NEW RULES TO THE OLD GAME: CUBAN SPORT AND STATE LEGITIMACY IN THE POST-SOVIET ERA

Abstract

After the collapse of the socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Cuban state faced its greatest crisis. How the state managed to maintain sufficient legitimacy in light of the growing economic hardships and class restructuring Cuban society underwent in these initial post-Soviet years remains somewhat mysterious. A crucial element of the legitimating discourse of the Cuban state, domestically and internationally, has been the relative success of its sports teams in international competition. As symbols of the strength of the state and one of the few remaining “successes” of the Revolution, Cuban sports performances remain vital symbolic capital for current and future administrations. The problem that state officials continue to face is how to transform that symbolic capital into economic capital without sacrificing ideological principles. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Havana during the late 1990s and on interviews with sports officials, athletes, and coaches since then, this article examines Cuban officials' efforts to transform Cuban sport from a modern, centralized bureaucratic institution to a revenue generating industry within the neoliberal, capitalist, competitive, and post-Soviet world. In particular, I concentrate on the strategies pursued by Cuban sports officials in their efforts to maintain world-class sporting excellence and the ramifications of the emergence of Cuban sport as an export industry to provide a small suggestion of how legitimacy of the state was maintained and what the future of Cuban sport may hold.