The best baseball players from Cuba are preparing for the Pan American Games in Puerto Rico. The team that emerges from this training session will fight to secure a spot that will elevate them to compete in the World Cup. Spectacular National Baseball Championship for the under-23s. Children, adolescents, and young people train and compete, their dreams of international competitions. The Yankees shatter those dreams by denying visas to the girls' softball leadership team.

This won't happen to Margarita Mayeta's girls: the host city is Venezuela, a free country, and not the Puerto Rican neo-colony, that partner in an enslaved society that has plunged its sister nation into bitterness. It shouldn't be surprising. What can be expected from a system capable of creating people who committed the crime in Barbados? Later, one of its organizers, a worm and instrument of the gringo movement, justified the action and commented: "Anyway, they were just some black girls who practiced fencing."

I continue with the current performance of the athletes from Cuba despite the Trump attacks. The lifters are promising, especially the weightlifters. Our triple jumpers are on fire. The volleyball team continues struggling in a tough men's competition. Archers, good achievements. A distinguished delegation from Cuba will be present at the continental youth event in Asunción, Paraguay. We rescued land, swimming pools, courts... The youth takeovers recall the Street Plans of the wonderful era, the massive Ready to Win events, the workplace gymnastics, the inter-school competitions. Physical education classes as they should be.

It's urgent to revive that phase without dogmatism, taking into account the current situation in the country and the planet, without ceasing to dream, but with our feet on the ground and our wings ready for the flight that the sector itself must make possible with its resilient and forging work. The National Institute of Sport, Physical Education, and Recreation (Inder) is seeking new paths. Cuban sport is moving forward, despite the crisis in the country. The main culprit is the increasingly intensified blockade.

As with the entire population, the greatest suffering comes from there, although we must not deny our imperfections. The best of this small archipelago resists and fights, lacking the great support received from the socialist bloc, which has disappeared for many years. As for athletics, without it we would not have become a global power. We must overcome obstacles with our own efforts, based on intelligence, courage, and unity, with the democratic vision of listening to everyone and the participation of all patriots.

Amidst so much work in a society fighting for the longed-for social justice for which so many noble human beings have fallen, the magnate president of our savage neighbor attacks. Physical culture is not left unscathed. He begins by tearing at one's own diet and health, lacerations that are worse for the agonist, which requires greater attention due to its greater physical and mental strain. On November 3, 1984, Fidel pointed out these deficiencies existing under capitalism here, now used as a weapon of combat against Cuba since the siege: "The supposed (sporting) inferiority of our people is not genetic or racial, but nutritional, educational, health, economic, and technical..."

With the people in power, we can have overcome a significant part of these historical wounds, without them being fully resolved, especially when the enemy does not abandon its daily terrorism in one way or another. Now, regarding sporting events, they have returned to denying visas to athletes and coaches, similar to how they obstructed the attendance of the delegation from Martí's homeland to the 1966 San Juan Central and Caribbean Games, defeated by the strategy and tactics of the Commander in Chief, led from the ship Cerro Pelado by José Llanusa, the head of the heroic delegation.

As stated in the approved declaration regarding the motorboat in Puerto Rican waters: “…Cuban athletes know how to act, not only to defend our own right, but also the right of all peoples, and for the prestige of sport, which must exist as a bond between peoples. And “I SWEAR: In the name of the martyrs of Cerro Pelado and in the name of all those who have made our dedication to sport possible, to defend it with my life if necessary.”