FCB — Federación Cubana de Boxeo

What it is

The Federación Cubana de Boxeo governs the most successful Olympic boxing programme in the world after the United States. Its seat is inside the Ciudad Deportiva in Havana, the same complex as the national sports institute.^[1]

Its founding year is contested and no single date should be printed: the commonly cited 1910 appears to conflate the federation with a Havana boxing academy of that year, and the documented antecedent is a national boxing and wrestling commission constituted on 13 December 1921.^[1]

It is not a private association in the Western sense. The state sports institute, created in 1961, directs sports policy, and under Cuba's first sports law — approved in July 2025 — national federations are national sporting associations for which that institute is the organ of relation. In practice federation and state interlock at the top: the 2022 decision to permit women's boxing was announced jointly by an institute vice-president and the federation president.^[2] [3]

A distinction worth keeping straight: the federation president and the national commissioner are separate posts, held by the same person until about 2024 and by different people since.^[4]

Selection, and the Olympic record

The federation affiliated to World Boxing on 22 May 2025, in the batch of seventeen that took that body past a hundred members, describing the move as securing its Olympic future. One precision: its own statement says only that it informed the IBA and thanked it for good relations — a formal resignation from the IBA could not be verified, and press framing of a clean break goes beyond the document.^[5] [6]

No published selection criteria exist. What is documented is the machinery. A national boxing commission governs the sport operationally, and a technical committee — the technical chief, one representative per province, and the heads of sports medicine and psychology — meets monthly to evaluate athletes and take decisions. The selection instrument in practice is the Playa Girón national tournament, first held in March 1962 after professionalism was abolished, fought "under the eye of the strategists of the national pre-selection, who are looking to update the current roster." The squad itself is called the matrícula.^[1] [7]

The pipeline beneath it is a state function rather than a federation one: community sports schools in all 169 municipalities from age nine, then provincial sports schools, then academies feeding the junior and senior national teams, with a residential national boxing school outside Havana.^[8]

The Olympic record. Cuba has won 42 gold, 19 silver and 19 bronze — 80 medals, second only to the United States. Widely quoted totals of 41 golds and 78 medals are pre-Paris 2024. Cuba was absent from the 1984 and 1988 Games through boycotts, and two of the only three men with three Olympic boxing golds are Cuban.^[9]

Two governance developments are of record. Cuba returned to professional boxing in April 2022 after sixty years, through agreements with foreign promoters, with athletes training on the island and travelling to fights only with technical approval. And boxers leaving the national squad while abroad is a documented and recurring phenomenon, reported almost exclusively by independent and exile outlets rather than state media — which bears directly on how the federation's rosters should be read.^[10] [11]

No Cuban amateur licence, record book or medical booklet could be identified in any source, and there is no federation website or results database — results are published as journalism.^[1]