Posted on March 2, 2010.
Politics and sport: Cuba Politics and sport: CUBA
By Alejandro Guevara Onofre
Like Park Chung-hee (Asia / South Korea: 1962-79) and Idi Amin Dada (Africa / Uganda: 1971-79), Fidel Castro is a sports fan and enjoys watching all types of Olympic sports. Fidel Castro visited training camps of the national team, sports schools, National Games of schools and spent time with the student-athletes and Olympic players. Since 1990, the Cuban dictatorship has spent more than $ 80 million per year in the Olympic sport. However, Cuba is no paradise Olympics. history of modern sports Cuba was marked by defections sports.
Every dictatorship has a style all her own. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo had one: Dominican music. Francois Duvalier was a: Haitian culture. Kim Jong Il has one: the cinematography. He likes movies like "Gone With the Wind", a famous American film. The dictator of North Korea has written an essay on the art of cinema. "
The regime of Idi Amin was known for torturing political prisoners, forbidding dissent and freedom of expression. Under the dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada, about 350,000 people were killed. But he loves Olympic sports like Fidel Castro Ruz. During the 1970s, he became outspoken champion of sport in the Third World. I remembered that the Ugandan team has won two gold medals, four silver and three bronze medals at the Commonwealth Games in New Zealand in 1974. Overall the Ugandan team ranked tenth, Wales, Trinidad and Tobago, Tanzania and Jamaica.
Fidel Castro said: "What has been the role of Cuba in the Olympics? What has he done? What was the fruit of our efforts to promote the health of clean sport? Olympic Games 1972, we finished 14th among 122 countries. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976-Juantorena remembers well, and if we do-finished 8th among 88 participating countries. In 1980 in Moscow we finished 4th among the 81 countries in 1992, in Spain we finished 5th in 169 countries, and Atlanta, in 1996 we finished 8th overall out of 197 countries. Could anyone refuse these figures. "But under the world's oldest surviving dictatorships, the sport has become a useful tool for women and men to gain freedom.
Certainly, Cuban sport is a story of both frustration and miracles. The Cuban government has reacted with increduly in 1980, when Roberto Urrutia, a weightlifter, unexpectedly announced his decision to seek asylum in the United States. At age 14 Urrutia made weightlifting high priority, and ten months later, he set the national record. Urrutia entered the 1975 Pan American Championships at age 18 years and has won gold medals for Cuba. In December, in Matanzas, he became the first weightlifter to Latin America for a world record. In 1976, he finally realized his dream of attending the Olympics. As Juantorena (athletics), Teofilo Stevenson (boxing) and Mireya Luis Hernandez (volleyball), Roberto Urrutia Hernandez, former member of the Communist Youth Union, was a symbol of the Cuban Revolution. Roberto, was born December 12, 1956, in Havana, won 3 gold medals at the World Weightlifting Championships in 1978 and ended the world's Soviet-year domination of international weightlifting. Certainly, he was elected Hero of the Year by Prensa Latina. Before the Moscow Olympic Games, Roberto Urrutia defected to the United States via Mexico.
In recent years we have seen a number of events take place: Taimaris Aguero, a player, came to seek freedom in Italy; Odelin Molina, an outstanding footballer of La Havana have requested political asylum in the United States States, and Dulce Tellez, a sportswoman, came to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Aguero, who at 1.77, was considered one of the best female athletes in the Americas, at age 16, she became the youngest person to be a member of the Cuban team. During the judge in the 1993 World
