From 1900 to 1960, Cuba had won 12 Olympic medals. In a comparable period after the Revolution, from 1960 to 2016, Cubans won 207 medals: 72 gold, 65 silver and 70 bronze. Cuba has an average of 7.5 medals for every million inhabitants; the great USA has 0.70.

Why has this happened? How to account for a tiny underdeveloped country under the longest and cruelest blockade in world history being a major world sports power? Simple: the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro.

Fidel declared sports to be the right of the people, and instituted policies and practices to ensure that every Cuban would enjoy that right. From a child is two months old, the mother is taught how to exercise the child’s limbs and massage her muscles to help develop them healthily. At every stage thereafter, from the “Circulo” where working mothers can leave their children in professional care through kindergarten, primary, secondary school and university, sports is encouraged and provided for, with professional training and the facilities that can be provided.

Schools up to secondary level teach sports as a compulsory subject: track and field, basketball, baseball, gymnastics and volleyball. There are competitions and summer schools from which the best move on if they wish to specialized schools.

After the foiled attempt to overthrow the dictator Batista in 1953, Fidel was imprisoned on the Isle of Pines. That island, now renamed the Isle of Youth, became the site of about thirty specialized sports schools, each with about 600 students. There is a Junior Olympics Program with 20 sports, from chess, weightlifting and athletics to tennis, football, basketball, gymnastics, swimming, volleyball, cycling, fencing, judo and wrestling.

All this, and sports activities and training for adult sports and a massive program for sports for the handicapped, requires organization. In 1961 Fidel created the INDER, the institute of sports, physical education and recreation, which also has programs in sports medicine, a national coaches program, and others. It manufactures sports equipment and engages in research in sports science. Despite the blockade and severe economic restraints, millions of dollars were and are spent on sports. And, of course, since the people’s right to sports must also include the spectators, it costs pennies to pay to enter a stadium for any game of the highest caliber. And it’s not just schools; throughout Cuba, many parks have exercise equipment for public use, with trainers holding daily classes for senior citizens in tai chi and other disciplines.

And as with everything, Cuba shares the little it has. More than seven thousand Cuban trainers, teachers, technicians and researchers have worked in more than 50 countries on solidarity missions. One of them is Belize, but, alas, we have not taken advantage of the generous opportunities Cuba has offered us.

Fidel was himself quite an accomplished athlete, being named the best athlete of the year in 1945 at the Jesuit school he attended in Belén in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba. Fidel has a lively and close friendship with Cuban athletes, playing ball with them, sparring with the boxers, trying his hand at chess with some of the world chessmen that Cuba has produced. Internationally, his friendships with Muhammad Ali or with football hero Diego Maradona are legendary.

But the essential point is the Fidelista conception of sports, as of health, education and culture, as a RIGHT of all the people, and the conversion of words into action. Do that, and any country can have Olympic champions.

Hasta la Victoria siempre, Fidel!