Sports Insight

4 • Sports Insight ~ July/August 2017 sportsinsightmag.com Your Man in Havana TIME OUT | MARK SULLIVAN I visited Cuba earlier this summer with a number of American trade show executives to explore event opportunities in that country. Going into the trip, I did not believe there would be short-term opportunities for our company, but I wanted to see the country before capitalism takes hold and there is a Starbucks on every corner. After spending a week in Havana, I can report that there won't be a Starbucks on every corner anytime soon. Cuba is a fascinating, complex country. A government official described it to me as four separate countries: Spain from the 19th century, America from the 1940s, Russia from the 1980s and Cuba in the year 2017. Cuba in 2017 needs work and could really use a good dose of capitalism, competition and free enterprise. The country is incredibly poor and the gap between the haves and have nots is significant. Riding to my hotel in downtown Havana from the airport, I travelled through neighborhoods that were as impoverished as anything you would see in Haiti or the Dominican Republic. Later that night, I ate fresh swordfish in a private restaurant in Miramar, in the northwestern part of the city that is home to most diplomats, embassies, moneyed foreigners, and high-ranking Cuban officials. My meal that night cost as much as the average Cuban makes in a week. Cubans have it rough. There is no national industry in which the population can participate. No shoe or apparel factories and the island's sugar industry has been beat up over the past two decades. The government controls the economy and Cuban workers are left with scraps. It will take a major shift in its government's policies for that to change anytime soon. Cubans love their sports. Baseball is hugely popular and soccer participation and fandom is growing dramatically. My two best experiences in Cuba both involved sports. We went to a boxing match one night that pitted the Cuban National team against the Kazakhstan national team. The arena, in an impoverished neighborhood, was beautiful: clean and air conditioned. And the Cuban boxers were terrific, winning every match I saw. The next night as our group walked through downtown Havana after dinner, our team leader Rich Curran from EXPO Convention Contractors in Miami opened up a backpack he brought with him. It was full of baseball gear he had collected back home and he was determined to hand it out to young Cuban kids. When he began distributing the gloves and balls, for these kids it was Christmas on a hot summer night . O When he began distributing the gloves and balls, for these kids it was Christmas on a hot summer night.

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