With a strong right jab to the face of her opponent, Elianni Garcia Polledo on Saturday won the first official women’s boxing match in sports-crazed Cuba.
“It is a historic result for Cuban boxing,” said one of the judges over the loudspeaker when announcing the “unanimous” decision for Garcia, from Havana province, over Reynabell Grant, from Guantanamo. Both are 27.
Dressed in red and shorter, Garcia tirelessly landed powerful blows with both hands that hit her opponent’s face, shoulders and abdomen several times.
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That is, until the decisive blow, in the third round, left Grant down for the count and ultimately decided the fight.
It was the beginning of the first official women’s boxing program, something that many women and authorities of this sport expected in Cuba, an island that boasts 80 world boxing titles and 41 Olympic gold medals in boxing, including the legendary Teofilo Stevenson.
Finally, Cuban sports authorities gave a green light for women on December 5.
“This is a moment that we have been preparing for, for several years,” Alberto Puig de la Barca, president of the Cuban Boxing Federation, told AFP.
In the end, there will be 12 females — two for each division, which will be the preselection of the team for the Central American games in San Salvador, in August 2023 and other international events.
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“She (García) just kept working on the offensive, looking to shorten the distance,” Raul Fernandez, 55, one of her trainers, told AFP at the end of the fight.
Garcia, who says she came to boxing from athletics, now looks optimistically at her future in boxing.
‘Bittersweet’
“I have a bittersweet feeling, because I cannot represent Cuba,” Namibia Flores told AFP. At 46, she is six years older than the age maximum in this sport.
But she can be there outside the ring: “Right now, I am the only trainer and I was one of the first girls who is training since 2006,” she says.
At 70 years old and already retired, Nardo Mestre could not miss this moment.
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He was the trainer of Flores and many other girls for nearly 30 years, when, he remembers, Alcides Sagarra, the father of the Cuban Boxing School, arrived one afternoon suggesting the need to train women.
So “it was never approved. Now it was authorized and I am already retired, but proud because five of the girls that I trained are here today,” he told AFP.
Cuba has had female representation in all sports, including weightlifting and wrestling, since 2006, but the last bastion of “sports machismo” long was insurmountable: letting women box.
Women’s boxing is now practiced in 187 of the 202 member countries of the International Boxing Association (IBA).
Women made their debut at the London 2012 Olympic Games, with three divisions.
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It has yet to be determined if Cuba could be represented by its women in the next Boxing World Cup in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, next May.
The new truce plan in Gaza includes “many demands” from Hamas, according to an Egyptian source
The talks held between delegations from Egypt and Israel in Tel Aviv for a truce in Gaza were “largely positive and successful” and included “many of the demands” of the Islamist movement Hamas, an Egyptian security source familiar with the negotiations and another from Hamas reported to EFE on Sunday.
A delegation from Hamas, headed by the member of the political bureau Khalil al-The Hague, is expected to arrive tomorrow in Cairo, mediator in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group, to deliver its response to the mediators, according to the Egyptian source, which asked not to be identified by the sensitivity of this issue.
This new proposal, on whose content it did not provide details, “overcomes the obstacles that hinder” the declaration of a truce, a ceasefire, the exchange of prisoners and hostages, as well as the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip.
The possible announcement of a truce “will contribute to the approval of a first phase and to the efforts of the entire international community to consolidate this ceasefire and seek to move to a permanent truce instead of a temporary one,” according to the informant.
On the other hand, a source of the Palestinian Islamist movement, which also asked for anonymity, confirmed to EFE that tomorrow a delegation from Hamas will arrive in the Egyptian capital to present its response to the new Israeli proposal.
The informant added that the proposal includes “reducing the minimum number of kidnapped that Hamas will commit to freeing and eliminating divisions in sections of the Gaza Strip.”
Last Friday, an Egyptian mediating delegation traveled to Tel Aviv to discuss this truce with Israel, while the Jewish State has warned that it will not allow the Palestinian group to delay and has once again threatened to invade Rafah, at the southern end of the strip and where more than a million refugees are overcrowded.
Hamas warns the United Kingdom that if it sends soldiers to Gaza they will be a “legitimate” military target
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas warned the United Kingdom on Sunday that if it deploys military personnel in the Gaza Strip, after information that they could help in the distribution of humanitarian aid, they will be “legitimate targets” of its armed wing.
“We alert Britain, or any other country, against the deployment of forces on land or on the coast of the Gaza Strip and affirm that they will be legitimate targets for our people and their resistance,” Hamas said in a statement.
The armed group charged against any initiative in the Palestinian enclave that does not have its approval.
The Islamist group responded to the information released on Saturday by the British network BBC, according to which the British Armed Forces could deploy troops to deliver humanitarian aid on the ground arriving in Gaza through the new floating dock that is being built by Israel and the United States.
The public broadcaster indicated that the United Kingdom could be the intermediary to which the United States referred when it said that it would not be the American soldiers, but others, who would distribute the food packages sent by ship from Cyprus and then transferred to Gaza.
Yesterday, the Israeli Army assured at a press conference with international media that international organizations would be in charge of the distribution of humanitarian aid, but did not indicate which ones would have agreed to collaborate.
Although the British Government has not confirmed the news, the BBC affirms, according to anonymous sources, that the Ministry of Defense is considering getting involved with ‘wet boots’ on the ground.
The possible role of the British forces would involve driving the trucks with the help from the landing boats on the floating runway, hundreds of meters long, and delivering it to a safe distribution area on dry land, the station explained.
The London Ministry of Defense reported on Friday, in turn, that the British Navy auxiliary ship RFA Cardigan Bay set sail from Cyprus to provide support for the construction of the temporary dock, which is led by the United States.
This ship will provide accommodation for hundreds of American sailors and soldiers, about whom Washington has made it clear that they will not set foot in Gaza territory.
Nancy Pelosi says that Netanyahu “could not have made things worse” in Gaza
Former President of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said that the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, “could not have made things worse” in the conflict in Gaza, in an interview broadcast this Sunday by the BBC.
Pelosi, who on Thursday participated in an event at the English university of Oxford, told the ‘Laura Kuenssberg Program’ that Netanyahu “was never a peace agent” and admitted that she “is not a great fan of his.”
The congresswoman said that what is happening in the Strip “challenges the conscience of the world” and maintained that the impact of famine on children “is almost unforgivable”, while calling the Hamas attack on Israeli territory on October 7 “barbaric”.
“Israel has the right to defend itself, but the way it is doing it is a challenge because Netanyahu has never been a peace agent,” he said.
“I’m not a great admirer of yours; I couldn’t have done things worse than those tens of thousands, or whatever number it is, of dead people, malnourished children and the uncertainty that exists… and that’s what people are talking about,” he said.
Asked if she understood why young people in the United States used controversial tactics when protesting against the conflict, Pelosi opined that “when they go beyond the campuses and block the Golden Gate Bridge, or something else, for a long time, and people can’t go to the doctor or the hospital or anything urgent in their lives, they don’t get support.”
But he added: “How can demonstrations on (university) campuses be criticized? That’s a way of life in the United States.”
On Thursday, the British police evicted two pro-Palestinian protesters who protested during their speech on populism to students from the University of Oxford, while abroad another group criticized her for her defense of Israel and her position on the movement to support Palestine.
