On May 6, the plane carrying Cuban hockey players Daylin Suárez, Yadira Miclín Galban and Marianela López left Barcelona and landed on the island of Gran Canaria. Taking advantage of a “shopping” outing, the three athletes had managed to escape from their delegation, which was receiving training in Spain from May 3 to 13 to attend the Central American Games in San Salvador, and buy tickets to travel to the Canary Islands.
“Nothing was planned beforehand, everything was unforeseen,” Daylin Suárez assures 14ymedio from the city of Las Palmas, where he now lives with his two companions. “But I didn’t think twice. I thought about my future and my family, and I left everything behind for something better,” she says.
However, the path has not been without difficulties. After requesting political asylum in Spain, he will not be able to meet with the immigration authorities until February 2024 and, meanwhile, he takes the first steps towards his new life.
“I see a future in this country as an athlete, but we need to get the papers and the roads begin to open up for us,” admits Suárez, who together with Miclín and López was received for a few days by a friend in Gran Canarias, and now lives on. thanks to the help of the Catholic Church and the Red Cross.
“We are together, but going through work. We slept in the church that welcomed us and we are moving forward”
“We are together, but going through work. We sleep in the church that welcomed us and we are moving forward,” she adds.
Getting to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria was quite a challenge, explains the hockey player to this newspaper. The delegation arrived in Barcelona on May 4th and their official passports –with the visa to be legally in Spain– delivered by the Inder (National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation) were immediately taken away. “We had our ordinary passport hidden, but it did not have a visa,” says Suárez.
The day they arrived they bought them sports shoes to start training: “They were the cheapest out there,” says the hockey player, who shows 14ymedio the deteriorated pair of shoes she used to play in Cuba.
Miclín, López and Suárez managed to buy plane tickets and risked going to the Barcelona airport without a visa. They were lucky. As it was a flight within Spanish territory itself, they were not strict with their documents, so they were able to reach their destination without difficulty.
“The situation in the Antonio Maceo Field Hockey School in Havana is very sad. People are very hungry,” he recalls. “We trained in terrible conditions, without sports equipment, because the country says it has no resources to care for athletes. We almost always trained hungry, because there was no bread for breakfast. We did three training sessions on an empty stomach.”
The three hockey players know that they will not return to Cuba for a long time, although they have not received any notification from Inder, but their position is clear: “I do not agree with that system and even less with how high-performance athletes are treated in Cuba”.
“I do not agree with that system and even less with how high-performance athletes are treated in Cuba”
Suárez and her companions are added to the more than 75 Cuban athletes who have abandoned their delegations between 2022 and 2023, according to journalist Francys Romero, who does not include in the number those who have left the country after requesting discharge, retiring or leaving the island. by legal means.
On April 12, the Cuban News Agency (ACN) expressed itself in glowing terms about the Cuban hockey players of both sexes, whose delegations trained to “maintain regional supremacy” in the games in San Salvador.
That is why a “great motivation” for the trip to Barcelona, the person in charge of preselecting the athletes, Mileysi Argentei, told ACN. At the Barcelona training base, Yadira Miclín and Dailyn Suárez were scheduled to play as defenders, while Marianela López would play as a striker.
After the Cuban defeat in Miami during the controversial World Baseball Classic, catcher Iván Prieto also escaped from his hotel and stayed in the US. The stampede of Cuban athletes became a headache for the regime, which in July In 2022 – after the escape of several Cubans in the World Athletics Championships, also in the US – he dismissed Yipsi Moreno, then national commissioner of that sport, from his position.
Moreno, one of the stalwarts of the regime, was also removed from the Council of State, the body that is in charge of choosing the Government and approving the laws proposed by Parliament. When she left the athletics commission, Inder issued a brief statement: her dismissal, they said, responded to the “personal will” of the former athlete.
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