By Oscar Sánchez Serra on July 15, 2025
Cuba’s Little League softball champions will continue to develop in the sport. Photo: National Softball Commission
The United States has violated the rights of Cuban children by preventing nine- and ten-year-old girls from the Little League national softball team from attending the World Series qualifying tournament in Puerto Rico.
This can only be described as sadistic, because of its refined cruelty, which it carries out with pleasure; sarcastic, because it mocks and offends with biting irony; and criminal, because it cuts short the noble aspirations of the early years of life.
Any description would fall short of the new felony committed by the US government against Cuba and its sports movement. To the 82 people—athletes, coaches, and officials—who, so far in 2025, have been prevented from representing their country, we can now add, in the most ruthless manner, the refusal to allow girls between the ages of nine and ten, national champions, to participate in the qualifying tournament for the Little League Softball World Series in Puerto Rico.
These little girls have had their dreams stolen from them, and their innocence has been toyed with, because that government, whose embassy in Havana has not granted a single visa requested by Cuban sports this year, did grant them visas. But it did not do the same for their teachers and coaches.
Does the US administration really believe that Cuba would send those 14 girls alone?
Perhaps in its anti-Cuban hysteria or paranoia, it believed that the government of the Greater Antilles would send them, as in that farce of 1960, when the United States manipulated the feelings of parents and children with unfounded fear and forced a child migration under the lie that has always been its main weapon, known as Peter Pan.
How can you play with children’s feelings like that? What level of cruelty dwells in those who decide on such an aberration?
“How can we explain to nine- and ten-year-old girls from La Palma, Pinar del Río, that after so much effort, the petty politics of the United States has robbed them of their dream of playing in the Little League World Series?” asked Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic. He added that “it is not just a blow to sport, it is stealing their dreams.”
The White House’s decision reveals, once again, that the hostile policy of the US government, which knows no depth is against the Cuban people, including its children.
Although alienating, this stance is not surprising. Of all the member nations of the UN, only one has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which in November 1989 was the first treaty to recognize that children and adolescents have their own rights. The United States is the only country that has not signed this agreement, which, with 196 signatories, is the most widely ratified human rights commitment in history.
These little Cuban girls whose rights are being violated today are from the same province as a giant like wrestler Mijaín López. Perhaps even that frightens the fearful empire, because an example like that of the five-time Olympic champion, in their uniforms emblazoned with the name of Cuba, is such a great measure of dignity that it is impossible to hide.
They will continue to develop in sport, they will become champions, as they are today in Cuba in their category, and they will continue to grow under the preaching of Fidel that in Cuba “nothing is more important than a child.”
Source: Granma translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English