OFFICIAL VOICE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CUBA CENTRAL COMMITTEE
Cuba's Little League softball champions will continue to develop in the sport. Photo: National Softball Commission

Sadistic, for its refined cruelty, which it executes 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 adjective would fall short of describing the new felony committed by the US government against Cuba, against its sports movement. To the 82 people—athletes, coaches, or managers—who, so far in 2025, have been prevented from representing their country, is added, 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 any of the visas requested by Cuban sports this year, did grant them visas. But it did not do the same for their teachers.

Does the US administration really believe that Cuba would leave those 14 girls alone? Perhaps in its anti-Cuban hysteria or paranoia, it believed that the government of the largest of the Antilles would send them, as in that farce of 1960, when the United States manipulated the feelings of parents and children and forced a child migration under the lie that has always been its main weapon, known as Peter Pan.

How can one play with children's feelings like that? What great 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 United States' petty policy 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 only 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 is directed 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.

The Cuban girls whose rights are being violated today are from the same province as a giant like Mijaín López. Perhaps even that frightens the fearful empire, because an example like that of the five-time Olympic champion, in their uniforms and with the name of Cuba, is such a great source of dignity that it is impossible to hide.

They will continue to develop in the sport, they will become champions, as they are today in Cuba in their category, and they will continue to grow under the Commander-in-Chief's preaching that in Cuba "nothing is more important than a child."