In front of the Capitol building in central Havana, 8 Jul 07. (© 2007 Fabio Vio) |
Sadly, our DVD copy of the 1978 friendly between Chicago Sting of the North American Soccer League and Cuba, graciously supplied by Dave Wasser, has become data-corrupted over the past two years, so we cannot post video highlights of this unmemorable game. The United States plays in Pedro Marrero Stadium in Havana tonight, the first visit of the full national side since a 1947 exhibition—a 5–2 Cuban victory.
Toye
I do not recall particulars of the Sting-Cuba match, even the result. It was broadcast on Cuban television, the first visit of an American professional sports team to the island since 1959. Cosmos president Clive Toye, making connections through Lamar Hunt (see 20 Dec 06) and George H. W. Bush, helped arrange a Cosmos trip to Beijing and Shanghai in 1977 and also sought an invitation from Cuba. Later, with the Chicago Sting training in Barbados, the invitation from Havana did arrive.
Toye embraced the game’s “geopolitical aspect … so that [soccer] could grow out of the purely sporting into other pages, other media.” In his memoir, A Kick in the Grass (St. Johann, 2006), he links a Cuba visit to this “ongoing campaign to intrude soccer into people’s minds by doing the newsworthy, the unexpected. …” The strategy also included a visit by Dynamo Moscow to the United States in 1972.
In an interview Sept 5, Toye said, “We thought we were doing America a favor, quite plainly we were doing America a favor, by introducing them to a wider world. Did we have such lofty thoughts to believe this would change the world? I don’t think so. There was a certain Robin Hood element about this—robbing the rich to feed the poor, using owners’ money to develop the game. They may not always have seen eye to eye with us in that regard.”
Current American players have not held forth on the off-field aspects of the Saturday-night match. “We all read and hear about Cuba, and see it on TV,” Landon Donovan told the Miami Herald, “so we have a vague idea of what goes on there.” At least in comments in the New York Times, U.S. Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati, a Columbia University economics professor, did not show much interest either in the game’s historical and geopolitical meanings: “Obviously, it’s a unique situation for all of the history. But the emphasis Saturday night is on getting the three points.”
One interesting perspective, in an online article by Grant Wahl, comes from former Cuban international Maykel Galindo, who defected in 2004. He comments on the preference for other games in Cuba—baseball and boxing, in particular—and says that soccer fans would not wear national-team jerseys, because they cannot afford them. “When a player scores a goal and the game ends he really can’t give his shirt to the fans because it’s the only one he’s got,” he says. “You pretty much play the whole year with the same jersey. If someone wants to exchange jerseys, like in the Gold Cup, you can’t because otherwise you won’t have anything to wear for the next match.”
The chances of American citizens learning much from this rare encounter are limited. Travel restrictions from the United States have been in place since the 1960s and strengthened in 2004. The economic embargo has lasted since 1962.
We will not receive a dispatch such as the journal entries that Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton offered during his Cuba sojourn in 1940. “Havana is more of a city” than New York, reads an April entry from Run to the Mountain: The Journals of Thomas Merton. Volume One, 1939–1942 (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), “because it is flesh and blood, bread and wine, matter charged with life.” He continues:
The gaiety of the bars and cafes is not locked in behind doors and vestibules: they are all open wide to the street, and the music and laughter overflow out into the street, and the passersby participate in it, and the cafes also participate in the noise and laughter and gaiety of the street. That is another characteristic of the Mediterranean type of city: the complete and vital interpenetration of every department of its public and common life. These are cities the real life of which is in the market place, the agora, the bazaar, the arcades. (181)