Related videos:
Photographs shared this week on Facebook reveal the state of neglect of the Comandante Raúl Díaz Argüelles Sports Complex in Havana, a facility built for the 1991 Pan American Games that now accumulates rust, weeds, and flooded pathways after more than three decades without institutional maintenance.
The venue, popularly known as La Pelota Vasca, is located behind the 26 clinical-surgical hospital, near the Dinosaur Park, in the Cerro municipality. It hosted frontenis, pala, and other forms of pelota vasca competitions during the Pan American Games held from August 2 to 18, 1991, in the Cuban capital.
The images shared on Facebook by the user David Martínez reveal a two-story building with a peeling pink/salmon facade and turquoise details, a rusted structural metal roof without covering, empty windows without glass, corroded light poles, and concrete pathways covered by stagnant brown water.
"It's a place near my house. It's known as 'La pelota vasca.' That sport and others like it used to be practiced there a long time ago," Martínez himself explained.
Other neighbors immediately recognized the place. "From the time of the Pan American Games in '91? It reminds me of the complex near the clinical hospital on 26 where they played frontenis, paddle, and other variants," commented Karen Díaz.
El deterioro no es nuevo. En marzo de 2019, el periódico oficial Juventud Rebelde reported that the installation necesitaba una "reparación capital" gestionada entre el Instituto Nacional de Deportes, Educación Física y Recreación (Inder) y la Federación Internacional, intervención cuya concreción no ha podido verificarse en fuentes posteriores.
What barely survives is the adjacent skating rink to the complex, and not because of state management. "Next to it is the skating rink, which is still operating thanks to the parents of the children who practice there, who keep it alive," pointed out Luis Manuel Afaro Frias in the comments.
The Raúl Díaz Argüelles Complex was part of the ambitious sports infrastructure program established for the 1991 Pan American Games, the largest continental sporting event organized by Cuba. This program also bequeathed the Pan American Stadium, the Reinaldo Paseiro Velodrome, the Baraguá Swimming Complex, and the Pan American Village, which consisted of 55 prefabricated buildings, facilities that today face varying degrees of deterioration.
The complex is named after Brigadier General Raúl Díaz-Argüelles García, a Cuban military officer born in Havana on September 14, 1937, who died in combat in Ebo, Angola, on December 11, 1975, when the armored vehicle he was traveling in hit an anti-tank mine. He was posthumously declared a Hero of the Republic of Cuba in 2015.
The abandonment of the facility reflects a documented pattern of institutional negligence that affects sports, cultural, and housing infrastructures throughout the island.
The XI Festival de Alamar film was declared in "total collapse" in April of this year; Tarará has accumulated 520 abandoned Art Deco houses with closed schools and clinics; and Boca Ciega has collapsed structures and areas that are completely in ruins.
Also, the Santa Fe Casino has become historical ruins, adding to a list that continues to grow without the regime providing any verifiable responses or recovery plans.
Filed under: