This is how the Cuban weightlifter Ramiro Mora made it to the Olympic Refugee Team

The Cuban weightlifter Ramiro Mora was born in central Cuba, in a town called Gaspar in the province of Ciego de Ávila. He is 26 years old, lives in England and is one of the thirty-six athletes that make up the Olympic Refugee Team with a view to participating in the Paris 2024 Games.

This fact and what his friends have marked his life fills him with joy.

“It is a pleasure to be able to talk about my story, what my process has been like and that some people who are in this and have not been convinced, continue fighting for their dreams, do not give up,” Mora said in an online conversation with the Voice of America from Bristol, a city located almost 200 kilometers west of London, the capital of the United Kingdom.

In May the International Olympic Committee (IOC) advertisement the Refugee Olympic Team, made up of 36 athletes from 11 countries in 12 sports disciplines. In addition to Mora, from Latin America, this team includes his compatriot, the canoeist and Tokyo 2020 Olympic champion, Fernando Dayán Jorge, resident in the United States, and the pistol shooter, the Venezuelan Edilio Centeno Nieves, resident in Mexico.

The impulse of friends

On several occasions during this interview, Mora insisted on the weight that his friends, coaches and his girlfriend have played in his life and in his achievements in sports.

An example of this was his first opportunity – he explains – which came at the end of his primary education.

“One of my friends was practicing weightlifting. His shirts were tight on his arms and I said: ‘I want to do that to gain muscles’ because I was very skinny. He took me to the gym, I met the trainer and from there I started training weights,” he recalls.

Neither his lack of muscle nor the advice of a first coach to abandon the idea kept him from the dream of becoming a champion on the island, where there is a tradition of competitive practice of this sport. Although no Cuban athlete has reached the hall of fame of the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF), many of them do have this position in the Pan American Weightlifting Federation (PFLP).

Mora got a place in the elite school of his native province a year after starting training and five years later he was crowned national champion in his category, but he was not allowed to join the senior national team until he was 18 years old. in accordance with the regulations of this sport on the island.

A long process

“They told me I had to gain weight because I was too thin for the division I was in.” Even so, he says, he won the national championship in his category. He spent four years on the National Weightlifting Team, based at the “Cerro Pelado” Center, in Havana.

Mora, whose sports career he promoted in Cuba, says that “like every Cuban, when you join a national team and live in a country that is a dictatorship, they don’t give you freedom of anything, you arrive with a dream and over time they themselves leave you. extinguishing the dream.”

“You have to be from the Party (Communist of Cuba, the only legal one on the island),” he says. “They involve you in many organizations that you don’t want to participate in,” she adds.

Cuba, where the flight of athletes, artists and other professionals is high, has been subject to an economic embargo by the United States for more than six decades. The island’s government blames the US government for most of its problems, including encouraging the desertion of its athletes and doctors. Opponents, on the other hand, say that the failures are systemic and related to poor state administration.

In recent days, the official newspaper of the ruling party Gramma criticized the participation of Cuban athletes in the Refugee Olympic Team and called it a “farce.”

“The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) are wrong or are lending themselves to the farce against Cuba (…),” the newspaper said in an extensive article published at the end of May.

“Can you be a refugee (…) and be an Olympic, world, Pan American and Central American and Caribbean champion?” asked the newspaper in reference to Fernando Dayán Jorge, Olympic champion in Tokyo 2020 in canoeing and who a few months later abandoned an official Cuban delegation in Mexico.

A rudder in life

Mora says that, disappointed with the dynamics of the competitions in Cuba and the material shortages, he decided to turn his life around.

“In 2018 I went to the Circus (National of Cuba) because I no longer felt good in the sport. There was a very bad economic situation (…) there was no money to go to the competitions,” said Mora, who only managed to participate in some national and some international championships, but held on the island.

“I was very close to my mother,” he says. “I didn’t feel happy, I was far from the family, I only saw her in December,” she says. That’s why for a time he alternated his first rehearsals in the circus with training in the national weightlifting team.

“Come and learn,” Mora remembers a circus manager at the time telling him. And then everything changed.

“I went to the circus and learned, I did trampolining,” he says. “I had to dance, laugh… and in sports the only thing I did was lift the weights and that’s it. Here I had to put on makeup, I had to wear different types of clothes, things like that.”

A definitive “change”

In 2019 he got a contract for England, where he traveled for the first time outside of Cuba. In 2021 he arrives again in the city of Blackpool, for a three-year contract with the circus company. But that same year he has to return to the island because his mother suffered from cancer.

“There were no medications, there was no oxygen. The beds were in poor condition,” she laments. Her mother, whose illness worsened during the coronavirus pandemic, died three weeks after being hospitalized.

Upon his return to London, he learned through social networks about the protests in Cuba in July 2021 and participated in acts of support for the protesters who were imprisoned.

“I began to open my eyes and see life differently. When my mother died, everything changed, the world fell on me. I began to speak out, with all the things that were happening in Cuba and that I saw on social networks. Here I asked for asylum. “I started posting the things that were happening.”

From then on “warning letters and summonses arrived for me; They gave them to my sister there (in Cuba), because of what I was doing she could go to prison. “Just for posting the photos of the protests that took place (in front of the Cuban embassy in London and the British parliament) and that is why I decided to ask for political asylum in England.”

“What I did was protest, I didn’t do anything wrong. Just protest for the rights of every Cuban,” she explains.

“I took refuge in training”

He was sent to a hotel for six months while he was given asylum status through the UNHCR. The institution gave him daily food and 8 euros a week for expenses, but he did not have permission to work, according to the UN agency’s rules.

“It is a very hard and very complicated process,” says Mora about the process to obtain asylum.

And in that situation – he adds – he remembered his mother’s advice: “‘You have to be disciplined, even if we are not millionaires or have a lot of money, you have to be disciplined and fight for what you want.'”

He says that in those days he could barely stop the bus. So a friend bought him a bicycle. “Every day in the morning I would walk 15 kilometers to go to training.”

In Bristol, he says, he met his girlfriend. It was she who supported him to pay for a gym membership for his training while he was granted asylum. The challenges have not been lacking. With just one month until the English national championship in 2022, he had to lose 6 kilograms to enter the 89 kilogram division.

He also had to overcome the language barrier. “My English was not very good. I wrote to her on the translator (on the phone). She decided to help me. She paid for my hotel for the competition and took me in her car. There I set a national record and became national champion” with the mark of 155 kilograms in the snatch category and 191 kilograms in the clean and jerk category.

On December 1, 2023, he was granted asylum. “It was an incredible day. Your life starts to change, you start to believe in yourself a little more. You leave Cuba with the desire to get ahead, to fight for your dreams, to have a car, a bicycle, a house (…) The first thing I did was go to church to put flowers for my mother because I know that she He is always with me, helping me every step I take,” he says.

When the Voice of America interviewed him, the Cuban athlete’s daughter was 10 days old. “His birth from her was something incredible, I have no words to explain it.”

Road to Paris 2024

Mora is preparing to make the weight of 102 kilograms, 10 above his ideal weight.

“What I think about most is having a good competition, looking good and making good brands,” he says. “I hope to repeat this interview for the next Olympic Games in the United States and give my best in each competition.”

This Cuban athlete has a message for others who like him have left their countries and are in the asylum process.

“Don’t stop, keep fighting and fighting for your dreams… that nothing and no one can stop you (…) Difficult moments will come, good moments, of joy, of sadness, but you have to get up and move forward. “It’s all about believing in yourself and continuing to fight, everything is possible,” he concludes.

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