Cuba's Youth Make Their Own Revolution...on Skateboards

Havana –  Tucked in a remote corner of the city’s sprawling Parque Metropolitano, Yojany Pérez and other skaters are gathered on a hazy and humid afternoon at the bottom of a dried-up, concrete lakebed.

Ramps, boxes and rails in all sorts of disrepair lay in a seemingly random order on the lake’s dusty floor, waiting for the skaters to ramp, grind and ride them under the blistering sun in Havana’s only skatepark.

Like the ubiquitous late-50s Chevys and Fords still rolling around on Havana’s streets, the make-shift nature of the park is a potent reminder of the Cuban talent for reclaiming, refitting and refurbishing things. The park’s graffiti – nearly unheard of in revolutionary Cuba unless state-sanctioned – hints at the small freedom these skaters enjoy.

“When I skate I forget the world, I forget the problems, I forget the hunger, the thirst,” said the 22-year old Pérez.

In response to government control – where you live, whom you associate with, when you can travel – skateboarding has become a break for these kids from the constant panoptic eye of the regime. And it attracts new converts everyday….

With all the changes that Cuba has gone through since an ailing Fidel Castro relinquished power to his brother Raúl in 2006, it seems ironic that a sport once universally considered as anti-establishment and underground would begin to flourish in this big brother state….

Coinciding with the thaw in restrictions, the Cuban government – struggling to keep itself afloat financially – has cut funding to many of the nation’s once-heralded social and cultural programs, including, and maybe most importantly for the country’s psyche, sports.

“Sports form a real big part of the Cuban ethos and image,” said Christopher Sabatini, the senior policy director at the Council of the Americas. “Fidel himself was a frustrated baseball player who tried out for a minor league team to play for the Yankees….”

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