The Economist March 26th 2022 The Americas 43they are playing cricket, but because they
are playing anything at all. Brazil may be
known the world over for football and
beach bodies, but a lot of Brazilians are
conspicuously unsporty. In a recent survey
of exercise habits, Brazilians puffed in last
out of 29 countries, devoting half the glo
bal average time to physical activity. A stu
dy in 2016 found that six in ten state
schools had no exercise area. In Poços the
cricketers are allowed to use a few of the
town’s derelict sport centres. But the rest
has been done, quite literally, off their own
bats—made by a local carpenter. The balls
are imported from Bangladesh.
Unusual too is that women are in the
vanguard. Brazil remains cleft by gender
stereotypes, but they never infiltrated the
pavilion. Today all 14 of the country’s pro
fessional cricketers are women, including
Ms Sousa. In Poços they are local celebri
ties. Brazil’s team dream of becoming “the
next Thailand”, says Ms Sousa. It too is not
a traditional cricketing country, but has
rapidly improved and now boasts the
world’s tenthbest women’s team in the
oneday format (Brazil lags behind at 28th).
The hope is that cricket one day becomesan Olympic sport, for then the flow of
money and interest would increase.
Within the next five years, Cricket Bra
sil wants to have 30,000 players in the re
gion around Poços. It is building a federa
tion of teams playing in Salvador, Brasília
and São Paulo. “I have no doubt that soon it
will arrive in the whole of Brazil,” says Sér
gio Azevedo, the mayor of Poços. He some
times cuts ribbons in a cricket jersey.
Cricket may never receive as much
money or adoration as the Seleção, Brazil’s
famous football team. But in Poços, at
least, it has already hit football for six.nW
hen yunior garcía, a dramatist,
was still living in his home city of
Holguín, in eastern Cuba, the local secre
tary of the Communist Party, Miguel
DíazCanel, came to see two of his plays.
“We talked,” says Mr Garcia. “He seemed
open and more modern. He liked the
theatre.” Since 2019 Mr DíazCanel has
been Cuba’s president. “He has stopped
smiling. He reads out everything he says.
He has acted as a despot.”
Mr García, one of whose plays has
been staged at the Royal Court theatre in
London, has suffered from that despot
ism. He was a founder of the San Isidro
movement, a group of artists and writers
based in Havana. In 2020 they staged a
protest against censorship outside the
culture ministry. “It began with 20 peo
ple and grew to 500,” he recounts. It was
the biggest gathering of its kind in de
cades. A senior official agreed to meet the
artists, though talks got nowhere. But it
was a turning point, Mr García thinks.
In its more than 60 years of rule,
Cuba’s Communist Party has been adept
at isolating dissidents, branding them
stooges of the United States. In its early
decades the regime enjoyed public sup
port, thanks to free education, health
care and housing and the charisma of
Fidel Castro. The first crack came with
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
end of its largesse to its Caribbean client,
later partially replaced by Venezuela.
Now Venezuela’s government has
little money, Mr Castro is dead and his
brother and successor, Raúl, has retired.
Mr DíazCanel and the militarybu
reaucratic complex he heads face un
precedented difficulties. While Donald
Trump was president of the United States
he intensified sanctions barring most
tourism and remittances to the island.
This compounded the inefficiencies ofCuba’s centralised economy.
The pandemic kept tourists away and
highlighted the parlous state of Cuba’s
health service. Hospitals were over
whelmed and oxygen ran short. The econ
omy is still 11% smaller than in 2018. In
January 2021 the government devalued the
peso, to try to cut subsidies and ineffi
ciencies. As a result inflation was almost
300% last year, according to the Econo
mist Intelligence Unit, our sister organisa
tion. On the black market the peso is
worth less than a quarter of the official
rate. Many shops have empty shelves,
except those that sell in dollars, which
many Cubans lack.
Frustration boiled over in spontaneous
protests across the island on July 11th 2021,
in which there were isolated incidents of
violence. This social explosion was fanned
by mobile phones and the internet, to
which the government granted access in2018. It was probably the biggest public
challenge to the regime since the 1960s.
The response was harsh: almost 800 peo
ple were charged over the protests and
more than a hundred have so far received
long prison sentences, some of up to 30
years, in summary trials.
On July 11th Mr García and his move
ment, now called Archipelago, demand
ed 15 minutes on television to explain
their view of the events. They were ar
rested and he spent a night in jail. Cracks
showed in the normally monolithic
façade of the regime. Silvio Rodríguez, a
prominent singersongwriter and a pillar
of the revolution, met Mr García. “He’s
conscious of the situation,” says the
playwright. “But he’s devoted his life to a
Utopia and can’t admit that he’s wrong.”
Archipelago sought official permis
sion to organise a peaceful protest last
November 15th to call for the release of
the prisoners. In response the regime
ordered military mobilisations on that
day. So the protesters switched to No
vember 17th. The security police told Mr
García he would go to jail for 27 years. He
said he would march alone carrying a
white rose. But in the days beforehand
his home was surrounded by a mob of
200 people. Rather than face long jail
terms, he and his wife, Dayana, escaped
to Madrid. The regime seemed content to
let them go, its usual expedient with
troublemakers. Dozens of other activists,
artists and journalists have left the island
since July, many of them ending up in
the Spanish capital.
The government has shut Mr García’s
theatre group. Archipelago is dispersed.
But it has already achieved something. It
has shown that the regime faces not just
a disgruntled populace but also an intel
lectual opposition it does not know how
to handle and which is hard to brand as
the creation of the cia. By repressing
such voices, the regime can doubtless
stay in power. But other voices may pipe
up, reminding the world that Cuba is like
Russia, only sunnier. Cuba’s dictatorship has a cultural opposition that it can’t tolerateBelloRussia with sunshine