Soccer’s popularity continues to rise in Cuba – Los Angeles Times

Several dozen people gather under a punishing December sun outside the weathered baseball stadium in this port city 60 miles east of Havana, pushing and shoving in the hope of glimpsing the eight major leaguers who have come for a children’s clinic.

Matanzas is the birthplace of Cuban baseball, site of the first game played in the Caribbean and home to many of the country’s greatest players. But proof that the sport might be fading on the island was evident in the crowd of curiosity-seekers, some of whom dressed not in baseball jerseys but in the shirts of Spanish soccer clubs Real Madrid and Barcelona.

“Things have changed a lot,” said Seattle Sounders midfielder Osvaldo Alonso, who recently returned to Cuba for the first time since defecting during the 2007 Gold Cup. “The kids are beginning to pay more attention to soccer. And that’s good for soccer on the island.”

It also parallels the experience in places such as Puerto Rico, where volleyball and basketball have replaced baseball as the national pastime.

In Cuba, many blame the change on the decline of the country’s domestic baseball league, which has lost dozens of top players to the U.S. over the last decade. State-controlled television has hardly filled the appetite for good baseball, allowing the broadcast of only one major league game a week, on a tape-delayed basis each Sunday night.