Category Archives: Cuban Sports

Cuban Sports

The Summer Beach and Sea Sports Festival is taking place on Havana’s beaches

An initiative that multiplies summer options

The Summer Beach and Sea Sports Festival is taking place on Havana’s beaches until August 13

Author:  | deportes@granma.cu

august 8, 2025 08:08:10

It will be possible to compete in volleyball, field hockey, wrestling, badminton and soccer, all in their sand version, as well as sailing, apnea, aquathlon and other modalities. Photo: ACN

A party is going on these days on the beaches of Havana’s coast, with the celebration of the First Summer Sea and Beach Sports Festival, which will be held until August 13.
The inauguration took place at the Gerardo Abreu Fontán Social Worker’s Circle, in the municipality of Playa, and will also see action at the Félix Elmuza and Otto Parellada entities, and at the Villa Bacuranao and Guanabo beaches.
The activities are aimed at healthy leisure and recreation for the Cuban family during the summer season, and will include volleyball, field hockey, wrestling, badminton and soccer, all in their sand version, as well as sailing, apnea, aquathlon and other modalities.
The Festival will not only have a sports section, but will also be useful for technical training, with workshops and educational spaces.
The program, sponsored by Inder, responds not only to the promotion of a new summer initiative, but also to the precept of sport for all, always defended by our social project.
Sport is making a comeback in this summer 2025, along with other options for enjoyment, and as a platform for physical wellbeing and social cohesion.
In addition to the sports activities, ecological workshops, artistic presentations and spaces for local art have been announced, in order to guarantee options for all ages and social sectors.
The project will also be valid to promote environmental care, as it will develop sanitation and cleaning initiatives in the natural scenarios chosen as venues.
The first edition of this event will conclude with a tribute to our greatest athlete, Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, on the 99th anniversary of his birth; a well-deserved recognition to the man who put all his efforts to bring ideas like this to the people.

Cuban Sports

The national ensign in the hands of the future champions

The national ensign in the hands of the future champions

The Cuban delegation that will participate in the Junior PanThe Cuban delegation that will participate in the Junior Pan American Games in Asuncion was flagged American Games in Asuncion was flagged

Author:  | informacion@granmai.cu

august 1, 2025 08:08:23

The athletes will defend their flag in each of the facilities in Asunción. Photo: Ricardo López Hevia

Yesterday was a different experience at the Antonio Maceo Monument Complex in San Pedro. The emblematic site, located in the municipality of Bauta, in the province of Artemisa, served as a stage for the future of Cuban sports to receive the banner that will accompany them in the upcoming Junior Pan American Games in Asuncion.
Deputy Prime Minister Inés María Chapman Waugh and five-time Olympic champion Mijaín López, Hero of the Republic of Cuba, handed over the national ensign to wrestler Yainelis Sanz and rower Roberto Carlos Paz, escorted by Yisnoly López (canoeing) and Emmanuel de la Rosa (weightlifting), in a ceremony that evoked patriotic feelings in the place where the lieutenant general of the Liberator Army Antonio Maceo fell in combat.
In the presence of Yuniasky Crespo Vaquero, head of the Department of Attention to the Social Sector of the Central Committee of the Party, the taekwondoca Elianet María Crespo, and the beach volleyball player, Eblis Verane, laid a wreath in the exact place where Maceo and his aide Francisco Gómez Toro fell in combat.
The 231 talented young people who make up the Antillean delegation were summoned to defend with dignity, and with Maceo’s intransigence, the patriotic colors in each of the competition scenarios.
In Yainelis Sanz’s opinion, “being the Cuban flag bearer represents a great honor and an additional motivation to add my second title in these competitions. We know that the challenge ahead is great, but we have trained hard to achieve the best possible performance,” she told Granma.
On the other hand, the president of Inder, Osvaldo Vento, stated that “we are happy with the representation we are going to have in these Games. In the midst of a very complex scenario, the Revolution has allocated valuable resources for the preparation of our athletes. We cannot create false expectations, but we know that our athletes will give their all for Cuba in Asunción,” he said.
Asunción-2025 will be an ideal scenario to evaluate the Island’s sports reserve and achieve the highest number of qualifiers for the Lima-2027 Pan American Games. Those are the fundamental objectives, confirmed to this newspaper by José Antonio Miranda Carrera, general director of High Performance of Inder.
Cuba will only participate in 56% of the 336 events called, due to the impossibility of covering the entire critical route in most of the specialties. In the Cali-Valle-2021 edition, 29 gold medals were obtained, which meant a 13.6% of effectiveness, given that there were 212 competitors. A better parameter than Colombia (12.6%, with 386 members) and Mexico (12%, with 378).
This time, the studies of opponents and positions in the ranking show that the greatest potential to bring gold medals are centered on athletics, canoeing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting and rowing, with taekwondo, fencing, volleyball, beach volleyball, diving and table tennis, with real possibilities of climbing the podium of awards.
The political-cultural gala was also attended by Meyvis Estévez Echavarría, first secretary of the UJC National Committee, and the president of the Cuban Olympic Committee, Roberto León Richards.

Cuban Sports

The Paris Olympiad was very competitive

In the invincible arms of Mijaín, the flag arrives today at the Homeland

The Paris Olympiad was very competitive, with 63 flags at the top of the award masts, at least once, and 91 countries entered in the list of medals

Author:  | informacion@granma.cu

august 12, 2024 13:08:56

Photocomposition with photos by Ricardo Lopez Photo: Ricardo López Hevia

Paris.— There is rarely a clearer image of the differences between the rich and the poor world than that seen in the Olympic Games.
If you take the medal table of Paris-2024, or any other of the previous events, and look at the first pavilions, you will notice that it looks more like a meeting of the G20 or one of the rich nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
That is why the first gold medals in the history of St. Lucia, Dominica and Guatemala are so valuable, even though they came 124 years after the start of these Games.
The three Brazilian, two Cuban, Ecuadorian and Chilean titles, those won by the African countries, the four silver medals won by Mexico and the Colombian medals are worth a great deal. They make us from the South sit in that luxurious hall, despite the fact that we are denied the business and technological development of the sport of the great powers.
And they are worth more, because the Paris Olympiad was very competitive, with 63 flags at the top of the award masts, at least once, and with 91 countries that registered in the list of medals.
These are also reasons to celebrate today, in the Homeland, our athletes – medalists or not – who will carry, in the invincible arms of Mijaín López Núñez, the lone star flag that they defended with so much fervor and love.

Cuban Sports

He’s Known as ‘El Terrible’—and He Might Be the Greatest Olympic Athlete of All Time

He’s Known as ‘El Terrible’—and He Might Be the Greatest Olympic Athlete of All Time

Story by Robert O’Connell, Jared Diamond

PARIS—With a list of accomplishments longer than a swimming pool, Michael Phelps has a strong claim to be considered the greatest athlete in Olympic history. After all, his 23 gold medals is more than twice as many as anyone else.

But it turns out there’s another athlete, barely known to most of the sports world, who might have a better claim to that title. He stands at 6-foot-5, weighs about 290 pounds and has dedicated his life to overpowering some of the strongest men on the planet.

His name is Mijaín López—and he might be the most dominant Olympian of all time.

López is a 41-year-old Greco-Roman wrestler from Cuba who seems less like an athlete than a tall tale: as solid as a mountain, as ungraspable as air. He can’t match Phelps’s overall medal count, but he looks set to achieve one feat that neither Phelps nor anyone else at the Games has ever done before. With a victory in Tuesday’s match against Chile’s Yasmani Acosta, López would become the first person ever to win gold in the same individual Olympic event five times.

He’s Known as ‘El Terrible’—and He Might Be the Greatest Olympic Athlete of All Time© Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

“To be able to do that, it’s unheard of,” said Phelps, one of the small group of athletes to have won four times in a row. “There’s a reason why no one’s ever done it before.”

To the people unfortunate enough to have stepped into the ring with López, the remarkable streak of medals is just the beginning of his legend. Forget losing a match or settling for silver—entering the Paris Games, it had been more than a decade since he’d so much as given up a single point at the Olympics. His last gold medal, in Tokyo, came when his final opponent chose to stop competing, standing to one side and letting López raise his arms in victory.