HAVANA – Cuba’s boxing powerhouse hosted a series of official female boxing fights on Saturday for the first time since Fidel Castro’s 1959 Revolution, just a few weeks after removing a ban on the sport.
Women have been boxing in community and basement gyms for decades, but they have been barred from the state-dominated sports system and tournaments.
The 14 fighters in the seven fights were among 26 women chosen for special attention because of their promise to compete worldwide for the Communist-run country.
“I’m quite proud of myself. For me, winning an official tournament is a dream come true. “We women have been waiting for this opportunity for a long time,” Eliani de la Caridad Garcia, a 27-year-old mother of a 2-year-old girl, told Reuters.
Garcia, the first woman in the country to win a state-sponsored contest, was speaking in a gym and training area where numerous athletes, including male boxers, were cheering the women on.
The women are now competing in six Olympic divisions to earn a spot at the Central American and Caribbean Games in San Salvador in June 2023.
Since Munich in 1972, the Caribbean island, long lauded for its top-ranked male boxers, has won 41 gold medals in the Olympic games, dominating global statistics.
However, it was one of only a few countries of the 202 nations affiliated with the International Boxing Association that did not practice women’s boxing until recently. Female boxers had little choice but to travel in order to achieve the pinnacle of their sport.
Coach Julio Cesar Morales, who has been training male boxers for decades and has recently begun working with female boxers, was ready to get started.
He told Reuters that Cuba was hopeful that women’s boxing will attain worldwide success, perhaps not immediately because the team was still in its early stages, but in the medium term.
“The Cuban woman is a guerrilla in every way,” Cesar stated. (Nelson Acosta contributed reporting, Marc Frank wrote the piece, and Chizu Nomiyama edited it.
Source: Reuters
