Football diplomacy
The U.S. men’s national soccer team made its first visit to Cuba (a land where beisbol is king, and soccer is barely an afterthought) since 1947, a dozen years before the Revolution. On both sides of the Straits of Florida, players and officials alike went out of their way to de-emphasize the political context of the game — this despite a half-century-old Cold War still raging between Washington and Havana, and the recent defection of seven Cuban soccer players to the U.S. following an Olympic qualifying match in Tampa back in March.
The U.S. government allowed the team, its staff, and a handful of journalists to attend and broadcast the match, but the travel ban remained in place for U.S. fans who wished to attend the game. Not surprisingly then, ESPN and CNN focused a large part of the coverage on a handful of such fans who circumvented the U.S. travel ban to cheer on the American team (wearing sunglasses, hats, and star-spangled bandanas to obscure their identities), and, more implicitly, challenge the absurdity of U.S.-Cuban relations that remain as deeply frozen in the late 1950s as the American cars still omnipresent on the island’s roads. (I highly recommend the SI.com photo gallery from Havana in advance of the game).
Back in the early 1970s, “ping-pong diplomacy” preceded the thaw in U.S.-Chinese relations. Alas, no U.S. politician has found the courage to risk upsetting the aging anti-fidelistas in South Florida and begin to move U.S.-Cuban relations into the late 20th century, and Saturday’s match is unlikely to do much to spur such change, as much as one might hope otherwise.
There’s much more reason to be more optimistic about Turkish-Armenian relations in the wake of the game in Yerevan. Turkish President Abdullah Gül accepted the invitation from his counterpart, Serge Sarkisian, to attend the game in person in the Armenian capital – this despite bitter hostilities between the two nations grounded in the World War I-era deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks (and Turkey’s ongoing refusal to accept responsibility for the first genocide of the 20th century). More recently, relations between Ankara and Yerevan have suffered in part due to Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan’s breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region — Azerbaijan being a close ally of Turkey, and the Nagorno-Karabakh region’s population being predominately Armenian.
Sarkisian invited Gül to Yerevan over the opposition of Armenian nationalists; in turn, many Turkish nationalists expressed their outrage at Gül’s decision to accept the invitation. With Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Turkey is looking to build regional cooperation, and the thawing of Turkish-Armenian relations is critical to any such efforts. The Armenian economy, in turn, would benefit greatly by the opening of the border between the two countries, which has remained closed since 1993.
President Gül, his entourage, and the Turkish media covering the game traveled to the stadium, past Yerevan’s Genocide Museum and the national monument to the victims of 1915. Gül watched the match, behind bullet-proof glass, as the Turkish flag flew over the Armenian national stadium, as local fans almost drowned out the Turkish anthem with their boos, and as Mount Ararat loomed in the distance, towering over Yerevan, just behind the closed border.
Today, in the week of the soccer match, the foreign ministers of Turkey and Armenia announced that their two nations will open the border, establish diplomatic relations, and otherwise begin normalizing ties. All because of a soccer game? Of course not, but all the same, what Pelé called “the beautiful game” has helped along the dream of a better future in one troubled region of the world.
Tags: armenia, cuba, genocide, soccer, sports, turkey, u.s.-cuba
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