Download Free Boxing For Cuba Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Boxing For Cuba and write the review.

In 1961, fearing the communist rule of Fidel Castro, Guillermo Vicente Vidal's family sent him to America through Operation Peter Pan. He arrived in Colorado and was sent to an orphanage with his brothers, and his family reunited four years later. Fifty years later, he served as Denver's mayor. This is his story of overcoming incredible odds.
Boxing is one of the most popular sports in Cuba and its fighters are recognized the world over for their skills and finesse. The Cuban national team holds more Olympic medals in the sport than any other country, making the nation a hotbed of emerging global champions. State-sanctioned and promoted since the revolution, amateur boxing's potential for fame and relative wealth makes it a beacon for impoverished youth yearning for a better life. Shot all across the Republic of Cuba,Havana Boxing Clubdocuments amateur boxing schools and the aspiring, determined boys studying the sweet science. Compiled over the course of eight years, French photographer Thierry Le Goues spent countless hours in the complex network of training facilities that abound in the island nation, developing relationships with the coaches and their young progeny, following the rise and fall of countless talents and wannabes. The resulting images are of young fighters struggling, sweating, and fighting to overcome anything thrown in their way--inside the ring and out. Le Goues' luscious tritone black and white photographs depict rigorous training camps, boxing rings erected in the streets of small villages in the Cuban countryside, the lows of these young boxers struggling with abject poverty and crushing defeat, and the ultimate highs of rising up victorious over all obstacles and challengers. The pure instinct to survive against overwhelming odds and to realize their dreams of boxing on the national team is both startling and beautiful.Havana Boxing Clubcaptures the sport's arresting beauty and unrelenting brutality.
A powerful and lively work of immersive journalism, Brin-Jonathan Butler's The Domino Diaries tells the story of his time chasing the American dream through Cuba. Whether he's hustling his way into Mike Tyson's mansion for an interview, betting his life savings on a boxing match, becoming romantically entangled with one of Fidel Castro's granddaughters, or simply manufacturing press credentials to go where he wants-Brin-Jonathan Butler has always been the "act first, ask permission later" kind of journalist. This book is the culmination of Butler's decade spent in the trenches of Havana, trying to understand a culture perplexing to Westerners: one whose elite athletes regularly forgo multimillion-dollar opportunities to stay in Cuba and box for their country, while living in penury. Butler's fascination with this distinctly Cuban idealism sets him off on a remarkable journey, training with, befriending, and interviewing the champion boxers that Cuba seems to produce more than any other country. In the process, though, Butler gets to know the landscape of the exhilaratingly warm Cuban culture-and starts to question where he feels most at home. In the tradition of Michael Lewis and John Jeremiah Sullivan, Butler is a keen and humane storyteller, and the perfect guide for this riotous tour through the streets of Havana.
In Prizefighting and Civilization: A Cultural History of Boxing, Race, and Masculinity in Mexico and Cuba, 1840–1940, historian David C. LaFevor traces the history of pugilism in Mexico and Cuba from its controversial beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century through its exponential rise in popularity during the early twentieth century. A divisive subculture that was both a profitable blood sport and a contentious public spectacle, boxing provides a unique vantage point from which LaFevor examines the deeper historical evolution of national identity, everyday normative concepts of masculinity and race, and an expanding and democratizing public sphere in both Mexico and Cuba, the United States’ closest Latin American neighbors. Prizefighting and Civilization explores the processes by which boxing—once considered an outlandish purveyor of low culture—evolved into a nationalized pillar of popular culture, a point of pride that transcends gender, race, and class.
THE STORY OF CUBAN BOXER AND POLITICAL PARIAH GUILLERMO RIGONDEAUX'S HARROWING DECISION TO DEFECT IN HOPES OF REAPING THE REWARDS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM "What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?" This was the question posed by legendary boxer Teofilo Stevenson in the 1970s, crowned by many as the Muhammad Ali of Cuba, in response to an offer of five million dollars to leave his island to fight Ali. But not all Cubans have come to the same conclusion, let alone with such apparent ease. Guillermo Rigondeaux, two-time Olympic champion and heir to Stevenson's throne, sacrificed everything he had in his home country—his wife, his son, his government-subsidized car and house, as well as universal reverence among his fellow citizens—to try to make it in the mecca of big-money boxing, the United States of America. But has the chance to make good in America been worth the loss of his national identity and the love of his countrymen? And to what extent has he been corrupted by the promise of untold riches? In A Cuban Boxer's Journey, author, filmmaker, and journalist Brin-Jonathan Butler chronicles the fascinating and tumultuous career of Rigondeaux—moody, driven, and almost mythically talented––as he attempts to capture the elusive and often punishing American dream. See how this athlete's most daunting challenge becomes how he can survive the complex forces outside of the ring.
Professional boxing has been illegal in Cuba since 1961, so it was no surprise that Felix Savon, Cuba's double Olympic heavyweight champion, had to turn down the $25 million purse offered by Don King to fight Mike Tyson. John Duncan wanted to make the fight happen and so he quit his then job as sports writer for the "Guardian and left for Cuba. His plan was to cut a deal with Cuban boxing authorities to make this fight happen. His account of the year spent in the maelstrom of Havana's heat and bureaucracy is intercut with often poignant portraits of some of Cuba's most famous boxers.
This book is dedicated to all members of the international boxing research organization -ibro- and the editors at boxrec.com- for their brilliant work and selfless dedication at rescuing boxing history from yellowed clippings and dusty archives and to the late hank kaplan, grand guru of boxing archives, outstanding historian, great friend and mentor.
No aspect of Cuban life more clearly epitomizes their government's emphasis on image-building and individual participation than the system of physical culture and competitive athletics. Indeed the Cuban record in international athletics is the most universally recognized success of the communist revolution, as indicated by the Cuban arrival in the 1972 Olympics and the 1991 Pan-American Games, when Cuba beat the United States in the gold medal tally, dominating boxing, baseball, and winning the marathon. The fruits of the Cuban sports system were again in evidence at the Barcelona Olympics of 1992, despite the severe deprivation caused by the collapse of the island's socialist allies.In spite of the obvious success and political importance of sport in Cuba, very little has been written on the subject. Sport in Cuba closes this gap. In the first major study on the Cuban system of sports and physical culture, Paula J. Pettvino and Geralyn Pye analyze how sports was given such a high priority in Cuba, how the country became a world power by the mid-1970s, and the impact of sports on Cuban society. Moving from the early days when the government's approach to sports was loosely defined, through the construction of a complex system of physical culture, to the current years of uncertainty, Sport in Cuba utilizes both archival sources and personal interviews. It will be of interest to Latin Americanists and students of sports.
"Kid Gavilan: The Cuban Hawk" is the story of the rise and fall of one of the greatest boxing champions of all time. Born Gerardo Gonzalez in 1930, he rose from humble beginnings in Camaguey Cuba to become Kid Gavilan, the Welterweight Champion of the World. During the early days of 1950s television, Gavilan became an instant sensation and TV's first superstar attraction. Easily recognizable in his classy white trunks and shoes, Kid Gavilan thrilled crowds around the world with his flashy style and trademark "Bolo Punch." Throughout his championship reign 1951-'54, the "Keed" was virtually unbeatable in the welterweight class. Gavilan fought the greatest boxers of his era including Sugar Ray Robinson, Ike Williams, Carmen Basilio, Beau Jack, Billy Graham, Carl "Bobo" Olson, Ralph "Tiger" Jones, Chuck Davey and others.During a time when organized crime controlled the fight game, Gavilan had the courage and character to remain true to his sport. At the height of his title reign, mob promoters like Frankie Carbo and Frankie "Blinky" Palermo robbed him of his crown and denied him the opportunity to regain the championship.Retiring to Cuba national hero, Gavilan was thrust into Castro revolution and virtually forgotten as a champion. Returning to the United States in 1968, his greatness was finally recognized when he was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame (1985) and the International Boxing Hall of Fame (1990).
Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santería trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today. Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.