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The (Soft) Power of Sport: The Comprehensive and Contradictory Strategies of Cuba's Sport-Based Internationalism
Abstract
The Cuban government creates and seeks opportunities to engage in collaboration, diplomacy, commerce, and trade in order to pursue its own concepts of progressive international development, which involves garnering much needed hard currency and political benefits for its national interests. Such strategies include the organisation and deployment of sport and physical activity programmes. Based on our analysis of, and interactions with, Cuba's Ministry of Sport — the Instituto Nacional de Deportes, Educación Física y Recreación (INDER) — we suggest that INDER pursues both sport development and sport for development — at home and abroad — while simultaneously seeking economic benefits through its for-profit enterprise division named Cubadeportes. The implications of this comprehensive and sometimes contradictory approach are considered, in terms of politics, policy, internationalism and the place of sport therein.
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This form of ‘cooperation’ is a long-standing dimension of Cuban foreign policy. Rarely does Cuba provide services free of charge to other nations (except in cases of natural disaster). Instead, through bilateral agreements Cuba works out payment schedules for professional services that can suit the capacities of the host nation. For example, Venezuela pays Cuba for the receipt of professionals, but also offers Havana preferred prices on petroleum purchases. South Africa pays large sums for the receipt of Cuban health experts, meanwhile countries like Honduras, the Gambia, and Bolivia, have given very little hard currency back to Cuba for the receipt of professionals and technical assistance. For more information on these exchanges in the health field, see R. Huish, Where No Doctor Has Gone Before: Cuba's Place in the Global Health Landscape (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013).
Pundits disagree on the exact figures but all agree the loss was catastrophic. For varied discussions see, among many others, Antonio Carmona Báez, State Resistance to Globalization in Cuba (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Julio Carranza Valdés, ‘La economía cubana: balance breve de una década crítica’, Temas 30 (2002): 30–4; Julio Carranza Valdés, Pedro Monreal and Luis Gutiérrez, ‘Cuba: restructuración económica, socialismo y mercado’, Temas 1 (1995): 27–35; Archibald R.M. Ritter, ‘The Cuban Economy in the Mid-1990s: Structural/Monetary Pathology and Public Policy’, in M.A. Centeno and M. Font (eds) Towards a New Cuba? Legacies of a Revolution (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997), pp. 151–70.