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An influencer tournament fills the Coliseo with light and sound as Havana sits through its blackouts
The 3x3 por Cuba event drew some 13,000 people to the Ciudad Deportiva on Saturday, according to 14ymedio. Granma celebrated the full house and the prize's charitable destination, without mentioning the city's blackouts.
The event, called 3x3 por Cuba and billed as «charitable» by its organisers, was held on Saturday at the Coliseo of the Ciudad Deportiva, home of the national sports institute, in central Havana. It was sponsored by the private company Helados Gustó, from Artemisa, and promoted by the actress Carla Cremata, daughter of the founder of the pro-government arts project La Colmenita, according to 14ymedio.
The tournament pitted 24 influencers split into eight teams of three, each named after the company sponsoring it: at least two state-owned, Eventos Palco and Los Portales (a joint venture between the state firm Coralsa and Switzerland's Nestlé), and six private ones, among them Suncar, La Poompa, PedroCarr, Ocean Boutique, Bazzo and Confecciones Pío. Cuba's women's basketball team trained them; Granma specified that each trio was completed by a youth player from the Capitalinos.
The Coliseo, with a capacity of between 12,000 and 14,000 people, was almost full. At 3:30 p.m., the scheduled start, the queue of spectators was already huge and the police presence notable. Matches alternated with cultural interludes, including the Liszt Alfonso ballet company, the National Circus of Cuba, the comedian Yamira Díaz and urban music artists, and the band Los Van Van closed the day. While the lights and the music went on inside, the city was sitting through its scheduled blackouts.
La Poompa's team won and received a solar panel kit as the prize; the cleaning company explained that it had cleaned the Coliseo in five days. Cremata said in one of her videos that the idea of making the event «charitable» came once it had already been called, when they worked out they could fill the venue: «I didn't want to leave it as just an event, I thought: if there are so many of us with so much reach, why not do it for a good cause?». No money would be handed to the institutions, but rather whatever each one asked for.
Criticism had been building on social media for weeks, as the comments on the event's own advertising show, over the waste of resources on a promotional spectacle while the population endures the decay of the most essential services, according to 14ymedio.
Sources: 14ymedio · Granma
Data updated: 2026-11-10T04:15:00.000Z