Yordeni Caballero, 7, plays cricket in a neighbourhood street game in Havana, Cuba on September 29, 2014. Ramon Espinosa / AP
Yordeni Caballero, 7, plays cricket in a neighbourhood street game in Havana, Cuba on September 29, 2014. Ramon Espinosa / AP

Cricket catches on in corners of baseball-mad Cuba



The ball bounced off the pavement and Yordeni Caballero swung, whacking it with a soft thud and hurling his bat to the side as if he’d hit a home run. As the boy, 7, raced down a street-turned-cricket pitch, his coach shouted instructions about a sport that’s barely known in Cuba.

The Caribbean is divided between baseball-playing countries with US ties and cricket-playing islands that once belonged to the British Empire. Nowhere is more baseball-crazy than Cuba, but even here, a tiny but passionate group of men are trying to win people over to cricket, baseball’s bouncier British relative.

Mostly descendants of sugar-cane workers who migrated from other islands in the early 20th century, Cuba’s cricket partisans subsist on homemade and donated equipment from the embassies of cricket-playing countries. They recruit players from the streets and teach them rules of the new sport, while exploiting baseball-honed skills such as batting and running bases.

The offspring of immigrants from the island of Martinique, Kiomai Aguiar said he played baseball and basketball as a child, then switched to cricket at 16, falling in love with its leisurely pace and courtly interactions between players. He now coaches Caballero and other youths playing pickup games in San Miguel del Padron on the outskirts of Havana

“It’s a game that forces you to think, to organise, to do things deliberately. At the same time there’s respect and unity among the players,” said Aguiar, a 35-year-old unemployed maintenance worker. “There’s not a single cricket pitch in Cuba, so we play where they let us, on a football field, a baseball field, a running track.”

Cuba has organised cricket in six of its 16 provinces, with 1,150 registered players throughout the country of 11 million, said Barbara Delarra, an official with Cuba’s National Sports Institute.

“Youngsters like it because it’s similar to baseball, with pitching, batting and fielding. It’s a new sport and appealing to youngsters frustrated with baseball,” she said.

Cricket is also part of the cultural identity of Caribbean migrant communities in Cuba, the descendants of some 250,000 workers from Jamaica, Dominica and other British colonies who moved to sugar towns in eastern Cuba where they attended Protestant churches, ate spicier food and played cricket.

“They kept a lot of their identity,” said Jorge Giovannetti, chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico and an expert on Caribbean migration to Cuba. “They kept some of their diet, they kept some of their religious heritage, and cricket is part of it as well.”

Cricket is most deeply rooted in the eastern province of Guantanamo, home to many of Cuba’s immigrant-founded communities, where cricket is frequently taught to children in afterschool athletics programmes despite the lack of standard equipment.

“If we don’t have a bat, we make it from a stick. If there’s no ball, we make it from rags,” said Eliecer Brooks, the descendant of Jamaican immigrants who plays for Guatanamo’s cricket team. “We’ve wanted to maintain this tradition because it’s beautiful to remember one’s roots.”

Without a national tournament, Cuba has amateur tournaments like one played on a Havana football pitch last month between three Cuban teams and three teams of students from cricket-playing countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Adithya Senavirath, a Sri Lankan studying at the Latin American School of Medicine, where foreigners receive free medical education, said he enjoyed playing against Cubans instead of the fellow foreign students he usually faced in cricket.

“The Cubans have skills, they’re good bowlers,” he said. “They lacking some technique, but they learn fast.”

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Day 1 results:

Open Men (bonus points in brackets)
New Zealand 125 (1) beat UAE 111 (3)
India 111 (4) beat Singapore 75 (0)
South Africa 66 (2) beat Sri Lanka 57 (2)
Australia 126 (4) beat Malaysia -16 (0)

Open Women
New Zealand 64 (2) beat South Africa 57 (2)
England 69 (3) beat UAE 63 (1)
Australia 124 (4) beat UAE 23 (0)
New Zealand 74 (2) beat England 55 (2)

The specs

Engine: 1.5-litre 4-cylinder petrol

Power: 154bhp

Torque: 250Nm

Transmission: 7-speed automatic with 8-speed sports option 

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Indoor cricket in a nutshell
Indoor Cricket World Cup - Sept 16-20, Insportz, Dubai

16 Indoor cricket matches are 16 overs per side
8 There are eight players per team
9 There have been nine Indoor Cricket World Cups for men. Australia have won every one.
5 Five runs are deducted from the score when a wickets falls
4 Batsmen bat in pairs, facing four overs per partnership

Scoring In indoor cricket, runs are scored by way of both physical and bonus runs. Physical runs are scored by both batsmen completing a run from one crease to the other. Bonus runs are scored when the ball hits a net in different zones, but only when at least one physical run is score.

Zones

A Front net, behind the striker and wicketkeeper: 0 runs
B Side nets, between the striker and halfway down the pitch: 1 run
C Side nets between halfway and the bowlers end: 2 runs
D Back net: 4 runs on the bounce, 6 runs on the full

Coming soon

Torno Subito by Massimo Bottura

When the W Dubai – The Palm hotel opens at the end of this year, one of the highlights will be Massimo Bottura’s new restaurant, Torno Subito, which promises “to take guests on a journey back to 1960s Italy”. It is the three Michelinstarred chef’s first venture in Dubai and should be every bit as ambitious as you would expect from the man whose restaurant in Italy, Osteria Francescana, was crowned number one in this year’s list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

Akira Back Dubai

Another exciting opening at the W Dubai – The Palm hotel is South Korean chef Akira Back’s new restaurant, which will continue to showcase some of the finest Asian food in the world. Back, whose Seoul restaurant, Dosa, won a Michelin star last year, describes his menu as,  “an innovative Japanese cuisine prepared with a Korean accent”.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

The highly experimental chef, whose dishes are as much about spectacle as taste, opens his first restaurant in Dubai next year. Housed at The Royal Atlantis Resort & Residences, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal will feature contemporary twists on recipes that date back to the 1300s, including goats’ milk cheesecake. Always remember with a Blumenthal dish: nothing is quite as it seems. 

Qosty Byogaani

Starring: Hani Razmzi, Maya Nasir and Hassan Hosny

Four stars

Joker: Folie a Deux

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson

Director: Todd Phillips 

Rating: 2/5

UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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Name: ARDH Collective
Based: Dubai
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
Sector: Sustainability
Total funding: Self funded
Number of employees: 4
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Hobby: Playing piano and drawing patterns

Best book: Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins

Food of choice: Sushi  

Favourite colour: Orange

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Publisher:  Activision
Console: PlayStation 4 & 5, Windows, Xbox One & Series X/S
Rating: 3.5/5

Titanium Escrow profile

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Founder: Ibrahim Kamalmaz
Based: UAE
Sector: Finance / legal
Size: 3 employees, pre-revenue  
Stage: Early stage
Investors: Founder's friends and Family

What is hepatitis?

Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver, which can lead to fibrosis (scarring), cirrhosis or liver cancer.

There are 5 main hepatitis viruses, referred to as types A, B, C, D and E.

Hepatitis C is mostly transmitted through exposure to infective blood. This can occur through blood transfusions, contaminated injections during medical procedures, and through injecting drugs. Sexual transmission is also possible, but is much less common.

People infected with hepatitis C experience few or no symptoms, meaning they can live with the virus for years without being diagnosed. This delay in treatment can increase the risk of significant liver damage.

There are an estimated 170 million carriers of Hepatitis C around the world.

The virus causes approximately 399,000 fatalities each year worldwide, according to WHO.

 

Moon Music

Artist: Coldplay

Label: Parlophone/Atlantic

Number of tracks: 10

Rating: 3/5

if you go

The flights 

Etihad and Emirates fly direct to Kolkata from Dh1,504 and Dh1,450 return including taxes, respectively. The flight takes four hours 30 minutes outbound and 5 hours 30 minute returning. 

The trains

Numerous trains link Kolkata and Murshidabad but the daily early morning Hazarduari Express (3’ 52”) is the fastest and most convenient; this service also stops in Plassey. The return train departs Murshidabad late afternoon. Though just about feasible as a day trip, staying overnight is recommended.

The hotels

Mursidabad’s hotels are less than modest but Berhampore, 11km south, offers more accommodation and facilities (and the Hazarduari Express also pauses here). Try Hotel The Fame, with an array of rooms from doubles at Rs1,596/Dh90 to a ‘grand presidential suite’ at Rs7,854/Dh443.

APPLE IPAD MINI (A17 PRO)

Display: 21cm Liquid Retina Display, 2266 x 1488, 326ppi, 500 nits

Chip: Apple A17 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine

Storage: 128/256/512GB

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In the box: iPad mini, USB-C cable, 20W USB-C power adapter

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The struggle is on for active managers

David Einhorn closed out 2018 with his biggest annual loss ever for the 22-year-old Greenlight Capital.

The firm’s main hedge fund fell 9 per cent in December, extending this year’s decline to 34 percent, according to an investor update viewed by Bloomberg.

Greenlight posted some of the industry’s best returns in its early years, but has stumbled since losing more than 20 per cent in 2015.

Other value-investing managers have also struggled, as a decade of historically low interest rates and the rise of passive investing and quant trading pushed growth stocks past their inexpensive brethren. Three Bays Capital and SPO Partners & Co., which sought to make wagers on undervalued stocks, closed in 2018. Mr Einhorn has repeatedly expressed his frustration with the poor performance this year, while remaining steadfast in his commitment to value investing.

Greenlight, which posted gains only in May and October, underperformed both the broader market and its peers in 2018. The S&P 500 Index dropped 4.4 per cent, including dividends, while the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index, an early indicator of industry performance, fell 7 per cent through December. 28.

At the start of the year, Greenlight managed $6.3 billion in assets, according to a regulatory filing. By May, the firm was down to $5.5bn. 

ABU%20DHABI'S%20KEY%20TOURISM%20GOALS%3A%20BY%20THE%20NUMBERS
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