Cuba goal: Qualify for World Cup in the next decade

HAVANA: Every recess, Gabriela Alfonso Cabrera would watch the boys play soccer out of the corner of her eye.

She was so enthralled by the game that she finally approached her fifth-grade teacher, who frowned and reminded Gabriela she was a girl.

“I wanted to play, but they wouldn’t let me play at school because what if I got hurt and started to cry,” she recalled adults telling her.

Now 14, Gabriela sometimes is still the only girl playing alongside boys who are bigger and stronger than her, but she is not quitting after waiting four years to share a field with them.

She is one of hundreds of players that coaches across Cuba are training as part of a newly launched program to elevate the soccer’s profile and status in a country that last qualified for the men’s World Cup in 1938, losing to Sweden 8-0 in the quarterfinals.

An initial group of 16 coaches were recently trained by international officials from FIFA, the Switzerland-based governing body of the sport, with the aim of building Cuba’s next generation of soccer players on an island long known for its baseball and boxing superstars.

Those coaches also will be responsible for training more than 1,500 other coaches across the island in the upcoming months. The aim is for Cuba to qualify for the World Cup in the next decade, something it hasn’t achieved in nearly a century.

“We hope to make it,” said soccer coach Hector Noa Cuadro, who began playing at the age of 13 in the province of Guantánamo after seeing Argentina win the World Cup in 1978.

He said young Cuban soccer players have good physical strength but need to improve their technical abilities, including how to dribble the ball, use passing combinations between two or more players and sharpen their