CUBA

Matches at the Malecón

By Where Is Football

November 19^th, 2019

The following feature was made possible through our partnership with Fotmob.

We love this sport because it allows us to connect.

Whether it's providing a link to our community, a context to relate to our family, or a means of interacting with a stranger who speaks a different language, the connective power of football is obvious.

As well-worn a catchphrase as "the beautiful game" may seem at times, there is little doubt in our minds about the beauty of one specific piece of travel advice we've picked up over the years: If you want to make a friend, bring a ball.

So, our creative director Nathen McVittie did exactly that. He brought a ball to Cuba. He wanted to learn about a country from its own people and experience its shores with his own senses. More importantly, he wanted to hang out, make new friends, and do what we do anywhere we go: Try to get a sense of how football is played, consumed, created, and cherished in another part of the world.

This is Where Is Football in Cuba.

This was the first time I'd ever played pickup in an actual stadium.

Just off the Malecón, Havana's famous esplanade, where the sea splashes the sidewalk, sits a tiny arena—old and falling apart, with construction happening all around. Estadio José Martí has been there for decades, but seemingly never used. If you've walked far enough along the Malecón, or taken a taxi, you've likely seen it.

I'd planned to come see this beautiful space long before I ever step foot in Cuba. I'd seen photos for years, and dreamt of kicking a ball on the pitch, taking photos and soaking it all in. Rusting goalposts, with a huge oblong of orange dirt cutting the grass apart in the middle of the field where kids were playing. And so, after jumping through construction materials, open trenches, and busy workers to get to the middle of the field to take as many photos as I could fit on my rolls of film, I came across three kids. Beckoning me to join, we evened out into a little 2v2. One of the kids was older and much better than the others, and we traded goals for over an hour. Another, dressed in a Penn State t-shirt, kicked a shoe off after stubbing his toe to play half-barefoot in the bright dirt.

In between breakaways and overlaps, we'd take turns drinking cold water out of a bottle one of them had brought from home, wrapped in wet sheets of the El Granma newspaper to keep it cold and frosty.

It was wild to be one of only four people playing on this pitch—somehow palatial and ramshackle all at once. The kids told me the stadium was being torn down soon—or redeveloped—my Spanish was seemingly more broken than usual after running around in the heat for an hour. Hearing about the potential demise of an icon admired from afar felt like an immense shame. Imagine having such a stately venue for a kickabout in your backyard, dilapidated as it may have looked on the day.

I’d conveniently picked that day to wear an all white outfit in the Havana heat, but the dark crimson dust and soil quickly proved that memories of the day would register on my clothing for quite some time. By the end of it, my outfit was red with dirt, conveniently matching my soon-to-be-tanned skin.

With no cell phones or service, we exchanged an Instagram username and went on our way.

Named after Eligio Sardiñas, a super-featherweight boxer who is perhaps Cuba's greatest ever sportsman, Sala Polivalente Kid Chocolate is a sports hall built on the site of Havana's first hotel from the mid-19th century. Refurbished for the 1991 Pan-American Games—arguably Cuba's most significant moment in the global sporting spotlight—the building is now, like much of Havana, equally slightly broken and functional. It is also home to regular futsal action, if you know when and where to look.

Indeed, I was told when and where to look, and I found a futsal tournament. I paid a small entrance fee in CUC—one that was likely subject to 'tourist tax' and one I'm not entirely certain was official—and encountered games in the dimly-lit hall. The ball tumbled across warped and splintering wooden floorboards, making every touch a real exercise in precision and prediction.

A lot of my time in Cuba was spent getting to know and understand a place that had, for a majority of my life, been so wrongly presented to me—whether in terms of its economic policy, its political history, or, most of all, its reputation as having a distinct wariness of outsiders.

While I will leave a discussion of the first two for another day, what I can safely say is that I felt welcome in Havana in ways I never could have imagined. This feeling of being so embraced at all times by a country that, frankly, has every reason to be suspicious of foreigners, where my ability to communicate was quite limited, is something for which I am endlessly grateful. It will remain my enduring memory of Cuba.

These photographs capture that feeling well—but also speak to why we love the sport. Football is, at its root, a shared global language. Where words were not sufficient, it was how I found the means to connect with others. We've done this again and again around the world through Where Is Football... but, like so much about this place, it all felt a little bit different in Cuba.

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