Donations
The CanBiCuba Cycling Club supports youth programs throughout Cuba. We are involved with both the national cycling federation and master racing in the Havana area.
There are no bike shops as we know them in the developed world and our youth groups depend on your much needed support.
It is not mandatory but we do encourage all riders to bring a little something to help out.Your old 700c x 23 or 25c might be worn out to you but is like gold here. We need anything you can think of and have lying about, handle bars/stems/seats/gears/brakes and on and on.. If sending clothing keep to small and medium sizes. Handle bar tape is an often forgotten and economic gift.
Quite often a rider will bring an old racing bike to leave with a club. If you’d like to bring a bike let me know because I may have one up in Canada awaiting transport.
What is an EIDE high school?
Escuela de Iniciación Deportiva Escolar, referred to by the acronym EIDE. These are sports oriented high schools that are attended by youths deemed to have a talent for a particular sporting activity. There is one EIDE in each province of Cuba. Not all EIDE cover cycling but you can bet Cuba’s top sports are in every provincial EIDE, such as boxing and baseball.
Driving around the vicinity of each school with a cycling squad, you might come across a group of young athletes being escorted by their gym teacher on a motorbike. What a great idea, sure beats vaulting a box or pommel horse. They do have gymnastics but don’t push it down the throats of those not inclined to vault and bounce around the gymnasium. As the great Fausto Coppi told us the best exercise for cycling, is cycling! Life is not all games at these EIDE institutions, a student must maintain passing grades in order to hold that prized place in the provincial EIDE. Let your marks slip and expect the boot. After all the state doesn’t want academic slackers representing it at the Olympic or Pan Am games.
No matter how far the youth lives from the school, they are taken care of by the state. If you live close enough to walk then do that, further way and you will be bused in daily. Beyond a bus ride there is a boarding school where you are fed and housed. Cycling can possibly be regarded as an elitist sport. In Cuba it definitely is that. Simply because even if your family had the money to purchase racing equipment, this would not be possible. There are bike shops in Cuba but these are rather rudimentary and cater to utilitarian sit up and beg roadsters. You know those Flying Pigeon bikes with rod brakes and roadster tires. You might see some low-end Shimano parts in a shop in Havana but high quality racing parts are out of the question. These are sometimes found in our Revolico (something akin to Kijiji).
These schools need your used parts! Can you imagine how difficult it must be for the coach to keep 20 kids in rubber? Sure we need your old racing bikes and you are sending them here for which we are very grateful. It is impossible to buy a 700x23c racing tire or inner tube, please consider bringing your used tires.
The list of our needs is extensive, from water bottles to the cages that hold them on the bike, handlebar tape, gear cables and brake cables, saddles, chains, and cassettes. If it goes on a racing bike we need it, not necessarily new, used will suffice. Send us your used spokes. Thanks so much for reading this begging letter.
Best regards, from Havana, Peter Marshall.
On our last day, Peter Marshall, a Canadian-turned-Cuban and the owner of cycling tour group CanBiCuba, led the way as we biked out of Havana to meet the youth racing club in Punta Brava. We rode by fields of cows and waved back at drivers in classic cars. At a beach bar made of wood and palm fronds, we sipped a cold Tu Kola and watched perfect sets of waves go to waste without surfers.
When we arrived at the club coach’s home, 10 beaming kids in their bike kits put heavy coconuts with colorful straws in our hands and showed us to a table filled with food: banana bread pudding, fried plantains, sandwiches with spicy tomato jam, and bowls of guava and papaya.
While cradling their new (our old) saddles, pedals, and shoes, the boys spoke of life on two wheels, how they train six days a week after school and aspire to become pro cyclists, regardless of the challenges they face. Listening to their stories as they held the recycled gear and grinned the widest grins, it occurred to me just how much this moment meant to the club. The donations and beat-up bicycles allowed them to escape everything else, if only for a little while. The kids hugged farewell and chased after our wheels, which kicked up mud on the fractured concrete alley. I was surprised by having to brush away tears, a salty mix of joy and guilt.
Back in Havana, I sat along the Malecón, washing down my Cuban sandwich from La Chucheria with a splash of Havana Club rum and pineapple and a whiff of exhaust from a pink ‘59 Buick Invicta. A fisherman in a makeshift Styrofoam boat floated through ripples of gold as the sun dipped below the sea. It was a perfect sendoff, but my mind had already left, drifting towards new plans to ship bike supplies to those kids with big dreams in Punta Brava.