II

Today, La Bombonera is empty. Ravaged by Hurricane Gustav in 2008, it sits silent, crumbling, and gray. The pitch, once considered among Cuba’s best, is now more dirt than grass, marked by two rusting goalmouths that sit netless at each end. Kicking at the faded field chalk along the center circle, Pozo looks out toward the Sierra del Rosario mountains.

The bus doesn’t stop in San Cristóbal. Lost somewhere near kilometer marker 72 on the Autopista Nacional connecting Havana to Pinar del Río, its gridwork of concrete houses rests between Hospital General Docente and the old sugar factory.

The town sits on the edge of Cuba’s fabled tobacco country, its morning traffic a slow crawl of old Fords, tractors, and horse-drawn wagons carrying uniformed schoolkids. While the relentless sun burns on the horizon, women in tankinis and flip-flops navigate cracked sidewalks to collect the week’s beans, rice, and bread. A speaker bumps Cuban son from the main square. Cuba may be growing by the day, but San Cristóbal moves at its own languid tempo.

Perhaps that’s what brought Raul Rodriguez here half a century ago. A semiprofessional soccer player from Spain’s Canary Islands, Rodriguez was a vocal communist and political leader during the Spanish Civil War. That history caught up with him in 1948, and when newly installed dictator Francisco Franco marked him for death, he was forced to flee to Venezuela with his family. After Fidel Castro brought communism to the Caribbean in 1959, Rodriguez followed thousands of displaced Spanish communists to Cuba, landing in Havana before relocating permanently to San Cristóbal with his wife, kids, and a soccer ball in 1962. While Rodriguez was merely seeking peace after years on the run, it was a move that would change the fabric of the township forever.

Manolo Santos still remembers when Rodriguez showed up to the baseball field with a ball.

“I had never seen a soccer ball, or any ball that big,” recalls the 67-year-old. “It looked like a pumpkin. We were all so curious how it could work.”

British sailors had brought the game to Cuba in the early parts of the 20th century, but it had stayed primarily within the Spanish, British, and Irish immigrant populations of major port cities like Havana and Cienfuegos. When Rodriguez began kicking the ball around San Cristóbal with his three young sons, it didn’t take long for 15 more wide-eyed youngsters to join in. Then, 50. Soon he was organizing impromptu training sessions and playing small-sided games. Each week, the group grew. Everyone wanted to learn the new game from “El Maestro.”

“It became a religion,” says Santos, a former San Cristóbal soccer coach and one of El Maestro’s first pupils. Even as Castro exalted Cuban baseball and the island fell into line, San Cristóbal dropped its bates and pelotas in favor of the beautiful game. Funded by Cuba’s national sports association, INDER, El Maestro grew San Cristóbal’s youth program from one team to 10, driving players to games across the country in his 1952 Buick.

With no formal coaching background, he was more teacher than trainer, demanding strong ethics, a solid skill foundation, and organization from his players. These ideals contradicted the free-flowing nature of Caribbean soccer, but it didn’t take long for his teams to gain recognition against better-established clubs from the capital city.

As San Cristóbal’s first soccer generation became coaches, El Maestro’s empire propagated. In 1979, San Cristóbal’s Lázaro Amado Povea helped Cuba’s national team to a Pan American Games silver medal. (He went on to play in the Olympics in 1980 and the Pan Am Games again in 1983.) And when FC Pinar del Río, the provincial team that represented San Cristóbal, was born in 1978, it looked to the town to fill most of its roster. In fact, Santos, who coached the team until 1986, remembers that 12 of the 20 players on its 1987 squad hailed from El Maestro’s hometown.

“That high volume of players is an idiosyncrasy within San Cristóbal,” says Mario Lara, a Cuban-American and ex-Pinareño, and the author of Cuba’s premier soccer blog, Futbol de Cuba. “These players have clearly been exposed to soccer from a very young age.”

One of those players was a stocky goal-scorer named Osvaldo Alonso Sr. Raised in a fenced-in one-story house across the street from El Maestro’s training ground, Alonso was most at home putting the ball in the net. It’s rumored that during his early years with FC Pinar del Río, his coach put him into a match down 3–0 with a simple message: “Score goals.” He did, five in fact, marching his team to a 5–3 win in the second half.

Alonso Sr. led the league in scoring in 1986, and, thanks to an early goal by San Cristóbal native Rigoberto “Nany” Cruz, the league won FC Pinar del Río’s first national championship in 1987. In the face of traditional soccer hotbeds Villa Clara and Havana, Alonso Sr.’s squad established tobacco country’s first soccer dynasty, winning four titles between 1987 and 1992 and becoming the first Cuban team to reach the finals of the CONCACAF Champions Cup in both 1989 and 1990. In the two-leg 1990 final, the amateur team famously tied Mexico’s legendary Club América in La Bombonera, but, having never played above sea level, couldn’t compete in the high-altitude throne of Estadio Azteca.

When Alonso Sr.’s son, Osvaldito, made his debut with FC Pinar del Río a decade later, it was only natural for San Cristóbal to dream of more titles. In the spring of 2007, with Pozo and Alcantara playing alongside him, Osvaldito made good on that dream, winning FC Pinar del Río’s seventh championship (the team also finished first in 1995 and 2000)—the third most in Cuban league history—in San Cristóbal’s backyard.

But that celebration was short-lived. That summer, Pozo headed to U-23 camp ahead of Cuba’s Olympic qualification rounds, and Osvaldito and Alcantara joined Cuba’s senior national team for the Gold Cup in the United States. Less than a week into the tournament, Osvaldito tempted fate in a Texas Walmart, walking away from his teammates and the national team forever.

From there, Osvaldito’s journey is well documented. After running into the muggy Texas night and catching a bus to Miami, the 21-year-old midfielder started over, building a decade-long soccer career that took him from playing for the semipro Charleston Battery to captaining Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders. In 2016, he helped the club to its first professional championship, cementing his place as the most successful Cuban soccer player in history.

Back in the national training center in Havana, news of Osvaldito’s defection flew from dorm to dorm. Pozo still remembers the face of the women’s national team player who burst into his room. “She broke down,” he recalls. “She was just crying and yelling, ‘se acabó, se acabó.’” It’s over.

Pozo and Osvaldito had started playing together at age nine, rising through the ranks of San Cristóbal’s youth system side by side. After Osvaldito got the call-up to FC Pinar del Río’s senior team, Pozo followed him a game later. Together they went to the capital to train with the U-17 national team, and then with the U-23s, even sharing rooms at the national training facility. But that August, Pozo went back to San Cristóbal alone.

“We had to get accustomed to the field without [Osvaldito],” says Pozo. “I still feel his absence.”

Pozo still roams the midfield in San Cristóbal, but the 32-year-old no longer wears green and white. In Cuba’s national soccer league, teams are designated via geographic location, meaning that most players represent their hometown club for life. However, when Cuba rezoned his town from Pinar del Río province into the newly formed Artemisa Province in 2011, FC Pinar del Río was split in two, casting Pozo and the rest of San Cristóbal from the dynasty they had helped create.