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Shredding Communism:
Miami Skaters Hold Benefit to Send Boards to Cuba
By Sebastian Del Marmol, Mon., Nov. 15 2010
Embargo-Shmargo. It's time to export some skateboards to Cuba. After all, there's nothing like a little shredding to show islanders what freedom is all about. Though there may be some time before Fidel and Raul take their long awaited dirt naps, a group of Miami skaters are committed to getting Cuba's fledgling skateboarding scene the equipment it needs now.
Miami skaters sometimes have to fight to get new skate parks in their neighborhood, but in Cuba just getting a skateboard can take half a year or longer. That's why Rene Lecour, owner of several skate shops in Miami, is organizing a Got Skate fundraiser to collect boards and equipment ahead of a planned trip to the island-nation. The event takes place Sunday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. at Lecour's Country Village Skatepark in Hialeah. There will be a S.K.A.T.E contest (think H.O.R.S.E. like in hoops) and a $100 best trick contest.
Lecour is collecting new and used board to go along with the equipment he will be donating and what skateboard company sponsors will give. In six months, Lecour and a group of about 10 will travel to Cuba with all the boards they can fit in overhead compartments.
The Miami skater first thought about helping his fellow shredders in Cuba get some new boards after he and his 16-year old son watched a documentary on skateboarding in Cuba made by a couple of Englishmen, of all people. The Cuban Skateboarding Crisis video is below.
Cuban Skateboard Crisis from UWE Bristol Media Practice on Vimeo.
"What really got us is the scene in the movie where a skater talks about how hard it is to get a board when they break one," Lecour says. They resolved to do something about it and the Got Skate event was their answer. Lecour insists that his mission is not to make a political statement but just to get equipment to those who don't have it.
His efforts are starting to gather steam as local pro skaters have signed on to help raise awareness and there is even talk of some musical acts joining the trip to Cuba to perform, although Lecour admits that such a plan could raise red flags among Cuban officials. "The last thing we want to do is start any trouble," he says, adding that his plans shouldn't raise too much suspicion for Cuban authorities since they view skateboards as little more than toys.
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Northwest Miami-Dade skateboarders helping reinvigorate Cuba's skate scene.
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Skaters in Northwest Miami-Dade hold a contest and fundraiser on Sunday to help fellow skaters in Cuba. The plan: gather old and new skateboard equipment and hand deliver it on the island next year.
BY LAURA ISENSEE
For more than three years, Rene Lecour, a former DJ and now father of three, has been helping kids ride the rails at skate parks around Miami-Dade County.
Now Lecour has a new mission: Help kids in Cuba skate.
The plan: collect new and used skateboards and equipment at a contest and fundraiser Sunday at the skate park at Country Village Park, just north of Miami Lakes in Miami-Dade County.
Next year, Lecour, his wife, their three teenage kids and a posse of skaters plan to hand deliver the equipment to Cuba.
``We're going down there to liberate the youth with our skateboards,'' Lecour said. ``It sounds crazy but it's all that they have. It's keeping them out of trouble and it gives them a sense of just being themselves.''
Lecour manages the county's skate parks through his company Sugar's Drop Shop and previously has collected skateboards for inner-city kids in Miami-Dade.
But the plight of skaters in Cuba recently caught his attention in an online video posted by a British documentary filmmaker and other videos recorded by tourists and skaters visiting the communist island.
``It's amazing the scene has even grown like that,'' Lecour said. ``There are no skate shops. There's no chance of going pro. They just skate because they love it. To me that's the most beautiful part about skating.''
In addition to skateboards, the group plans to take hardware, like bearings, so skaters can make their own repairs.
Lecour, whose parents were born in Cuba, said he and his family will be traveling to visit his wife's family on the island.
Lecour tried to convince national companies to join the effort with little luck. Several local companies though are pitching in, such as Magic City Sk8boards.
``Anything to expand our sport is great,'' said Steve Velez, who owns the company and also will be collecting equipment. Velez recently started skating again to spend time with his 11-year-old son.
``My friends and family tell me, `You're crazy -- you're going to break a bone.' But I love it,'' Velez said.
The best part, Velez said, the freedom and feeling like a kid.
Last Friday evening, Lecour and his 15-year-old son Kaya hit the ramps and rails at the Country Village Park. That is, Lecour wore a bandage on a weary knee and mostly managed the small skate shop there. Kaya skated until an attempted trick broke his skateboard in half.
``If that happened in Cuba, they would be figuring out how to screw it back again which makes any tricks impossible,'' Lecour said.
Charity Initiative
Skateboards For Cuban Youths
By Tim Paynter
A generous family based in Miami, Florida, has launched a project to help children who have nothing. The Lecour family hopes they can help Cuban youths find the passion of skateboarding and lift themselves from the poverty and oppression they face daily. The family is holding a charity event this weekend to raise funds and collect new and used skateboarding parts and clothes.
"Ten year olds get it,” Rene Lecour, the son of a Cuban immigrant, told me today. He reminisced about watching his son, Kaya, fix the skateboard of a boy he met in a local park. Kaya used his own parts and didn't ask for anything in return. He did it out of the kindness of his ten-year-old heart. That was five years ago.
When I asked Rene Lecour where he found so much heart he told me, “Older people don’t get it," speaking about the idea of giving back. For example, finding sponsors for the Cuban event has been difficult. People don’t care or they don’t have any idea what Christmas looks like for boys and girls in Cuba.
Lecour is the contract operator for the Dade County skateboard parks through the trade name Sugar's Drop Shop. He is well-known for hosting charity fundraisers for disadvantaged children in Florida.
“I decided if I was ever in charge (of a skateboard park) I would use that business to focus on charities I like,” Lecour told me. “We had a canned food drive but we didn’t take the food to the food bank. We took it straight to the homeless ourselves.”“I have two sons. That is how I am raising them,” Lecour told me. "Teaching them to give to others."
Lecour said he got the idea for the Cuban charity after watching a documentary by Phil Brown called Skate Cuba. Young people perform skateboard tricks but have almost nothing to make field repairs with.
As the island nation goes flat broke, with massive layoffs planned, poor people have barely enough to eat. Not one skateboard shop exists in all of Castro's Cuba. There is only one skateboard park that Lecour knows of. The makers of Red Bull built it in order to get their products onto Cuban shelves. No one maintains it. A skateboard is a luxury reserved for the rich guys living in the United States and even Mexico.
"We're going down there to liberate the youth with our skateboards,'' Lecour said. ``It sounds crazy but it's all that they have. It's keeping them out of trouble and it gives them a sense of just being themselves.'' Lecour said to the Miami Herald.
Those who can’t come to the contest in person are invited to send their used skateboards or skateboard parts in the mail, or drop them off at his shop. Cash to buy new skateboards is always appreciated, especially since the manufacturers have refused to support the Cuban effort. This is an ongoing effort. The Lecour family plans to continue their efforts working with distressed youth.
“My wife and three kids can take 66 pounds (each) into Cuba,” Lecour told me. “We will take skate boards, parts and tools to repair their park,” he continued. “We plan to leave everything we have in Cuba. We will come back with the clothes on our backs and empty suitcases."
This is a family affair. Lecour's wife, Yilka, does the books. Kaya is the oldest son, 15 and an avid skateboarder. Daughter Oryanna is a cheerleader and keeps the boys on the straight and narrow during skateboarder events.
Lecour says skateboarding has turned lives around. He started fixing skateboards mostly for free in tough Coconut Grove. Pretty soon there were boys skateboarding in front of his house instead of looking for trouble. The boys made skateboarding a focus in their lives.
“My kids really enjoy helping other children on the Islands. It seems like it is doing some good. You have kids who are stereotyped (in a bad way) and they get into a positive sport and clean up their act,” Lecour said.
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Help the Kids Shake, Rattle, and Roll
By John Hood
May 21 2009
Throughout the ‘90s, Rene Lecour was known around South Beach as DJ Sugar. And like many of those who crawl by night, he got caught up in the party life. Flash-forward a decade and Lecour is a clean-living, hard-working single father of two who supports his family with a full-time gig at the nonprofit Base Camp Miami, home of the South Florida Parenting magazine-approved Grove Skatepark. Last summer, Lecour began tutoring 24 inner-city kids on the fundamentals of skateboarding and was immediately struck by their desire to learn, as well as their need to have an adult around who cared. But what most struck Lecour was the look on the faces of his de facto progeny when they were given a board, some pads and a helmet, and the freedom to skate.
Unfortunately, these inner-city youths don’t have the resources to buy their own equipment. So this Sunday from 1 to 6 p.m. at Peacock Park, They will hold a blowout fundraiser in conjunction with Family Resource Center. There’ll be live music, DJs, raffles, contests, an art auction, and even a commissioner (Joe Sanchez). Best of all, there’ll be a chance for you to help give some kids a chance to actually be kids again.
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Thrasher Magazines November issue.
Sugars Drop Shop
"Shop of the Month"
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CNN video on Recycle, Reduce Reskate page of this website.
By Jorge Casuso
Feb 10 2011
Skateboarding in Cuba
Punk rock blares from a car radio. Graffiti is scrawled on the sides of an empty fountain. A gaggle of teenagers, some sporting tattoos, others shaved heads or short Mohawks, are skateboarding, doing tricks along the fountain's concrete ledge. Everyone is speaking Spanish.
It could be Miami. But look closer. That street sign appears strangely out of place, and in the background, only old cars cruise the nearly empty street.
The scene is unfolding as it does every day on the corner of Calle G (Avenida de los Presidentes) and 23rd Street in the heart of Havana, where several dozen teenagers have taken up a skateboarding lifestyle that values individuality over teamwork and rebelliousness over conformity, the very things the Communist regime frowns upon.
"The majority of the skaters are very American-looking," says Daniel Abril, a 27-year-old Cuban-American freelance photographer and videographer from Coconut Grove who first visited the island this past June. "Skateboarding represents the counterculture no matter where you are. There are no rules, no limitations."
Perhaps surprisingly, Abril — who's thin with wavy black hair — found the Communist government lets the kids skate their hearts out. If anything, skateboarders are freer in Cuba, he says. There's no private property, and many government structures — such as drainage ditches and fountains — are empty or abandoned, making them prime places to skate.
Abril wasn't alone. This past November, Rene Lecour was watching Internet clips of the Cuban skateboard scene. The tattooed, bearded 43-year-old Cuban-American owner of a skate park and three skating stores was researching a family trip when he came across a short British documentary called Cuban Skateboarding Crisis. One scene, he recalls, showed a teenager's reaction when his board cracked in half. The young man buried his face in his hands to hide the tears. The video showed that most of the boards were battered and taped-up. Some, snapped in half, had been put back together with nailed patches of plywood."When you break your board in Cuba, it's death," says Lecour. "You could be without a board for three, four, five months."
Lecour decided to fulfill his lifelong dream of visiting the island. His parents had left shortly before the 1959 Cuban revolution, and he had never been there.
So, this past December and January, both men boarded flights to Cuba with small groups of family and friends. They'd never met and didn't know about each other's plans. Also unbeknown to each other, they both lugged duffle bags filled with boards, trucks, wheels, and bearings that they had gathered from donors.
Abril, accompanied by his brother, Josh, and two local skating aficionados, was the first to arrive in mid-December. He managed to sneak in 17 boards without paying customs duties. Lecour, along with his business partner, Shane Shackel; his wife, Yilka; and their 16-year-old son, Kaya, arrived two weeks later. He brought in 25.
Shortly after Lecour's entourage landed, Shackel and Kaya took to the streets on their boards. Soon they were approached by a tattooed man with a shaved head, and ear and nose rings. The man looked American, and he had all the lingo down — "Rip it up," "Cheers, dude," and "Keeping it real," he said in English. Of course, he pronounced it all with a Cuban accent.
His name was Che Alejandro Pando Napoles. He was a forty-ish tattoo artist who had been skating and building plywood skateboards since a visiting Russian gave him a board in the 1980s. Soon, Lecour arrived and the three began talking.
"It was like, 'Holy shit, we're the same person,' " Lecour says. Both men had ample amounts of tattoos, listened to punk rock, and were obsessed with skateboarding.
Pando quickly began talking about himself. The skater explained he had been named after the two supreme leaders of the revolution, Che Guevara and Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. He told story after story about skateboarding's early days on the Communist island. "Back in the '80s, if you were into skateboarding, you had to pray to find someone who would give one to you," he said in a video. "Some people traveled to the Soviet Union and brought back boards, or people coming over would give us their stuff."
Pando explained that he had started building his own boards. "I would steal plywood from my work station, stick it in water, and bend it with a press I made myself."
Over time, other visitors to the island, often inspired by the plight of Cuban skaters chronicled on the Internet, began to bring boards. There was a generous group from Tampa and an Irishman who arrived annually for years. Then there was the guy from Cleveland whose name Pando can't pronounce.
Pando told them how over the years he had become the elder statesman of Cuban skateboarding, teaching new generations of kids how to do tricks he learned from videos delivered from abroad. They scrutinized the moves until the tapes wore out. "Since I've been skating for so long, young people see me as one of them," Pando said. "I skate, buy a bottle of rum for the kids, skate, have fun."
Both Lecour and Abril — who didn't learn about each other's trip until after returning — had all that skateboard equipment to leave on the island, but they had to figure out who would receive it. Pando recommended they hold competitions.
Lecour agreed: "If you have a few boards, you want to give them to the best," he says now.
George Martinez
Rene Lecour at his skate shop in Kendall.
Both Lecour and Abril held competitions at Calle G and 23, ground zero for Havana's counterculture. Several hundred watched each time. Footage shot by Abril shows skaters performing flips, lip tricks, slides, and grinds.
The visitors all describe a sense of camaraderie they had never seen in the states. The kids cheered each other on. It was as if they had managed to turn one of the most individualistic endeavors into a team sport.
"We spent four days skating," Lecour says. "My son hung out with them 24 hours a day."
Both Lecour and Abril vow to return to the island again this year, this time with more boards. The trips have changed both men's lives.
Abril has been spending time collecting boards and organizing a large competition he hopes to hold in December. "One thing I've always wanted to do is help out the youth, give to others what skateboarding gave to me," he says, adding that he felt a closer bond with the Cuban skateboarders than with other natives of the island.
Lecour, who will open a skate park at Town Center in Sunny Isles Beach this Saturday, February 12, has also been organizing drives to collect boards. He plans a return trip in May. "Now that I've met them, I feel like I'm abandoning them," he says. "We need to look for ways we can teach them to help themselves."
When they returned to Miami, Lecour says, his son Kaya went to a local skate park. Kids were doing tricks on professionally made ramps and paying little attention to one another. "There were kids everywhere," Lecour says the boy told him. "But I never felt so alone."
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