Cuba - Lonely Planet [32]
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Cuban high-jumper Javier Sotomayor is, arguably, the best high-jumper in history. He has held the world record for the event (2.45m) since 1993 and has recorded 17 of the 24 highest jumps ever.
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Basketball, volleyball (the national women’s team won gold at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games) and, to a lesser extent, football are all popular in Cuba, but dominó (always referred to in the singular) and chess, both considered sports, are national passions. Self-taught José Raúl Capablanca, touted as the greatest ever natural chess player, became World Chess Champion in 1921; you’ll see chess matches on the street and read about the masters in the sports pages. Dominó is everywhere and you’ll find quartets of old men and young bucks slugging back shots of rum and slamming down their tiles in every Cuban neighborhood. In March 2003 Havana hosted the first annual Campeonato Mundial de Dominó (World Domino Championship), with 10 countries and thousands of players participating. The finals were held in Ciudad Deportiva, where Cuba won it all. Cockfighting, while technically illegal, is still practiced widely in Cuba with clandestine shows attracting a large number of mainly male spectators who come to gamble away their hard-earned pesos.
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MULTICULTURALISM
Despite the fact that racism was abolished by law after the Revolution, Cuba is still facing up to the difficult challenges of establishing lasting racial equality in a widely cosmopolitan and multicultural society. While there are no ghettos or gangs in Cuba’s larger cities, a quick tally of the roaming jineteros/jineteras in Vedado and Habana Vieja will reveal a far higher proportion of black participants. On the other side of the coin, over 90% of Cuban exiles are of white descent, and of the victorious rebel army that took control of the government in 1959 only a handful (Juan Almeida being the most obvious example) were of mixed heritage.
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MEDIA
In a country replete with writers, sages and poets, Cuba’s media is without doubt one of the Revolution’s greatest failures. The only daily national newspaper – a dour eight-page tabloid called Granma – is an insipid dose of politics, politics and yet more politics, all of which pours forth from the all-pervading, all-encompassing propaganda ministries of the Cuban Communist Party.
The silencing of the press was one of Castro’s first political acts on taking power in 1959. Challenged with the crime of speaking out against the Revolution, nearly all of Cuba’s once independent newspapers were either closed down or taken over by the state by the summer of 1960. Many freelance operators faced a similar fate. In 1965 Guillermo Cabrera Infante, one of Cuba’s most respected writers, left for an ignominious exile in London after serving as a cultural attaché in Brussels; many others followed.
Despite some relaxation of press restrictions since the heavy-handed days of the 1970s and ‘80s, Cuban journalists must still operate inside strict press laws that prohibit the use of antigovernment propaganda and ban the seemingly innocuous act of ‘insulting officials in public,’ a crime that carries a three-year jail term.
Other limitations include the prohibition of private ownership of the electronic media and a law that prohibits foreign news agencies from hiring local journalists without first going through official government channels.
Most foreign observers, both in and outside Cuba, agree that the Cuban media situation is an unmitigated disaster. Furthermore, in 2005 the