Legnis Cala Masso carefully removes her necklace and smiles as her coach slides her bright red boxing gloves over her French tip nails.
The 31-year-old swings her wiry body into the ring and pounds her fellow boxer — also a young woman — with a series of punches, just as she has done countless times before.
Today is a day she has been waiting for since she started to box seven years ago.
Photo: AP
Cuban officials on Monday announced that female boxers would be able to compete officially after decades of restrictions, although they did not yet confirm if that would be taken to a professional level, as it was with Cuban male boxers earlier this year.
Still, it sparked excitement in women like Cala Masso who have spent years fighting to be recognized.
“Saying that boxing is not for Cuban women — that’s always been the problem,” she said, leaning on the side of a blue boxing ring in downtown Havana. “Where we are now, we never thought we would get here.”
Cuba is known worldwide for boxing, home to many legendary male boxers — among them Felix Savon, Teofilo Stevenson and Julio Cesar La Cruz — and owner of dozens of Olympic medals in the sport.
The island has also sparked controversy by not allowing women to compete, despite permitting them to do so in other contact sports such as taekwondo and wrestling.
Perhaps most notably in 2009, the former head coach of Cuba’s men’s team, Pedro Roque, told a group of journalists that “Cuban women are there to show their beautiful faces, not to take punches.”
It was a sentiment Cala Masso and other women who have embraced the sport have rejected as they have sought to change the rules.
Cala Masso began boxing in Havana with just one other women, spending long hours training despite being turned away by many coaches and boxing rings. With time, interest in boxing among women has only grown.
On Monday morning, officials with the Cuban National Institute for Sports (INDER) announced at a news conference that they would hold a competition of 42 female boxers this month to choose 12 athletes for a women’s team.
The team would compete in the Central American and Caribbean Games in El Salvador, their first international debut, they said.
The competition would be a first step toward the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. Women were first allowed to box in the Olympics in 2012.
Cala Masso, who now trains with five other women, hopes the decision means their community will only grow.
The announcement came shortly after Cuban boxers made a comeback in May in Mexico, with male boxers competing professionally — and getting paid — for the first time since the communist government prohibited professional sports 60 years ago.
It was a big change in a country where athletes, namely boxers and baseball players, regularly leave for paychecks elsewhere.
Down the line, once the team is built, those women could also potentially compete in a professional capacity, INDER officials said.
Meanwhile, they said Cuban female boxers would be able to train in state sports centers starting next month.
Emilia Rebecca Hernandez, a director at INDER, said that the changes would make it so “Cuban female athletes can move up to the place where they belong — right next to men.”
Yet Hernandez, who spoke only briefly, was the only woman on a panel of male officials who said their delay in allowing women to practice the sport was because they had to investigate “the risks that women could run.”
Women would need to wear additional padding to compete, they said.
Yet for 22-year-old Giselle Bello Garcia, who boxed alongside Cala Masso after having only started boxing one year earlier for exercise, said the news offers them a chance to show what they are made of.
“I have a new hope for life, because my life has changed. From now on, I’m going to focus solely on boxing,” she said. “I want my whole life, up until my death, to be connected to boxing.”
“I have to be the best,” she added.
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