ABSTRACT
The interrelationship between sport and nation is currently so pervasive and widespread that most people do not question it. The modern Olympic Games only reinforce this supposedly ‘natural’ connection between national identity and sport. Indeed, it is widely seen as ‘common sense’ that each nation has a national sport, a game that embodies the qualities and characteristics of a group of people, not only in the specific game played but also in the style in which it is played. The most popular team sports in the world, association football, baseball, rugby union, cricket and basketball, reflect cultural histories as well as supposedly unique national characteristics. In football, the standard cliché about the Brazilian national team is that it plays with ‘flair’, an individual artistry that eschews teamwork. In contrast, the clichéd view of the Germans is that they are a ‘well-oiled machine’ in which the team often exceeds the sum of the individual skills of its members. These qualities are remnants of colonial discourses that legitimated the domination of non-European peoples. However, while sporting practices served to legitimate colonial rule, they also provided an arena for colonized peoples to challenge colonial hierarchies. Many sports scholars equate the formation of national sports to these colonial struggles, demonstrating a convenient one-to-one correlation between the political colonial relationship and the emergence of national sports in formerly colonized lands. [1] While evident in several instances, such an argument effectively imposes a form of cultural determinism in which the only logical choice for colonized peoples is to adopt the sport of their dominators. This is a position that Latin American sports scholars roundly reject even as they acknowledge the historical connections. [2] The presumed supremacy of colonial influences on the social importance of any given sport can hardly be universal and indeed, in this piece I concur with those who argue that each nation’s sporting culture is determined by its own unique historical trajectory. Consequently, the ideological assumptions of inevitable modernization and the discounting of colonized peoples’ abilities to affect their own histories are rejected. To contravene such assumptions, I will demonstrate how the evolution of Cuban identity and the use Cubans made of baseball in the late nineteenth century merged to create what is now the Cuban national sport.
