Cuba embraces golf to boost tourism

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - The only time Cuba's Fidel Castro is known to have played golf was in 1961, in a stunt thumbing his nose at the United States.

Now that Fidel has handed over power to his brother, Raul, Communist Cuba is setting aside any ideological objections and is embracing golf, the most capitalist of sports.

Investors from Canada and Europe have proposed building gated communities with luxury hotels, villas and condos surrounding 18 and 36-hole golf courses near beach resorts across the Caribbean island.

Some of the projects, which include one by top British architect Norman Foster's firm, have been on the drawing board for years and their backers are hoping Cuba's new president, Raul Castro, will give them the green light to revive golf.

"Old-school objections to golf on ideological grounds have fallen away," said Mark Entwistle, a former Canadian ambassador to Havana who now consults to foreign companies planning to do business here.

"Golf is seen as important to develop a more sophisticated and repeat tourism beyond sun and sand," said Entwistle, who is advising one of the golf community projects.

Since succeeding his brother, Fidel Castro, in February, Cuba's first new leader in almost half a century has set about lifting restrictions in the one-party socialist state, such as allowing Cubans to stay at hotels previously reserved for foreign tourists.

He does not appear to share his famous brother's abhorrence for the bourgeois sport of golf. There are today at least 10 golf resort projects in the pipeline at various stages in the approval process, Entwistle said.

The only time Fidel Castro was seen armed with a putter instead of a gun was two years after seizing power in the revolution in 1959 that ousted U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and changed Cuba from a Mafia playground into a Soviet ally.

That was in March 1961, one month before the disastrous landing by CIA-trained Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. Tensions were running high between Havana and Washington, and Castro played golf with Ernesto "Che" Guevara, wearing military fatigues and boots, as a publicity stunt.

Guerrilla icon Guevara at least knew how to play the game, having worked as a caddy as a boy in Cordoba, Argentina.

But the Colinas de Villareal golf course where the two revolutionaries played was soon turned into a military camp.

Havana's elite Country Club was taken over and its fairways became the grounds of Cuba's top arts and music school.

Today, Cuba's capital has only one 9-hole course, the former British-owned Rovers Athletic Club, where foreign businessmen and diplomats play.

The rugged course has seen better days -- sticks are used for flag poles on the parched greens. Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona played there almost every day when he lived in Cuba undergoing treatment for cocaine addiction.