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The NBA will be the first American professional sports organization to visit Cuba since the White House announced in December that it would restore diplomatic relations between the countries.

Steve Nash, the recently retired point guard, will make the trip, along with Dikembe Mutombo, the former centre who works for the league as a global ambassador and whose election to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame was announced Monday.

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From the women’s side, Ticha Penicheiro, who retired from the WNBA in 2012, will help conduct the clinics and other community outreach projects in conjunction with the Cuban sports ministry and the Cuban Basketball Federation.

Mark Tatum, the NBA’s deputy commissioner, said in a telephone interview that Nash, Mutombo and Penicheiro were selected, in part, because they all speak Spanish.

Tatum will also make the trip, as will Utah Jazz coach Quin Snyder and other league and team staff members. The league has had a planning group in Cuba in advance of the clinics.

Tatum said that the league had been in contact with the State Department and that “they’re supportive of it.”

He added, “We’ve seen the bridges that basketball can build between cultures.”

While none of the NBA’s broadcast partners have shown games in Cuba, they hope to at some point.

As a nation, Cuba has had successes in basketball, Tatum noted, saying the sport had been played there for more than a century. The country’s women’s team has been a consistent medalist in the Pan-American Games, and it finished first in FIBA’s 2013 Americas competition. The Cuban men’s team won a bronze medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Two Cuban-born players have played in the NBA, both only briefly: Lazaro Borrell with Seattle in the 1999-2000 season and Andres Guibert with Minnesota from 1993 to 1995. A third Cuban-born player, Al Cueto, is listed as having competed in the old American Basketball Association, from 1969 to 1971.