The brother of Moisés David Torres Puig, the Cuban goalkeeper who left the Cuban delegation during the XXV Central American and Caribbean Games in Santo Domingo 2026, requested help this Sunday from journalist Magdiel Jorge Castro due to the vulnerable situation in which the young athlete finds himself.
"Please, this is my brother. His name is Moisés Torres Puig. He has no one and no passport. Please, support him," was the message that the relative sent directly to the journalist, as Castro himself recounted on social media.
The journalist spread the message and called upon the Cuban community in the Dominican Republic, as well as Dominican institutions and officials, to guide and assist the young man.
The legal situation of athletes who defect in Dominican territory presents particular complexities, which further exacerbates Torres' vulnerability.
The athlete, originally from Las Tunas and the second goalkeeper of the Cuban men's field hockey team, became on Friday, July 24, the first Cuban athlete to leave the delegation at these Central American Games.
He was also the youngest player on the team.
The escape occurred while the team was attending as spectators a match of the Cuban women's national team at the stadium, a moment that the athlete seized to carry out a carefully planned strategy.
"I was very nervous about being discovered. I felt like they suspected something, but I ordered ice, saying I had bumped into a ball during practice, and that eased things a bit," Torres Puig recounted in an audio shared by Dporto Sports News.
Once the guards lowered their guard, the athlete executed the second part of the plan.
"Then I said I was going to throw the ice in a bin that was in the stadium hallway, and that's when I managed to leave with the person who took me out of there. We switched clothes and walked out until the UBER arrived," he explained in the same audio.
After escaping, Torres Puig tried to contact his teammates without success.
"I have tried to reach out to some team members, but no one has responded. I imagine it must be due to how tense the atmosphere is," he pointed out.
The case occurs in the context of massive defections in Cuban sports. Just days before, nine of the twelve members of the Cuban canoeing team left the delegation during a training camp in Montreal, Canada, marking the largest defection recorded in this discipline in the history of Cuban sports.
Field hockey also has its own history: five players left the delegation at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile in November 2023, and three more deserted in Barcelona in May of the same year.
Related videos:
Filed under: