It’s the last day here in Cuba. Another good day of shooting although our camera pool was reduced from three to one. We filmed with the simply great and heart-warming people of a surprising football fan club. Yes, football, as the national sport of Cuba – baseball – is constantly losing ground to the game Germany supposedly always win until the Italians come.
So, this time round you’ll read the first sport content blog post on 5 days. If you hate sports, you have been forewarned. But as you know by now, 5 days ITWBC would not report on sports just for the sake of sports, it rather likes to focus on the backstory that comes with it. So stay tuned, don’t click on the next cat video that might come your way (at least not now) and let’s get started.
Cuba is already infected with football fever, and the heat is on when it’s the Spanish league, Champions League, or actually the German Bundesliga. So I called Roberto Díaz in Havana, a man referring to himself as “Bobby”. He speaks fluent German, better than me, and not just that: he has learned German in a country that does not exist anymore, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) aka East Germany. So Bob even has a bit of a local dialect from Leipzig, the city he once studied in, in the 80s. Today, he works as a tourist guide in Havana. He always was a big football fan, and regretted the fact that “his” German town did not have a serious football team for a long time – as the former GDR super heroes of Lokomotive Leipzig fell very low after reunification.
This has changed recently. RB Leipzig has emerged on the scene, and they made Leipzig shine again – with a little help of an Austrian business tycoon who has invented a bizarre tasting energy drink named after an animal that is not red at all. For those not in the know: RB is of course the abbreviation of his beverage supposedly pumping up energy levels of the one who drinks it. It’s the first club of this kind in Germany, the tycoon simply bought some formerly heavily irrelevant fifth-division club from the Leipzig area, renamed it RB Leipzig, injected it with loads of money, and today only a couple of years later they are among Germany’s best teams.
It has not much to with what Bobby and his friends grew up with in Cuba and in the GDR: socialism. RB Leipzig is actually the worst class enemy one could actually probably think about. Not just that the energy drink tycoon is a right-winger from hell, also his way of doing business is not precisely about the principles of solidarity and equality. Still, Bobby and his friends have finally got what they have been dreaming of: a new successful squad from Leipzig, “their” city, where they spent their best moments of youth, and so they founded a RB fan club.
“Everything is about money today in football”, Bobby rightly argues and so his club members are perfectly fine with the fact that their team has neither tradition nor recognition. RB simply bought a team of upcoming stars and it worked out. We met about 10 out of 40 or so fan club members all showing up in their jerseys that were sent to them by a German friend supportive of their cause. The jerseys cost 90€ per piece, “which we can’t afford”, as Bobby says.
They watch the games in Habana’s Centro Vasco, where usually large numbers of people watch baseball. They are not all in their 60s; they actually do have younger members, too, like the “social media guy”. He is the only one not speaking German, as he had no training in the GDR. He was rather born in 1997, the year when I first went to Cuba. The fact that he is a RB Leipzig fan, and not a Real or a Barcelona fan like friends of his age, indicates the impact the club could have in years to come – if the energy drink guy continues with his investment that is. Not sure if Cuba is his key market but if only he’d know the joy he brought to the RB people of Havana he might even stop thinking the same non-sense his political homie Trump does.
Our RB people feel so attached to Germany and to the city of Leipzig in particular (which today has become kind of Germany’s 2nd best city after Berlin by the way) that they say they are “100 per cent Cuban and 50 per cent German”. It is touching to see, how the great bridge of internationalism following the principles of Carlos Marx and Federico Engels still creates bonds today, even if their statues in East Berlin and even more so in Leipzig have been hidden away for quite a while now. It might be a bit absurd, that it has been revitalised by a guy probably not giving the slightest flying shit about Cuba and his energy drink that is not even available on the island. But it does not matter to them; all that matters to them is that a city they see as their second home, some 11,000 kilometres away from Havana will keep Cristiano Ronaldo trembling, one day.
“Einmal Leipzig – immer Leipzig, hey!” (Once for Leipzig, always for Leipzig, hey!) they shout into our microphones. And then they also create their own Salsa version of it, dancing joyfully on the street with their jerseys, flags, and scarves. We ended the day with them in Havana’s ArtCafé, in the stylish Vedado neighbourhood. It is run, what else, by a German, although from former West Germany. The guy, Sven Creutzmann, is an awesome photographer and his café is really damn cool and full of his picture from around Cuba. All of them perfectly understand what Cuba is about: the people more than anything else. If ever you make it to Havana that should be a must, no matter if you support RB Leipzig or not. Creutzmann has been a permanent resident of Havana since 1993.
This is it, 5 days has to fly home and still owes you a couple of videos more. Please bear with us, most hardships we had during the trip have been explained on here for the last days. Those not mentioned, such as excessive alcohol consume and cracking unfunny jokes 24/7, have been omitted. The videos will come, we will prevail, we will dominate the world, and there is already a new destination in the pipeline.
There is a lot of talk on official Cuban walls about victory. For now, also building on the last day with the RB people, all we can say that victory is a matter of the heart. Siempre.