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Due to historical associations with the United States, many Cubans participate in sports which are popular in North America, rather than sports traditionally demoted in other Latin American nations. Baseball is by far the most popular; other sports and pastimes include football (soccer), basketball, volleyball, and athletics. Cuba is a dominant force in amateur boxing, consistently achieving high medal tallies in international competitions. ==The Cuban Sports Program== Post Revolutionary Cuba prides itself on its success in sports. Fidel Castro expressed that sports should be “the right of the people,” not the right of the wealthy.〔Pickering, R. J. (1978) “Cuba” in ''Sport Under Communism'' Ed. James Riordan. London: C Hurst & Co. pp. 142–174.〕 He compared Pre-Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Cuba by explaining that while before only the wealthy could enjoy sports, now everyone can enjoy sports. He also explains that talent in sport comes from hard work, and a strong will. These are not traits the naturally wealthy have; rather these are traits that working-class people have.〔 In modern Cuban society, sport and physical education begin when a child is only 45 days old. The mothers are taught to exercise their children's limbs and massage their muscles to keep them healthy. Children are taught at a later age to play games that resemble physical exercise.〔 These ideas were the basis for the modern sports program in Cuba, and clearly it is working. Considering that Cuba’s population is only around 11 million (around half the size of New York metro area), Cuba has a demanding 7.5 to 0.70 lead against the US in the number of sports medals won per million occupants. In 1961, two years after the triumph of the Revolution, The National Institute of Sport, Physical Education, and Recreation (INDER) was created.〔Wagner, Eric A. (1988) “Sport in Revolutionary Societies: Cuba and Nicaragua” in ''Sport and Society in Latin America''. Ed. Joseph L. Arbena. Westport: Greenwood. pp. 113–136.〕 This was the governing branch of all sport and recreation in Cuba. It developed all of the current sports and education programs in place today, including the EIDE, which is the program that finds the naturally talented young adults and gets them into sports oriented secondary schools. All first and secondary schools in Cuba teach sport and physical education as a compulsory subject. There are five sports taught in all standard secondary schools: track and field, basketball, baseball, gymnastics, and volleyball. The students who excel at a certain sport usually find themselves competing in the Cuban summer Junior Olympics which is where the EIDE sees their talent and recruits them to a specialized school that caters to just their sport.〔 Most of these specialized schools are located on the Isle of Youth. This is a 2,200 square kilometer island to the south of Cuba which has more than 27 of these schools, each having about 600 children who attend. The majority of them are semi-boarding schools where the students get on a boat to the island every Sunday evening and return every Friday evening.〔 The schools are spread out across the island and have citrus groves in between them. Being consistent with the ideals of the Revolution, all of the students are required to put in 3 hours of work a day picking or canning fruit. Every school in Cuba participates in the Junior Olympic Program established in 1963. However many of the standard secondary schools only compete in the sports for which they have teams, for instance most of them do not have pools. The competition usually commences in July. The games have a traditional ladder system where first local schools compete, then the district winners will compete and finally the regional winners will compete. However for team sports, the winning teams will move on, but the best players from all of the losing teams will form a new team and also move on. This way no single great player will be tossed out because of a bad team. As of 1978 the Cuban Junior Olympics involved 20 sports: Chess, Weightlifting, Athletics, Tennis, Football, Table Tennis, Basketball, Modern Gymnastics, Gymnastics, Synchronized Swimming, Swimming, Diving, Volleyball, Water Polo, Cycling, Fencing, Judo, Roller derby, Roller hockey, Pistol Shooting, Baseball and Wrestling.〔 INDER has many programs, including the National Institute for Sports Medicine, the National Coaches program, and the National Physical Education Institute. All of these were developed during the relatively strong economic period of 1960–1990. The Special Period of the 1990s–2000s created many special challenges for INDER, including budget cutbacks and a limited amount of electricity causing blackouts. In the early 1990s, many of the night sporting events were canceled to preserve electricity.〔 Cuba’s new sports program also began to pay for itself when many of the best players were allowed to retire early and take up position on teams in other countries. These other countries wanted to hire them because of Cuba’s fantastic success in training winning athletes. These players would earn a large salary, and about 80% of it would go directly to the Cuban government. The players would then pocket the other 20%, which was more than what the average Cuban in Cuba was earning. It is worthy to note that Castro abolished professional sport in Cuba in the beginning of the Revolution. What this meant was that all leagues and teams are considered amateur. This concept was imbedded in the stated ideals of the revolution, that everyone should be equal. However this outflow of the best athletes and trainers began to take its toll. In 1997 Cuba ended its 10-year, 152-game, winning-streak at the baseball International Cup by losing to Japan 11 to 2.〔Price, S. L. (2000) ''Pitching Around Fidel'', New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0060934921〕 To fix this problem, Cuba began to offer material incentives like houses and cars to the good players to keep them from playing for other countries.〔 These offerings weren’t to completely prevent talented Cuban’s from leaving the country instead they were there to keep the system balanced. By the year 2007 there were 50 nations around the world who employed several hundred Cuban sports trainers and coaches.〔Baxter, Kevin and Kraul, Chris (28 July 2007) (“Cuba’s Biggest Export is Sports” ). ''Los Angeles Times''〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sport in Cuba」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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