Cubadebate (English)

Last night the grand finale of the Classic took place between the two Asian giants. The U.S. team was brilliant in its absence. The multinationals which exploit the sport lost nothing and gained much. The American people are grumbling.

It will be a rough road to reestablish Cuba’s supremacy once more in that sport where patriotism, national pride and our struggle for healthy and educational sport has attained the highest of levels…Many are the lessons we must learn from the last Classic.

Our delegation was received early this morning with the recognition and the honors it deserves. Esteban Lazo and Frederich Cepeda spoke. There was Raúl, who had made them standard-bearers during the ceremony at the Palace of the Revolution.

What was important for the organizers was to eliminate Cuba, a revolutionary country that has heroically resisted and has not been able to be defeated in the battle of ideas. Nevertheless, one day we shall again be a dominant power in that sport.

On an individual basis, their rivals could be as good as or even better than many of our players, considering the technical and economic resources of countries like the United States, Canada, Japan, among others. What makes Cuban athletes to be different is the strong motivation they feel over the values they represent.

“He remembered that ‘many emerging countries have been turned into innocent victims of the crisis. The irony is that while the U.S. government was giving lessons on rules and institutions in the emerging countries, its policies were a total disaster’.

Last Monday the 9th, like all the rest, was a marvellous day of contradictions for developed capitalism in the midst of its incurable crisis. That day, the British news agency Reuters, not suspected of being anti-capitalist, printed: “Latin America will grow substantially less this year, hit by a strong deceleration or even by recessions in some of its main economies, after years of bonanzas distinguished by rises in the prices of raw materials.

As we all could see, that game could have been won by a knock-out in the seventh inning, with 6 home-runs, two of them by Cepeda, a record in the Classics. That would have enhanced the well-deserved prestige of Cuban sport.

If someone were to take this summary and carry it in his pocket, reading it from time to time or memorizing it like a small Bible, he will be better informed about what is happening in the world than 99% of the population that lives besieged by hundreds of advertisements and is saturated by thousands of hours of news, soap-operas and fiction or real movies.

Unfortunately, what I know about Pichirilo is of great human interest, but dreadfully little, and that requires anyone writing about him to make a special effort to pull together the pertinent information about the person I came to know during a very short period of his life.