The last professional boxing card held in Cuba, before the sixty-year ban, took place at the Coliseo de la Ciudad Deportiva, on the outskirts of Havana, on October 27, 1961.
Paul Díaz, a solid middleweight whose real surname was Suárez — he changed it so his mother wouldn’t find out he was boxing — knocked out Julio Carreras in the fifth, in a packed and smoke-filled arena brimming with enthusiasm and revolutionary fervor.
Just a few months before, young Fidel Castro had sat ringside, with his brother Raúl and El Che, surrounded by the sound and fury of the liberation, blissfully unaware of a failed plot by the US government to assassinate him there, in what preceded the almost farcical invasion of the Bay of Pigs. On April 16th of that year, now fully aware of the northern threat, Castro announces for the first time that Cuba is a socialist republic.
By many accounts, including the CIA’s internal reports, El Comandante had resisted communist ideology for years. In his earlier travels to the US, in his various meetings with government officials, he had come across instead as a staunch nationalist, and as someone the Americans could in the long run continue to do their Caribbean business with. It was the constant plotting, the sabotaging, and ultimately the failed invasion of his country that helped push him into the cold embrace of the Soviet Union, and turned him into the defiant villain that would haunt and taunt the gringos for the next half century.
Empires have a way of seeding their own destruction. What they practice and experiment with at the frontiers of their colonial dominions is often a sinister prelude to what will happen later back home. What is acceptable in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Asia, or even in space, might one day return to exact a gruesome and disproportionate vengeance.
Paul Díaz died on February 17th, 2024. He was one of the few boxers who chose to stay in Havana, after the 1962 blanket ban on all professional sports ended his short but promising career. He became a coach to many young fighters. Freed from the drain of top talent into professional ranks, Cuba became, over the next sixty years, one of the greatest amateur boxing nations in history.