The 30th edition of the Modern Olympic Games, which just concluded in Paris, involved 208 national Olympic teams, a refugee squad, 9,000 athletes, and some 45,000 volunteers. Millions of people from all over the world enjoyed the competitions, the emotions they evoke, and a sensational, beautiful and majestic closing spectacle featuring international stars like American actor and producer Tom Cruise, plus some one hundred acrobatic dancers who performed a futuristic number about Olympism.
Pierre de Coubertin, a French pedagogue and thinker, and the founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said in the inaugural address at the Modern Olympic Games, back in 1896: "The most important thing is not to win, but to participate, just as in life the most important thing is not triumph, but struggle; not to conquer, but to fight." At the end of this edition Thomas Bach, President of the IOC, summed up in a prayer the importance of this sporting festival in a polarized world that needs more friendship, peace, and understanding between different people, and joy and love: "The Olympic Games cannot ensure peace, but they can create a culture of peace."
The IOC emblem, a flag featuring five rings of different colours, interlaced on a white background, represents concord between the people on all the continents. Based on that original conception, the Olympic Games were considered a competition between individual athletes, not countries, so the IOC did not offer by-nation results. There are several historic examples of the subordination of sports to politics, even though it is contrary to the principles of the Olympics. Three of them include: the Olympic Games in Berlin (1936) used by Adolf Hitler to promote National Socialism; those in Moscow (1980), boycotted by the US and several allied countries; and Los Angeles (1984) boycotted by Moscow in response, along with other communist countries.
In Republican Cuba, presidents such as Gerardo Machado, Ramón Grau San Martín and Fulgencio Batista created institutions to manage sports, but none of them subordinated that activity to government power quite like Fidel Castro did after 1959.
Cuba participated for the first time in the second edition in 1900 (Athens), created the Cuban Olympic Committee in 1926, and, after the recently-concluded edition held in Paris, it has participated in 23 editions.
In Athens (1900) Cubans won a gold medal and a silver medal in fencing. In St Louis (1904) it won three gold medals in the same sport. In London and Tokyo (1948 and 1964) it won a silver at each event. In Mexico (1968) it took four silvers. It was in Munich (1972) (a year in which Cuba was admitted to the Comecon, or the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which artificially bolstered its economy through the subsidies it received) that it garnered eight medals, three of them gold. An upward trend began culminating in Barcelona (1992), where, with 176 athletes, it placed fifth on the medals board, with 31, including 11 golds.
It has been all downhill from there, due to the worsening of the crisis triggered by the loss of Soviet aid, with this decline hitting rock bottom in Paris, where, with plans for five gold medals and placing being in the top 20, Cuba fell to 32nd place, with nine medals, only two of them gold.
When a chronic crisis becomes structural, which is the Cuban case, no component of the system is immune from its effects, as is the case with sports. In the absence of freedoms, the State covers all the athletes' expenses exchange for them placing their intellects and muscles at the service of politics. And, as the inefficiency of Cuban totalitarianism forced the country to depend on Soviet aid, when it disappeared it was impossible to maintain the expenses entailed by sports.
Seven facts, absent from the rest of the delegations, illustrate the failure of Cuban sports, which are subordinated to politics:
1. Several of the 21 Cubans who competed for other countries won medals.
2. Cuba was not present in any team sport.
3. In the women's triple jump, none of the Cuban women reached the podium.
4. Of the four triple jumpers from Cuba, the only one on the official team placed eighth, while the three competing for Spain, Portugal and Italy won gold, silver and bronze.
5. In boxing, Lorem Berto Alfonso, representing Azerbaijan, knocked Julio César de La Cruz out of the competition.
6. Greco-Roman wrestler Yasmani Costa lost the gold to Mijaín López, but brought Chile its first gold in wrestling.
7. Judoka Dayle Ojeda, a member of the technical support staff, abandoned the delegation in Paris.
Cuba's debacle in Paris asks us to identify just when sports were monopolized by the State and subordinated to politics. The General Directorate of Sports, created in the 1940s, did not determine the competences of civil society, businessmen or franchises. That body, in the process of dismantling the existing institutions, was replaced on February 23, 1961 by the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER). From that moment on the State, with subsidies from the Kremlin, paid all the expenses of this activity in exchange for the loyalty of Cuba's athletes as a requirement to participate as a soldier, identified with the Homeland and the "Revolution."
In October 1975, overflowing with joy, Fidel Castro said: "If in other Latin American countries there is no social revolution, if the social revolution does not develop, no matter how much technique, no matter how many coaches they hire, no matter how many things they invent, they will not be able to enjoy the success that Cuba does in sports." His death prevented him from witnessing what happened at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Irrefutable proof of his contempt for the humanist principles of sport came in the leader of the Revolution's words on August 8, 1962 when bidding farewell to the athletes who would participate in the 9th Central American and Caribbean Games, held in Jamaica: "If any provocateur attacks a Cuban athlete, or penetrates the ranks of the Cuban athletes, or tries to grab the Cuban flag, break every bone in their body and tear out all their hair."