Ponente
Descripción
Amateur and professional sports have played a secondary but influential role in US-Cuba bilateral relations since the onset of the Revolution, but that role has become increasingly visible and commodified over the past three decades. As the Cold War becomes an increasingly forgotten relic of US life, sport remains one of the few areas in which Americans of all ages and backgrounds continue to be reminded of the US’s failed foreign policy against Cuba. Whether at the Summer Olympics, World Baseball Classic, World Series of Boxing, or other international competitions, the anachronistic Cold War framing of US-Cuban sporting rivalries have given them outsized hemispheric significance while driving up Cuban diasporic interest, particularly in the United States. Despite earlier efforts at achieving US-Cuba détente through sport (most notably in the 1970s and 1990s), this presentation argues that the pursuit of engagement through professional, semipro, and Olympic sport today offers little potential for sustained political change. Rather, both major US political parties have largely punted on US-Cuba policy, responding to ongoing crises (including the huge outflow of Cuban migrants to the US over the past few years) with limited policy solutions. Sport rivalries have thus become window dressing, hiding the inequities of a US athletic infrastructure that benefits from decades of global dominance. The US-based media narrative, which focuses on stories of individual success, contributes to a façade that the US and Cuba are equal opponents rather than underlying the brutal costs of a decades-long embargo on all facets of Cuban society.
