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.
Highlights
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
The Cuban government creates and seeks opportunities to engage in collaboration, diplomacy, commerce, and trade in order to project its own concepts of progressive development, and to garner much needed hard currency and political benefits for its national interests
While this strategy of Cuban internationalism has received significant scholarly attention in policy domains such as health care (Kirk and Erisman 2009; Huish and Kirk 2007), in this article we suggest that similar consideration should be afforded to Cuban sport and physical education
Summary
As this special issue of IJCS demonstrates, the Cuban approach to internationalism combines aspects of international solidarity, national interest, and the pursuit of development goals, both at home and abroad. The Cuban government creates and seeks opportunities to engage in collaboration, diplomacy, commerce, and trade in order to project its own concepts of progressive development, and to garner much needed hard currency and political benefits for its national interests In this way, and as Huish and Blue (this issue) note, the Cuban case may well lend itself to a working example of Joseph Nye’s (2005) understanding of ‘soft power’. Chief among these policy dimensions unique to sport is the possible tension between ‘Sport Development’ and ‘Sport for Development’ The former refers to the building of capacities for sporting success (both elite and participatory) and is most often concerned with the role assumed by government in the deliberate and strategic organisation and provision of sporting opportunities (see Hylton and Brahman 2007; Bloyce and Smith 2010). These programmes illustrate the various goals and values of Cuba’s sport-based internationalism: collaboration, cooperation, development, the pursuit of national interests and the generation of revenues
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