Irene Forbes, Ana Maria Lujan and Juan Velázquez Pueblo y Educacion Publishing House Havana, 2003

During the II Olympic Games held in Paris over a century ago, Cuban fencing sensation Jose Ramon Fonst won the very first gold medal for both the island nation and Latin America. Since then, hundreds of athletes from the largest Caribbean island have competed in these world games. This book gives readers an all-embracing and useful insight of how Cubans have fared in the Olympiads from 1900 to the year 2000. Linked to sports writing for over three decades, Irene Forbes (Havana, 1949), Ana Maria Lujan (Santa Clara, 1938) and Juan Velazquez (Guantanamo, 1952), “did a lot of research, scribbled hundreds of note pages and eventually pieced together a volume that highlights Cuba’s performance in Olympic Games,” said Jose Ramon Fernandez, president of the Cuban Olympic Committee. This second edition (revised and unabridged) of a work first published in 2001, stands for a magnificent contribution to Cuba’s sports library.

Enrique Figuerola (El Figaro) Basilio Fuentes Ferrer Scientific-Technical Publishing House Havana, 2003

Engaged in three Olympic finals, Enrique Figuerola (El Figaro) is a milestone of Cuban sports in the second half of the 20th century. This book provides a well-documented and exhaustive approach to this athlete’s history, teeming with passages of his life, anecdotes about his training, the races he ran in, as well as his place in history and in the world ranking of his time. A statistician who heads the Statistics Committee of the Cuban Track & Field Federation, Basilio Fuentes Ferrer (Havana, 1937) is currently working on a volume about this sport discipline on the island nation since 1886 to date. This book represents a closer look at Mr. Ferrer’s outstanding contribution to Cuba’s sports writing.

Women’s Judo in Cuba: The World’s Best Team Candido Perez and Ronaldo Veitia Scientific-Technical Publishing House Havana, 2003

For a considerable number of experts, Cuba’s women judo team is penciled in as the best on the face of the earth. This 100-plus-page book tells both the story and development of women’s judo on the island nation through an assortment of facts, figures, anecdotes and records. Historian and sports writer Candido Perez, together with Ronaldo Veitia, head coach of the Cuban women’s team, present a real text book on the issue that becomes too hard to put down. As judo master, trainer and professor Antonio Becali Garrido puts it, the book “enlightens readers in the knowledge of a rarely known sport in Cuba that’s riveting the attention of increasingly larger numbers of people and getting more and more recognition with each passing year.”