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Cuba has some of the world’s best volleyball players, but none of them are helping the national team, once one of the most feared. |
Instead, they are caught in a sporting Cold War.
Cuba’s women won the Olympic gold medal three times in a row between 1992 and 2000 and were fourth at the 2008 Beijing Games.
But they failed to qualify for the 2012 Games in London and suffered five straight defeats at the world championships just ending in Italy, against minnows such as Azerbaijan, Belgium and Puerto Rico.
The country’s men were world championship finalists in 2010 but also failed to qualify for the London Olympics and only managed 12th place at the world championships in Poland last month.
Most observers blame the rigid attitude of Cuba’s sporting authorities, under the close control of the communist government of President Raul Castro. The national federation considers the 50 top players now earning handsome wages in leagues in Italy, Russia and Turkey as “deserters” to be banished from the national side.
The spikers have followed top athletes from baseball and boxing, Cuba’s other national sports, in escaping the island’s economic crisis by going abroad.
Osmany Juantorena won four world club championships with Italian side Trentino, but is excluded from the national side. The same goes for the 2.06-metre (6ft 9 inch) Robertlandy Simon, now in the South Korean league; Wilfredo Leon, with Zenit Kazan in Russia; and Raidel Hierrezuelo with Halkank Ankara in Turkey.
Women’s stars Rosir Calderon, Nancy Carrillo and Yanelis Santos are central figures in Russian sides Dinamo Krasnodar, Omichka Omsk and Club Leningradka in St Petersburg, respectively.
Their absence leaves Cuba to rely on young, untried players and those who would not normally get a look into the once feared national team.
Time for change
The volleyball exports and officials still in the island have pleaded for a change as Cuba falls in the world rankings—the women are now 22nd, and the men are 11th, having fallen four places this year.
The national federation “must explain” why the national team does not use its best players, said Nelson Paez, a leading Cuban volleyball commentator.
“If nothing is done quickly ... we are going to drown,” warned Hierrezuelo, who was a member of the men’s team that reached the 2010 world championship final.
In 2013, federation president Ariel Sainz set up a commission to study Cuba’s collapse on the international stage.
The ministerial-level Cuban Institute of Sports said it was ready to start talks with exiled athletes to see if they could play for the national side. But nothing has been done.
Castro announced three years ago that top-level athletes would get better salaries. But they have still only gone up to a few hundred dollars a month, a pittance next to the wages being earned abroad.
Cuban authorities recently allowed some baseball players to join clubs in Mexico and Japan. But the number is small and in June, six players were kicked out of the national squad after being accused of seeking to follow the island’s baseball hero Yasiel Puig, who fled in 2012 and now stars with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Cuba won only two titles at last year’s world amateur boxing championships, an event it traditionally dominates.