreed that each sport had to become economi-cally viable for its continuation. In response to the circumstances ofthe Special Period, INDER officials created a state-owned corporation,CubaDeportes, S.A., whose purpose was to turn Cuba’s prolific sportsenterprises into profit-making enterprises in the global market.Recognizing that the hard-line position of “Socialism or death!” waslikely to end with the death of socialism in Cuba, the Cuban governmententered into joint ventures with multinational sporting goods compa-nies to cover the costs of Cuba’s national teams competing in interna-tional competition. The primary functions of this corporation were tonegotiate contracts and deal with the import-export aspects of allsports related business for INDER. Officials at CubaDeportes adoptedspecific strategies that drew upon Cuba’s recognized sports expertiseby exporting its highly educated, trained, and skilled sport workerswhile shutting down the export aspects of the country’s sporting goodsmanufacturing.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba exported its baseball equip-ment to other Latin American countries. Pablo, one of the many salesagents for CubaDeportes, insisted that the quality of these goods wassufficient to compete with Mizuno, Wilson, and Rawlings, three majorsporting goods manufacturers. This sales strategy had success: the Cen-tral American and Caribbean Games chose to use Cuban equipment inthe 1970s instead of Rawlings. But Cuba’s repositioning in the globalmarket of sporting goods and the policy that all industries must beself-sufficient in terms of hard currency resulted in the termination ofthe exportation of sporting goods, according to Pablo. Batos brand is

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still produced for domestic use in the Cuban leagues but is no longerexported, and production levels have been seriously curtailed.

Prior to the Special Period, the Cubans had provided all of theirown training facilities and equipment or acquired it from other social-ist states. But as the economy continued deteriorating, CubaDeportesentered into various agreements with sporting goods companies to fundCuba’s participation in international tournaments. These agreementswere presented to the public as taking advantage of Cuba’s athletictalents to promote socialist ideals through the patriotic fervor of Cuba’sinternational athletes. The apparent glaring contradiction of capitalistcorporations sponsoring socialist athletes so they could train outsideof Cuba and compete for the prestige of Cuba in international eventswas a compromise that the Cuban sports authorities reluctantlymade. Despite this compromise, these authorities averred that theacceptance of corporate sponsorship was not a change in ideology but ameans of exploiting the capitalist system to extend their socialistnational agenda. Conrado Martínez,6 then president of INDER, saidthat there was nothing extraordinary in this dramatic shift.

What is new is the name of the firm on the shirts of our athletes duringthe long European season of competition. We are taking advantage ofpossibilities that they offer us, thanks to the world class of our sport,and that we threw away previously. We’ll continue to do this wheneverit won’t hurt Cuban sport. What will be tried is the exploitation of acharacteristic advertising path that does not imply a change in our poli-tics or that our athletes will be sports merchants.

Despite protests that such a maneuver was in no way a compromise ofsocialist values, these agreements between state and sporting goodscorporations clearly produced contradictions in Cuban socialist ideol-ogy and in individuals’ economic realities within Cuba. For example,recognizing the vicarious value various organizations garnered fromthe Cubans’ presence at international sports festivals, Cuban officialsnegotiated deals with international governing bodies like the Interna-tional Olympic Committee and with transnational corporations todefray the costs of sending a representative contingent.

On those occasions when negotiations failed, the Cubans refused toparticipate, even in events in which they had a long illustrioushistory. One such instance was the 2002 Central American andCaribbean Games in San Salvador, El Salvador. Cuban authoritiesrefused to send athletes to El Salvador because of alleged threats ofviolence from the disaffected minority centered in Miami, Florida, butsome observers suspected that the Cubans also feared the risk of

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prominent athletes’ defections.7 It remained unacknowledged thatmany of the Cuban athletes who would have participated in thoseGames did not have sponsorship deals in place for this particularevent because many of their contracts had expired and renewals werestill being negotiated.8 In short, Cuban non-attendance was aneconomic decision and not a political one in which any potential gainsin symbolic capital were heavily outweighed by the economic costs ofparticipation.

Today, transnational sporting goods corporations continue to supplyCuba’s elite athletes with their equipment and travel costs. The seem-ingly rapid acceptance of corporate sponsors for Cuba’s nationalsquads shows the degree of erosion in the socialist discourse of stateofficials in the face of practical needs. While the degree to which capi-talist practices have penetrated Cuban society is a provocative anddebatable question (Pérez-López 1997; Peters and Scarpaci 1998;Jatar Hausmann 1999; Peters 2000; Togores and García 2004;Barbassa 2005), it is abundantly clear that Cuban sports authoritieshave maneuvered themselves and their sports into lucrative contractswith a variety of multinational corporations. The irony is that thesecontracts place Cuban bureaucrats, identified by party apparatchiksas “good Cuban socialists,” in positions where they can exploit theirconnections in a capitalist environment. These administrators negotiatemulti-million dollar contracts with some of the largest transnationalcorporations in the world acting as agents of the state. In doing so,they enter the capitalist workplace while the state maintains itscontrol over the local economy, thereby assisting the state’s mainte-nance of its control over the availability of imports in Cuba’s domesticeconomy. As a result Cuban administrators find themselves in the dif-ficult yet potentially lucrative position of having personal contactswith multi-million dollar corporations and access to consumer goodsand brands desired by Cuban consumers in the domestic market, allwhile presenting a façade of socialist ideals.

Unlike other industries that have entered into joint ventures,however, the Cuban sports industry does not involve the importation ofgoods or services. There are no signs of such institutional agreementswith sporting goods companies in Cuba. The marginal visibility ofsporting goods is primarily evident when returning individuals bringback commodities for familial consumption. Sporting goods retailersestablished a commercial presence in 2001, yet the prices of such goodsare far beyond the means of the vast majority of Cubans. Instead, therelationship is most prominently evident when Cuba competes in inter-national tournaments, although Cuba has not hosted a significantinternational sporting event since 1991.9 In a reversal of the usual joint

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venture structure, sponsorship agreements between CubaDeportes andvarious transnational sporting goods corporations involve the provisionof Cuban services overseas—that is, athletes in competition, inexchange for advertising on a globally recognized product of high qual-ity, Cuban athletes. Sponsorship has become an important incomegenerator for Cuba’s sports programs. The Japanese firm Yaohanfunded the women’s national volleyball team, who were OlympicChampions in Barcelona, in the mid-1990s. Mizuno, a Japanese sport-ing goods firm, has provided the national baseball team’s equipment,including bats, spikes, gloves, and uniforms, over the last decade. TheSpanish company Larios initially funded the training and otherexpenses incurred by the Cuban track and field teams during the 1993and 1994 European track and field seasons, only to be replaced byAdidas in subsequent years. Adidas took on the entire sponsorship ofall Cuban national teams in 2001, including baseball.

The pervasive acceptance of corporate sponsors of Cuban sportbecame glaringly evident at a 1999 exhibition baseball game betweenthe Cuban and Venezuelan national squads. This exhibition game wasrife with open political symbolism as the purpose of the game was tocelebrate the growing friendship between Cuba and Venezuela,especially the burgeoning relationship between Fidel Castro and HugoChávez. Both heads of state took active roles in the spectacle. Castromanaged the Cuban side while Chávez actually took part in the gameby both pitching and playing first base. Each head of state also ledtheir respective contingents onto the field of play prior to the gameitself. As Castro led the Cuban national team onto the diamond inEstadio Latinoamericano, he wore the team’s warm-up jacket andbaseball cap. The cap was identical to the ones the Cuban team worewhen they played the Baltimore Orioles in an exhibition series earlierthat year. Those red caps bore two symbols: the prominent white “C”on the front and on the left side, and just above the ear, the corporatelogo of New Era Corporation, a baseball cap manufacturer who providedthe caps expressly for the Baltimore-Cuba series. That Castro wouldbe seen wearing any article of clothing with a capitalist corporate logoon it is striking. It is even more suggestive that he did so in front ofover 50,000 Cubans in the stadium. Even more striking is Cubans’apparent nonchalance to Castro appearing in national gear that hadmore capitalist symbols than national ones. Further evidence of thisshift was perceptible during Castro’s recent convalescence in 2006–2007while he recovered from stomach surgery. Videos offering proof thathe still lived showed him in a Cuban tracksuit with the Adidas logoreadily apparent. The presence of a capitalist transnational corporatelogo remained ignored.

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The breadth of transnational corporate penetration of the Cubaneconomy and the state’s active role in trying to limit the extent of thispenetration is striking when it directly affects a pillar on which thestate’s legitimacy rests. Corporate sponsorship is not the only aspectof capitalist transformation of the Cuban sports industry. A relatedyet separate strategy being pursued simultaneously is the exportationof Cuban expertise. This strategy involves the exportation of Cubansports expertise in the form of both athletes competing in foreignleagues and coaches working for a variety of foreign sports programsat the Olympic and professional level.

The extent of this export of Cuban coaching expertise is difficult toascertain. Statistics are sketchy and often contradictory. For example,Pettavino and Pye report that there were 150 Cuban coaches workingoverseas in 1992 (1994: 150). Yet in 1997 interviews with CubaDeportesofficials, they provided evidence showing that there were 150 Cubansport specialists working in Mexico alone in preparation for the 1992Olympic Games in Barcelona. Since Barcelona, the scope of Cubanmigrants working overseas in sport has expanded both in terms ofnumbers and destinations. Cubans have worked with a large varietyof Olympic contingents. The Irish, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Spanish,and Mexican boxing teams have all had Cuban coaches since thecollapse of the USSR. In addition to boxing, several Olympic judo,baseball, and volleyball teams have had Cuban coaches. In 1998 RadioHavana reported that in 1997 there were over 600 trainers andcoaches working in thirty-three countries, including Spain, Italy,South Africa, Ghana, Indonesia, and Japan. Another official atCubaDeportes told me Cuban coaches in volleyball, track and field,boxing, and baseball, primarily, were working in approximately sixtydifferent countries in 1998. For baseball alone, according to CubaDe-portes representatives and Cuban journalists, former baseball playersnow work as coaches teaching baseball skills and knowledge in Mexico,Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Italy, and Japan. Sports personnelwere still exported as of 2000, including an entire soccer team that wassent to Germany to play as a team in a minor German professionalleague, three levels below the Bundesliga, the premier professionalleague in Germany.

Overall, though, the majority of coaches for all sports worked inLatin America, with over 100 coaches in Mexico and over ninety inColombia per year during the 1990s. Since 1999, many have gone toVenezuela because of the increasingly amicable political and economicrelationship between the two governments. In 2001 there were as manyas 600 sports specialists working in Venezuela as part of an economicagreement that brings an estimated half billion dollars–worth of

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oil per year. Journalists and CubaDeportes officials reported in morerecent interviews estimates between five and ten thousand sports per-sonnel working in Venezuela alone in 2006 with another estimatedthree and a half thousand in Mexico. More recently, according toCubaDeportes officials, Cuba’s sports programs (baseball, boxing, vol-leyball, and others) now operate self-sufficiently—that is, solely oneach program’s hard currency earnings from these labor exports andits joint venture sponsorships.

The future of Cuban sport

The economic viability of Cuban sports programs is essential forCuba’s national teams to remain important symbols of the state.Cuban sport has undergone significant restructuring due to circum-stances beyond the control of state officials. These changes werecarefully considered because of the intimate connections between thestate and sport. Some sports have lost their preeminence in Cuba.INDER has heavily invested in others because of the perceived lucra-tive contracts that Cuban success might bring. Soccer is one suchexample. Soccer was never a popular sport in Cuba, yet in recent yearsthe Cuban soccer program, through international exchanges with theArgentines, has rapidly improved. The ultimate goal, here, is to makethe FIFA World Cup finals, a quadrennial tournament that rivals theOlympics in worldwide attention. Cuba narrowly lost out to makingthe cut for Germany 2006.10 Considering that fifteen years ago Cubadid not even field a national team in international competitions,Cuban soccer is rapidly becoming another success.

Equally, Cuban officials realized that any symbolic capital producedthrough athletic success needed to be converted to economic capitalwherever possible. The exportation of Cuban expertise prior to 1991consisted solely of cultural exchanges designed to promote goodwillbetween countries. After the collapse of the Soviet trading bloc, acquir-ing hard currency quickly became paramount and Cubans needed to tapinto existing resources that did not require years of development orgreat initial outlay of capital. They needed immediate, lucrativeexchanges in which hard currency could be brought into the govern-ment’s coffers. In effect, the state became a sports agency, representingboth athletes and coaches to potential overseas clients. Cuban athletesand coaches leapt at the chance to earn hard currency and live overseas,and even though a minimum of eighty percent of any salary earnedwent to CubaDeportes, individuals retained the remaining percentageafter their costs of living overseas were subtracted. This amount,invariably, was significantly more than their annual salaries in Cuba.

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The negotiated relationships with various transnational sportinggoods companies were something of a Faustian pact necessitated bythe economic circumstances of the post-Soviet era. The use of equip-ment with prominent capitalist corporate symbols subsequently callsthe relevance of Cuban sport into question as legitimate symboliccapital in the implementation of statecraft. Such equipment isintended for use solely outside of Cuba, yet, even so, sports officials areacutely aware that the sporting nation of Cuba can hardly be repre-sented by a corporation. So while conceding to global realities that theycannot afford to provide everything their vaunted sports programsrequire and maintain the stratospheric level of athletic success thecountry has enjoyed for nearly five decades, they do recognize that ininternational competitions, Cuba must remain prominent, athleticallyand on their uniforms, because this symbolic capital remains centralto the legitimating constructs of the state.

The marketing and exportation of Cuban sports skills and knowl-edge is part of the transformation of the class structure that Cubansociety has been undergoing these past fifteen years (Barbería et al.2004; Prieto 2004). Many Cubans have changed careers and made useof a variety of strategies to obtain hard currency. Although returningCubans engaged in sport do not have the same domestic opportunitiesfor earning hard currency as others do (because of their requiredtraining regimens), the chance to work overseas provides an opportu-nity for substantial changes of fortune and, ultimately, class mobility.

The costs of this reorientation are and will be significant. Havingthe chance to live and work overseas provides many Cubans withopportunities that the majority of Cubans do not have. Once overseas,the state has less control over an individual’s movements, and severalCubans have taken advantage of that situation by refusing to returnto the island. Already several prominent Cubans now compete forother countries. Others have returned significantly wealthier in rela-tion to their comrades and neighbors. In a move that reinforces theseemerging class-based divisions yet is designed to counteract theincreasingly frequent departures of elite athletes in their prime,INDER announced that effective 1 March 2007, any Olympic or WorldChampionship medalist would receive a monthly pension for life. Theamounts vary depending upon which medal the athlete earns. Goldmedalists will be eligible for an additional monthly stipend of 300convertible Cuban pesos (CUC) or 1,000 pesos (moneda nacional) paidin the currency of the athlete’s choice. Silver medalists will receive 200CUC or 700 pesos and bronze medalists 150 CUC or 700 pesos.11

Whether this stipend is to be paid per medal or is based upon the mostvalued one an athlete earns in his or her career remains to be seen.

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Although this new policy has the potential to affect many of Cuba’smost highly prized athletes, it will have little effect on its baseballplayers because the International Olympic Committee removed base-ball from its sanctioned events. Consequently, baseball players havevirtually no opportunities to earn this stipend because there is noregular World Championship–caliber event for baseball unless therecently inaugurated World Baseball Classic achieves such status.12

The costs will also directly impact Cuban sport and its success ininternational tournaments. Cuban coaches training foreign athletes invarious disciplines are bound to affect Cuban sport itself. They areexpert at producing world-class athletes with limited resources, some-thing many national sporting bodies desire. It would not be surprisingto see other countries close the gap between Cuban performance levelsand their own in the next decade or so. If the frequency and level ofCuban success at international competition lessens, then the value ofsport as symbolic capital is also likely to be affected. Such a developmentwould obviously impact Cuban sport’s ability to serve as a legitimatingsymbol of the socialist state.

At the same time, the future of Cuban sport is only partially depen-dent on its ongoing association with the current socialist state. It ispresumptuous to believe that Castro’s eventual death will lead to thecollapse of the socialist state and a post-socialist era in Cuba. Whateverform the post-Castro Cuban state takes, the various relationships thathave been cultivated with transnational corporations and interna-tional non-governmental bodies are built on personal relationshipsthat middle-level administrators have fostered over the past decade.These particular individuals are not essential for the maintenance ofthe state and could very easily transition into new roles if the socialiststate were to dissipate. It is not safe to assume that the death of Castrowould herald a transnational capitalist free-for-all for the services ofvarious athletes and coaches managed by those same middle-levelbureaucrats. Such a dilution of the value of Cuban sport would leaveany future state with much less symbolic capital to draw upon in theimplementation of statecraft. Thus, it is likely that state officialswould act to protect Cuban sport from unfettered depredations bytransnational corporations.

Notes

Received 12 February 2006; accepted 22 January 2007.

Support for this article was provided by the British Academy, which permitted the mostrecent fieldwork in Cuba. Early versions were much improved by critical commentsfrom Susan Brownell, Tracey Heatherington, Martin Bruhns, Eriberto Lozada, and

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Hastings Donnan. I also thank the two excellent anonymous reviewers who providedsuggestions for improvement and additional resources. As always, any errors are mineand mine alone.

Address correspondence to Thomas F. Carter, Chelsea School, University of Brighton,Hillbrow, 1 Denton Road, Eastbourne BN20 7SR, United Kingdom. E-mail: t.f.carter@bton.ac.uk

1. There is a specific temporal and spatial geography distinct to each revolution,whether or not it is socialist (Knight 1994: 41). For the purposes of this article, mycomments are restricted to socialist revolutions.

2. For an example of a non-socialist state deploying sport in a top-down approach seeSilverstein’s discussion of how the French state used sport to attempt to control dis-contented ethnic minority groups in France (2004: 121–150).

3. All translations are my own.4. The National Institute of Sport, Physical Education and Recreation.5. For recent discussions of how each of the mentioned industries (other than sport)

are structured in this manner, see the following: For tourism, consult GarcíaJiménez 2005 and Colantonio and Potter 2006; for agriculture, see Roman 2004 andBas 2006; for music and art, read Thomas 2005, Remba 2006, and especiallyFernandes 2006; for the biotech industry, see Majoli Viani 2005.

6. Because Martínez was a public figure who made similar public statements reportedin the Cuban press, I use his actual name and title at that time. Similarly, theOlympic medallists mentioned earlier are internationally recognized public figures,so their real names are used in this article as well. Any other Cuban mentioned inthis article has been given a pseudonym.

7. The rate of athlete defection has gradually increased in scope and frequency overthe past decade. Initially, such defections were limited to a few veteran baseballplayers seeking riches at the end of their careers or youngsters simply seeking acareer as a baseball player. The practice has since spread to boxers, basketball, vol-leyball, and soccer players as well as judo practitioners.

8. The Cubans did participate in the Pan American Games held in Santo Domingo,Dominican Republic, the following year. Sponsorship deals had been finalized by then.

9. Cuba hosted the Olympic baseball qualification tournament in 2006 for the 2008Beijing Olympic Games, which did allow Cubans to gain first-hand experience ofseeing the Cuban national team in sponsored uniforms.

10. Cuba was eliminated in a CONACAF quarter-final. The three CONACAF represen-tatives in Germany were the United States, Mexico, and Trinidad and Tobago.

11. While the exchange rate between the two currencies is roughly 20 pesos to 1CUC, the choice is not based solely on equivalent currency values. In the shortterm it makes more sense to choose CUC. But there is an inherent risk in choos-ing CUC because it is a fictional currency of the state that has no value outsideof Cuba. The CUC could easily be eliminated, which would also eliminateexchanges, including payments by the state, based on it. Unless contracted by aforeign employer, a Cuban is paid in moneda nacional. Imported goods and tour-ist services are priced in CUC. Foreigners are expected to pay CUC prices forservices that Cubans also obtain, but Cubans usually pay in moneda nacional.For example, entrance to the Museo de la Revolución is 5.00 CUC for tourists but2.00 pesos for Cuban citizens. However, this is not the case when dealing withimported consumer goods, such as designer clothing, electronic appliances, ormobile phones.

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12. For example, boxers who medal in the World Amateur Boxing Championships orsprinters who medal in the World Athletics Championships would earn this stipend.Although there is a World Baseball Cup, there is no World Championship that isequivalent to, say, the FIFA World Cup or other globally popular international tour-nament. The World Baseball Classic was played in 2006 in the United States andwas organized and funded by Major League Baseball.

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