Demographic trends, armed conflicts, natural disasters, structural inadequacies of development, inequalities in national economies, conditions of poverty in broad sectors, inequities of an unjust and predatory world order, lack of job opportunities and, in general, the growing gap between poverty and wealth, stimulate the mobility of human beings.
I take up again the quote of Dr. Antonio Díaz Aja, director of the Center for Demographic Studies of the University of Havana, which I used a few years ago in a similar context, because, as he stated, “migratory dysfunctionality is a product of the basic contradictions of the world we live in”. Sport is no exception, it has become a means to extirpate the South of its best children; that is why many of the sending geographies were former colonies of today’s receiving ones.
Until April 2019, in football, Brazil, with 1 330 players, was the most exporting country, with presence in 147 tournaments. Argentina had more than 800 players in the English and Italian leagues. In the MLB that season, there were 256 players who were not born in the United States (28%), and 228 of them were Latin American. In basketball, the NBA had 116 players of other nationalities.
A study by the University of Maryland showed that in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 Olympic Games, more than 300 migrants won medals, or were part of a team that won medals. In the Pyeongchang-2018 Winter Olympics, 178 athletes participated for countries where they were not born.
Cuba has already had Olympic champions under a flag that is not its own, such as Pedro Pablo Pichardo, in Tokyo-2020, in the triple jump; in Paris-2024, the now Portuguese will have as rival his fellow countryman Andy Diaz, now Spanish. In 2016, we saw Osmani Juantorena in the Italian volleyball sextet, and in July the same will happen with the “Pole” Wilfredo Leon. In the Pan American Games in Santiago de Chile, there were several duels between Cubans representing their homeland and those representing another.
But the “story” of the Cubans on the world sports map is longer. Athletes from the largest of the Antilles have been victims of the crime of human trafficking; there are countless examples of baseball players who have been, and still are, victims of this scourge. Discrediting campaigns and incitement to desertion of delegations have been organized, also through crime, in the venues of multisport events, such as Central American (Ponce-1993), Pan American (Indianapolis-1987 and Winnipeg-1999) and Olympic (Rio de Janeiro-2016), without the International Olympic Committee (IOC) showing any ethical stance.
Today, the IOC, and the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, are mixing oil with vinegar. To put it more clearly, they are making themselves accomplices of the aggressive and criminal policy of the United States against Cuba, which has used the theft of talent and organized irregular migration – with all its human cost on top, because life does not interest them -, with the aim of discrediting it, attacking one of its great conquests: its sports movement.
Since 2016, the IOC, in a beautiful and humane initiative, created the Olympic Refugee Team (EOR). The first retinue participated in the Games of that year, in Rio de Janeiro; the second, in Tokyo-2020, and Paris will host the third. It is a delegation made up basically of young people uprooted by war or persecuted for reasons of ethnicity, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinions.
For more than 75 years, the Palestinian people have been victims of this persecution, violence and death. What is happening in Gaza today is happening in full view of the world, and the displaced people in Rafah make up half of the population of that region. But in none of the three editions has a Palestinian been in the EOR.
In the three rosters, including the one that will participate in the French capital, there are 75 athletes; 58 of them, 77%, reside in countries of the developed world. Of those who will go to the City of Light, only three live in underdeveloped nations.
Then, the presence of two Cuban athletes in the EOR is not serious, because it is based on a lie: Fernando Dayán Jorge, Olympic champion in Tokyo-2020, in canoeing, and Ramiro Mora Romero, in weightlifting.
Can one be a refugee, according to the concept of the United Nations, and be an Olympic, World, Pan-American and Central American and Caribbean champion, at only 22 years of age? Can one achieve that being a persecuted or uprooted by war? The IOC and the UNHCR are wrong or lend themselves to the farce against Cuba, which defends the Olympic Refugee Team, because it should be an expression of peace through sport, one of the noblest ideas in the face of the injustice that these people live.
Cuba has not claimed the presence of its nationals with other delegations, when they comply with the provisions of the Olympic Charter. But not only that, it has helped, as it has just done with the Chilean wrestling team, the preparation of those who were born in its entrails and now compete for that geography, as the gladiator Yasmani Acosta. Cuba proudly receives the dedication of those who live abroad and wear the national jersey, as did the baseball Team Asere.
What it does not accept, and that is why it denounces it, is manipulation. We Cubans are not surprised that campaigns against our country are fed, but the fact that the International Olympic Committee and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees appear in these dirty maneuvers is outrageous.
It is not Cuba that uses sports as politics, it is the empire defeated for 65 years that resents that, after wanting to starve it to death, to leave it without fuel, to speculate with its finances against an entire people, a black man like Mijaín López, or one like Idalys Ortiz rises to the top of the podium, reserved for the rich world, for those who exploit.
The Olympic Charter states that: “As sport is an activity that is part of society, sports organizations within the Olympic Movement must apply the principle of political neutrality”. But this is the most violated precept.