Cuba’s socialist revolution loves its athletes when they generate revenue and provide propaganda for the communist regime. However, once they’ve outlived their usefulness, the “revolution” discards them like trash.
Yusimi Rodriguez Lopez explains in Diario de Cuba:
From Glory to Oblivion: Ten Examples for Today’s Cuban Athletes
The death of Cuban sports legend Hermes Julián Ramírez Limonta at the beginning of September was a pretext to rescue from oblivion an Olympic feat by Cuban athletes that young Cubans were not aware of: the first medal for Cuba’s relay team at the Games; specifically in the 4×100 m event in Mexico 1968 and one of the two silver medals garnered by Cuban teams. It was also Cuba’s best result on a short track at the Olympic level.
However, the memory of that feat also turned a light on how Ramírez Limonta had been disregarded and forgotten, treatment that he complained about less than a year earlier in an interview with the state media newspaper Trabajadores. His case is not unique. DIARIO DE CUBA offers a list of ten athletes who, after having glorified their country’s name at international events, have been ignored by the government.
Hermes Julián Ramírez Limonta
Ramírez Limonta was a young world record holder in the 100 meters, an Olympic runner-up in the 4×100 m in Mexico in 1968, a multiple medal winner at the Pan American and Central American Games, and … an international combatant. This last fact, which lacks any athletic merit, makes the retired athlete’s complaints to the state media source Trabajadores, in December 2023, all the more striking.
“Attention to athletes in Cuba, for whom? For those who are here, or for those who no longer are?” the retired athlete asked seven months ago in an interview with Trabajadores. “Many people complain about my situation when they see me with my cane, standing in line to buy chicken. There is no adequate mechanism. A few years ago they gave us the CUC so that we could live a little more comfortably. When they made the change, they multiplied it by 24, and that’s not enough for us today.”
Ramírez Limonta was referring to the fact that, in 2013, the Cuban Government established the payment of a stipend in convertible pesos for Olympic, World Championship and Pan-American medalists. He was one of the beneficiaries of the measure, but with the “Ordering Task” these athletes receive sums in national currency at the old exchange rate of 1CUC/24 Cuban pesos, which is far from covering their needs.
Marisleysis Duharte Morell
No case on this list is as sad as that of the junior world javelin champion Marisleysis Duharte Morell.
This young woman won the World Youth Championship in Nairobi in 2017, with a throw of 62.92 meters, which was a record for the event. Earlier, at the Cuba Cup, she had thrown the javelin 65.44 m. That year, she and triple jumper Jordan Diaz, who was also crowned at the international event held in the Kenyan capital, were the most outstanding athletes in the category in the country.
In 2022, more than four years after she was diagnosed with scleroderma —a degenerative disease that mainly attacks the muscles and skin, and for which there is no cure— that ended her sports career, Duharte Morell expressed regret that no one remembered her.
“I’ve gone several times to government institutions in my province and my municipality, and I haven’t been able to get them to help me with anything that I need, and I really need it. I have no help from any of the people I expected it from, or from the institution I belonged to,” she stated two years ago in a Facebook post.
“In our country there is talk of human rights, but at this time I don’t know where they are, because with the situation I’m in, I believe that I have the right to be better served. I have the right to be better treated, and I have the right to better care from the INDER (National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation), which was where I got sick, and from the Cuban Government, not for what I have contributed, not because I was a world champion, or a good athlete, but because, as a ‘vulnerable’ person, according to our Government, they are supposed to be helping us the most,” she said then.
The lifetime stipend for Olympic, World Championship and Pan-American medalists —which is subject to delays and can be withdrawn from the athlete if he or she incurs engages in what the authorities consider acts of indiscipline— does not encompass the lower categories. Hence, Duharte Morell, a world youth champion, receives nothing for her achievements, and has to “pick up the crumbs that others leave me, simply due to the simple fact that I’m unwell, and can’t fend for myself. No one cares about the condition I’m in, or whether I’m still alive or not,” according to her words in 2022.
Two years later the young former athlete is “all right, if you can say that,” she told DIARIO DE CUBA
“I’m receiving aid in the amount of 4,095 pesos, and that is the only thing I’ve received, because they agreed that (for) everything they gave in the municipality (they) would give me priory, but they haven’t. Yes, modules have arrived, but they always say that I don’t have a right to them,” she complained.
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