Sports policies under the Batista regime (1952-1958). Cuban particularities and similarities with francoist Spain
Keywords:
Batista, Franco, dictatorship, sports, Cuba.Abstract
During the dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista, which started in 1952, Cuba encountered a permanent political crisis, where terror acts of the regime alternated with armed actions of its enemies, with Fidel Castro in the front line. The sports field was marked by many signs of social injustice as well as of the more and more generalized corruption. Sports policy, for its part, reflected in a more common manner the logics of a dictatorship. Indeed, Batista tried to held the sports associations under State control, relying both on the Comisión nacional de Deporte whose director was his brother in law and on a new Olympic Committee whose members he wanted to appoint himself. Apart from these authoritarian tendencies, the weakness of international results as well as the compensatory function of spectator sport can be considered as elements of similarity in comparison with the development of sports in Francoist Spain. The analysis of the functions and the factors of malfunction of Cuban sports under Batista is based on numerous archive documents (from the Cuban National Archives and the Avery Brundage Collection), on official government publications and on the two biggest Cuban weekly newspapers of the 1950s.
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