School of Education, Sport, and Health Sciences

Tourism is a multibillion dollar industry worldwide that has transformed apparently marginalised locations into hotspots of consumerism. Governments seeking low investment, high-yield industries have turned to this service industry to facilitate the generation of income for state coffers. In doing so, states have become integral players in the selling of their own citizenry. This article uses the emergence of the Cuban tourism industry to explore how Cuba's socialist state, ideologically existing for the emancipation of its people, works to commodify and, through that commodification, control its populace. This article makes use of a decade's worth of ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate how Cubans engage and negotiate these processes with foreigners, adapting and adopting the state's attempts to commodify their bodies, for their own advantage rather than the state's. The production of these illusionary desires ultimately results in the creation of Cuban phantasms that undermine the state's own selling of the Revolution and ultimately, its control over its citizenry.

Winner of 2009 Outstanding Book Award, North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. I contend that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. I explore the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, I point out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning home.

Chapter One is available below

"There is a growing interest in the transnational movements of sports professionals. Absent from these burgeoning discussions is the impact family plays upon any potential migrant’s decision to travel. This article is an initial attempt to address the lack of attention paid to this important area. Using research conducted over the last decade, it examines the influences two Cuban families had upon individual migrants and considers the consequences of their decisions. Their circumstances are elided through the use of extended ethnographic case studies and transnational ethnographic research, in which the focus is not on Cuba per se, but on individuals’ mobility between Cuba and elsewhere. These cases highlight the need for greater attention to be paid to local conditions and personal circumstances instead of relying solely on macro-scale structures for describing and explaining patterns of transnational sport migration.

Keywords: migration, mobility, transnationalism, Cuba, family, ethnography"

After the collapse of the socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Cuban state faced its greatest crisis. How the state managed to maintain sufficient legitimacy in light of the growing economic hardships and class restructuring Cuban society underwent in these initial post-Soviet years remains somewhat mysterious. A crucial element of the legitimating discourse of the Cuban state, domestically and internationally, has been the relative success of its sports teams in international competition. As symbols of the strength of the state and one of the few remaining “successes” of the Revolution, Cuban sports performances remain vital symbolic capital for current and future administrations. The problem that state officials continue to face is how to transform that symbolic capital into economic capital without sacrificing ideological principles. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Havana during the late 1990s and on interviews with sports officials, athletes, and coaches since then, this article examines Cuban officials’ efforts to transform Cuban sport from a modern, centralized bureaucratic institution to a revenue generating industry within the neoliberal, capitalist, competitive, and post-Soviet world. In particular, I concentrate on the strategies pursued by Cuban sports officials in their efforts to maintain world-class sporting excellence and the ramifications of the emergence of Cuban sport as an export industry to provide a small suggestion of how legitimacy of the state was maintained and what the future of Cuban sport may hold.

Sport has played an important role throughout the Cuban Revolution. It has fulfilled a number of social and political functions while serving symbolically as one of the main ‘triumphs’ of the Revolution.  As an institutionalised practice, however, sport in Cuba has not remained static but has evolved over the previous five decades, undergoing significant structural changes as both domestic and international circumstances dictated.  This article surveys those material and social changes in Cuban sport to consider how sport has been harnessed throughout the Revolution, how the emphasis of Cuban sport changed from grassroots, or masividad, to elite talent production as part of the economic necessity engendered by the Special Period, and what the neoliberal threats are to Cuban sport irrespective of what government exists in the foreseeable future.

In Foreign Fields examines the lives, decisions and challenges faced by transnational sport migrants - those professionals working in the sports industry who cross borders as part of their professional lives. Despite a great deal of romance surrounding international celebrity athletes, the vast majority of transnational sport migrants - players, journalists, coaches, administrators and medical personnel - toil far away from the limelight. Based on twelve years of ethnographic research conducted on three continents, I trace their lives, routes and experiences, documenting their travels and travails. I argue that far from the ease of mobility that celebrity sports stars enjoy, the vast majority of transnational sports migrants make huge sacrifices and labour under political restrictions, often enforced by sport's governing bodies. This unique and clearly written study will make fascinating reading for anthropologists, sociologists and anyone interested in the lives of those who follow their sporting dreams.

The Introduction is available below

The era of transnational sport migration (TSM) has been one of heady celebration, seemingly free movement across borders, and lucrative business. The predominant (and outmoded) models of sport migration currently ignore state controls of migration. This paper brings the state back into analyses of TSM and looks at strategies migrants have used to skirt governmental attempts to control their movements. Understanding the issues surrounding state constructions of national citizenship is essential – both for this paper but also for migrants themselves in order to manipulate these controlling mechanisms to work in their favour. After identifying classificatory themes for determining national and professional status, this paper draws on several examples to highlight states’ attempts to control the movements of sport professionals. Using a combination of ethnographic material gathered over the past decade along with interviews and investigative reports, this article argues that an updated theory for understanding transnational sport migration must incorporate and reflect the actual experiences routes and roots of TSM and the multiple forces that contour theseprocesses.

Baseball is the national sport in Cuba, not because of American imperialism or colonialism, but because criollos, nineteenth-century island elites, made deliberate efforts to equate the game with a nascent Cuban nationalism. The game represented one of a set of civilized practices that criollos used to distinguish themselves from the Spanish. As a distinctive practice, baseball provided a symbolic discourse for an independent Cuba, evident not only in its physical expression on the field but in other forms of expression as well. One particularly prominent form of expression that linked baseball to Cuban nationalism was poetry. As members of elite social clubs, the playing of the game and recital of poetry were two forms of expressive performance that expressed the desires, values and beliefs of Havana’s social elite. This essay examines the relationship between the emergence of Cuban identity, the nascent nation and its expression in the playing of a game by examining a late-nineteenth-century poem that makes these passionate linkages.

The 1998 Belfast Accord or Good Friday Agreement presented Belfast's civic authorities with an opportunity to rebuild much of the devastated city. Taking this opportunity, they began creating an image of the city that had rid itself of the problem of sectarian violence, even though the city remains a violent urban environment. Civic leaders recast the symbolism of violence to legitimate their gentrification strategies by controlling access to specific urban spaces in the city. This article plays with the different ways urban leaders contextualize violence. Their efforts to present Belfast as a cosmopolitan city contrast with working-class youth's practices of engaging in communal violence as a means of rejecting their spatial and social marginalization, a result of the implementation of urban leaders' vision of the city,

This chapter examines boys’ various pickup games of baseball along two interrelated analytical threads. As the national sport of Cuba, baseball is ubiquitous throughout its capital. Men and boys play versions of the sport with makeshift equipment (or no equipment other than a ball) in makeshift competitive spaces. In effect, they appropriate urban spaces whose designed and designated uses are for other activities. At the same time in carving out new fields they are not only appropriating space but they are carving masculine ideas through their gendered appropriation of the street, plaza, park or other urban space. Drawing ethnographic data, this chapter considers the interrelationships between the performative constructions of Cuban masculinity and struggles over the uses of public spaces. Recognizing that there are multiple masculine identities, which ones gain credence and predominate in neighborhood games of pickup baseball informs social values and norms of gendered behavior and how those norms are organized spatially become of utmost importance. This chapter attempts to unravel some of the entangled strands of gender, space, power, and control found within seemingly innocuous behaviors like children’s games.

The crowd exploded in a thunderous cry of anger and disbelief. Another close call had gone against the home team. One man leapt onto the backstop separating the field from the seats behind home plate. Stadium officials plucked at the back of his shirt in an attempt to pull him down as he vainly tried to jam his hand through the gaps in the wire mesh to get his hand closer to the umpire. Several irate fans clambered onto the roof of the dugout sheltering the home team's players. Conga drums continued beating out a rumba-like rhythm and a couple of shrill whistles punctuated the roar of voices. Some wiseacre was wildly generating a high pitched scream from a hand cranked air-raid siren. Several thousand voices spontaneously organised a chant, directing their spleen at the umpires who were, in the minds of the fans, once again jobbing their team. 'Asesino! Asesino!' (Assassin!) reverberated throughout the night air, drowning out the public address announcer attempting to calm the crowd. Four middle-aged American tourists spun in their front-row seats to face the emotional tidal wave washing over them on its way onto the diamond. Leaning across the short gap between my seat and hers, one woman shouted into my ear to be heard over the crowd's thunder. Eyes glowing, Diane asked in a slightly reverential yet conspiratorial voice, 'Is it always like this?'

This is the introduction to the first ever special issue published in the International Review of the Sociology of Sport. It lays out some theoretical ideas related to the production of urban spectacles that underpin the economies of global capitalism

My focus in this paper is on the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana.This plaza has historically played a central role in legitimizing the Revolutionary state and continues to be the site of mass spectacle. By controlling this space, dictating who can and cannot move through this space and sanctioning the kinds of social activities that take place within this plaza, the state makes itself present by making the vicissitudes of everyday life absent. The irony is that while Cuban tourism, run by and promoted by the state, uses the eroticized spectacle of the Cuban populace as a major attraction, these sites are devoid of everyday Cuban persons. This raises questions about the sanctity of spectacular spaces, strength of state ideologies, and the commoditization of all things Cuban when the predominant users of these spaces and their icons throughout the year are foreign tourists.How these consciously produced images of Cuba and its Revolution are conjured and consumed with their openness for (re)interpretation becomes a concern if the state is to maintain any semblance of consistency and, by extension, legitimacy.

"When Beijing hosted the Olympic Games in 2008 we were reminded that almost four decades earlier that the Peoples Republic of China’s road back to international recognition and acceptance had begun with a chance sporting encounter between two members of the USA’s and the Chinese table tennis teams in Japan in 1971. It is less well known that not long after this successful ‘ping pong’ diplomatic episode, attempts were made by various parties to use baseball in a similar way to try and repair international ties between Cuba and the USA. In this article the circumstances through which the former succeeded whereas the latter failed miserably are subject to detailed examination. Drawing upon existing literature and unclassified materiel gleaned from the NSA (National Security Archive) and the CIA Archive we argue that for a number of historically specific reasons, and because of the different balances of interest and asymmetric power relations, ‘ping pong’ diplomacy was able to help broker rapprochement between the USA and China whereas ‘baseball diplomacy’ could do little or nothing to stimulate diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana."

Interest in international sport migration has been burgeoning recently. This article considers the dominant theoretical models used to explore these movements and suggests that it is time to rethink some of our theoretical presumptions. Recent permutations of this theoretical model, shifting from globalization to network theoretical models, make this reconsideration of migration-related theories necessary. Drawing on the groundbreaking work done in the 1990s and on Rafaelle Poli’s rapidly expanding body of work, it becomes apparent that a more flexible, open-ended theoretical model is necessary. This article reviews these theoretical models before making a suggestion of how international sport migration might be better framed for understanding how migration is structured and experienced in multiple locations around the world. Considering that migrants are bodies moving through space, it seems crucial to return migrants to space-based models of movement thereby advocating a theoretical model that takes into account the complexly dynamic relationships between migrants, institutions, and places.

the Cuban government creates and seeks opportunities to engage in collaboration, diplomacy, commerce, and trade in order to pursue its own concepts of progressive international development, which involves garnering much needed hard currency and political benefits for its national interests. Such strategies include the organisation and deployment of sport and physical activity programmes. Based on our analysis of, and interactions with, Cuba's ministry of Sport -the Instituto Nacional de Deportes, Educación Física y Recreación (INdeR) -we suggest that INdeR pursues both sport development and sport for development -at home and abroad -while simultaneously seeking economic benefits through its for-profit enterprise division named Cubadeportes. the implications of this comprehensive and sometimes contradictory approach are considered, in terms of politics, policy, internationalism and the place of sport therein. keywords: sport development, sport for development, Cuban athletes, sport education, internationalism, capacity building in sport

This chapter examines the contexts and conflicts involved in the production of the world’s newest global sport spectacle, the World Baseball Classic (WBC). First held in 2006, this unusual spectacle takes place simultaneously in four different countries before culminating in a final contest in the United States. What makes this particular spectacle unique is that it is not organized and run by an International Sport Federation (ISF) (global governing body), or an international non-governmental organization (INGO), such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC); instead it is the product of a transnational corporation. The circumstances of the WBC’s conception, its initial production, and the international politics between its organizer, a transnational corporation, and various governments raises a series of questions regarding the sovereignty of states, the power of corporations, and the ethos behind the production of global sport.  The struggles in the production of this international tournament involved competing worldviews regarding the value and ethos of baseball, inter-corporate struggles, and governmental controls over citizenship and mobility. By focusing on the negotiations between these various agents, this chapter considers the ebb and flow of power within global sport. In particular it examines the apparent conflict of interests over the participation of a ‘Cuban national team’ in the WBC from different perspectives, including the American government, the Cuban government, the International Olympic Committee, and the Creators of the WBC itself, Major League Baseball International, Inc.  While not the only complicated international negotiations conducted in order to organize such a tournament, the complicated international politics between the US and Cuba illustrates the multiple levels of diplomacy, discourse, and discord underpinning any global sport spectacle involving governments and corporations.