WATCH: Highlights and Full Cosmos Press Conference with Cuban FA

The New York Cosmos will become the first professional sports club from the United States to compete in the Republic of Cuba since baseball’s Baltimore Orioles visited in March 1999. The Cosmos will be the first to visit the largest island in the Caribbean since the restoration of relations between our neighboring nations, facing the Leones del Caribe this coming June 2.  Cuba will be the 42nd country visited by North American soccer’s most famous ambassadors.

In 1978, it was a North American Soccer League club that was the first professional sports team from the United States to visit Cuba since June 1960.  It should have been the New York Cosmos, but instead it was the Chicago Sting. 

Two days before the Cosmos ever played a competitive match, on April 15, 1971 – as the United States table tennis team made its famous visit to China – founding General Manager of the club, Clive Toye, formally contacted the State Department of the United States to suggest a soccer exchange.

“Soccer is the one great international sport and is America’s fastest growing sport,” said Toye at the time in a press release to announce the offer.  “It has crossed more borders and broken down more barriers than any activity other than the very act of living itself.” 

It was with this sense of mission that Toye chose an identity for the club to represent the world’s greatest city at the global game, shortening the word cosmopolitan to form the Cosmos.  And that spirit of cosmopolitanism was on display as the club visited El Salvador this past weekend and Hong Kong last month. 

No longer President and General Manager of the Cosmos but still serving as a “special consultant” to the club from June of 1977, Toye’s final press release with the Cosmos in August 1977 was to announce that the Cosmos would travel to China, playing the Chinese National Team that September in Beijing on the 17th and again on the 20th in Shanghai.  By that time, Toye had moved to Chicago and taken over the Sting, announced as their new General Manager that August 25. 

Toye had long been trying to get the Cosmos to Cuba as well, but couldn’t secure an invitation until 1978. And as he explained last week, the invitation should have come to the Cosmos:

“The reason I took the Chicago Sting is I had been trying to take the Cosmos there and the Cuban Federation finally got hold of me and said, ‘Fine we’d like to invite you now.’ And I said. ‘Well that’s very nice of you, but understand I’ve left the Cosmos and I’m now in Chicago, so you need to get a hold of …’ And I gave him some name. [He said], ‘No, no, it’s you we want to invite so you can bring whatever team you like,’ and that’s why the Chicago Sting went there instead of the Cosmos.

I would do anything, anywhere, anyhow, to get us publicity… I could bring Manchester United over, but who cares?  But oh [when Moscow Dynamo played the Cosmos at Hofstra on August 30, 1972], ‘the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming!’ Whether it was going to Cuba or China or signing a chimp.  All these things I did, whether it was China, whether it was Cuba, whether it was anywhere you could think of where there was a dynamic above the dynamic of soccer itself. And then that’s why the Cuba thing came around. The Russians came and the Israelis came. Anytime I could get a name in the paper that would force them to use the Cosmos name, I would do it. Do you know what I mean? Anything that was dramatic in a sense – that was beyond the game of soccer and got publicity for the game of soccer.

The Cuban federation issued the invitation to me in the spring of ’78. We, the Chicago Sting were training in the Caribbean, preseason, and we were playing in Haiti, when I got the invitation. I told them, ‘Thank you very much but I’m not with the Cosmos anymore,’ and they said, ‘You’re the one who did all the work. We invite you.’

So I had to then rent an old World War II Dakota to fly from Port-au-Prince to Havana along a very well-designated route with people and guns looking up at us to make sure we stayed on the route.  When we got off the plane, and they took the players off it couldn’t be more hospitable. They took me into a room to sit down with Cuban top brass, got me a cup of coffee, and I said, ‘Now, I have a question for you which may change the entire course of U.S.-Cuban relations: Have any of you got a cigar?’

So one of them gave me a dirty look and said, ‘How many do you smoke every day?’ And I said, ‘Well that all depends on whether I’m telling you or whether I’m telling my wife, but I smoke at least three a day.’  And he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a Cuban cigar for which I was eternally grateful. So we had a big laugh and everything went well from there. Only thing was it wasn’t the Cosmos with me it was the Chicago Sting. If Warner hadn’t gotten rid of me it would have been the Cosmos.”

Chicago lost to the Cuban National Team 2-0 on March 21, 1978, but Toye recalls precious little from the game itself.

“There was a decent crowd at the stadium. They kept on telling me, ‘Castro’s coming so keep that seat empty,’ but he didn’t seem to turn up to the best of my recollection. We were very much in the basic start of building a team so it wasn’t a game I remember, certainly not a game that I glistened with pride over.  I don’t remember the score. We didn’t have a full team. 

“I remember our coach Malcolm Musgrove, who used to play at West Ham, had to go onto the field because at one stage we didn’t have any players. We were not ready to do anything spectacular. We were trying to rebuild an extremely badly run club.  So they’d have been better off in Cuba if they would have done what I said and contacted the Cosmos.  But I guess I must have made an impression in all of the efforts I made so they insisted it was us.”

So at long last the Cosmos will make the trip the club planned to make in the 1970s. 

The Cuban National Team played its first international match in 1930 and reached the World Cup quarterfinal in 1938. The U.S. Men’s National Team has made just two trips to Havana, winning a World Cup Qualifier 1-0 on September 6, 2008. The only other visit was in 1947, when they lost 5-0 to Mexico in Havana on July 13 and fell 5-2 to Cuba a week later. 

The Chicago Sting are the only professional soccer club from the U.S. to visit Cuba, so the Cosmos will try to become the first U.S. club side to win there this June.  Regardless of the result, the Cosmos will further their cosmopolitan mission and continue to build upon their reputation as North America’s greatest soccer ambassadors with this historic trip to Havana.