Cuba made world history with the best news of 2021 for its baseball

By SwingCompleto / contacto@swingcompleto.com

It is clear that what a good part of the Cuban players have done in the 2021 season of the Major Leagues has been excellent. Fantastic must be cataloged what is done by figures such as Yuli gurriel, Jose Dariel Abreu, José Adolis García or Raisel Iglesias, among others who have shown that the talent of Cuban players is immense.

Beyond our army in MLB and other leagues worthy of consideration, the year had grown tired of leaving us bad news. Deaths due to the pandemic, international defeats, a National Series with more spots than lights and multiple negative situations that mostly had the island’s sports authorities as the main protagonists.

Perhaps that is why INDER decided to play a card that they had up their sleeve for a long time without deciding to put it on the table despite the claim made by journalists, historians, artists and even fans themselves identified with the issue for quite some time.

This Thursday, baseball was finally made official as one of the socio-cultural symbols of Cuba, after proclaiming this sport as the cultural and intangible heritage of the nation.

The news was announced at a press conference held at the Latin American stadium with the presence of part of the main directors of sport and baseball on the island, plus part of the main members of the official press.

Although many people do not know to what extent this declaration has significance, it serves not only to turn baseball into something more than a sport from an institutional and legal point of view, but from now on many of the things that have to do with him, at least in theory they will demand greater responsibility on the part of INDER, the FCB and the National Baseball Directorate.

It is about better protection of monuments and facilities, better treatment of its active and retired players, and allocating more resources to projects directly or indirectly related to this discipline. Sure, in words everything sounds very good, but the economic crisis that Cuba is experiencing may limit most of the actions that have to do with investment and money.

The declaration of heritage is something that goes beyond sports leaders, since it is a complex process in which the National Heritage Office intervenes, with the permission of UNESCO when it comes to having the endorsement for the final step that it is the officialization as a World Heritage Site.

Cuba thus becomes the first country in the world to declare baseball as a national heritage, even at a sporting level in general there is no news that disciplines as massive as soccer, basketball or volleyball have achieved this endorsement in certain territories.

Outside of the purely sports field, baseball has had a practically infinite socio-cultural impact within the Island for more than a century and a half. Almost from the very origin of this sport when the archipelago was still a colony of Spain, the extra-sporting impact of the game was gigantic in social, political and economic matters.

All this, rather than maintaining itself, acquired greater strength with the birth of the republic and logically after 1959, for better or for worse. The different artistic manifestations, we would say that all, that have been mixed with the ball, plus the social relevance that it has represented for the majority of Cubans, and being an identity element for many foreigners, become part of the most irrefutable arguments to demonstrate why despite the growing problems that have considerably weakened Cuban baseball, it is still a historical and present symbol for many. There is no doubt that the feats of our players in the Major Leagues this season are something where pride rises to extreme levels, which means that in such classy baseball, but this heritage is much more general and above all it represents the eternal. Whatever happens is already symbolized because we say it the most passionate, but because it is already recorded by UNESCO, as culturally tobacco, the tenth, the danzón and the rumba, plus other sublime banners such as Martí, did before. , the flag and the anthem.