The (Soft) Power of Sport: The Comprehensive and Contradictory Strategies of Cuba's Sport-Based Internationalism

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.5.1.0026
• Pages: 26-40
• Published date: 01 April 2013
• Date: 01 April 2013
• Author: Robert Huish,Thomas F. Carter,Simon C. Darnell
• Subject Matter: sport development,sport for development,Cuban athletes,sport education,internationalism,capacity building in sport

I J  C S 5.1 S 2013

THE SOFT POWER OF SPORT:

THE COMPREHENSIVE AND CONTRADICTORY

STRATEGIES OF CUBA’S SPORTBASED

INTERNATIONALISM

Robert Huish Thomas F. Carter Simon C. Darnell

Dalhousie University, Canada University of Brighton, UK Durham University, UK

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.

Keywords: sport development, sport for development, Cuban athletes, sport education,

internationalism, capacity building in sport

The Place of Sport in Cuban Internationalism

As this special issue of IJCS demonstrates, the Cuban approach to international-

ism 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 also 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’.

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