![]() What’s happened with Palma has been going on for a long time and it is not about one or two disciplines, because we have champions in wrestling, judo, boxing, athletics, baseball, fencing, basketball…. Palma Soriano has as many Olympic and world champions and medalists as many countries. All of this is part of our identity, of our roots. For them I will always be “La Pille,” that’s how they called me and still call me. I am very grateful to all the people in Palma who influenced my growth as an athlete. It is something that characterizes us Cubans being unassuming, being kind, and being grateful. I always see my relatives last, because on every corner I have to greet someone. Every time I go and walk through Maribel, my neighborhood, people don’t let me get to my house. I love to go back and talk with people, remember happy moments from my childhood, from when I was little. I don’t do it as often anymore because of all the activities and now because of the pandemic, but I like to go back there, walk the streets of Palma Soriano, walk down the river as I used to do…. I always talk about my roots because I have not forgotten the humble neighborhood where I started in sports, my people, my friends, and because one must be consistent and grateful to the people who love you, to the people who supported you, to your people, to your family. Ana Fidelia Quirós is one of the essential names in the history of Cuban athletics and sports. Those are, broadly speaking, the cardinal points in the history of Ana Fidelia, the last great star of the Cuban tracks, a woman who never loses her smile and who still transmits that feeling of inexhaustible strength, with which she imposes on us an extremely fast pace from the first curve and leads us to a fabulous race, full of revelations. Then would come the tragic chapter, the accident that put her on the brink of death, and the subsequent recovery - almost miraculous - that allowed her to return to the tracks with a force never seen before, to the point of registering her name as the only Cuban Olympic multi-medalist runner in individual events. There she began her training, her take-off until she became the best runner of her generation and the fifth at the international level who has devoured the fastest the 800 meters in the history of athletics. ![]() The plot would have its starting point in Maribel, a neighborhood in Palma Soriano where Ana Fidelia won her first races, not on a track, but in parks and roads. ![]() ![]() Her life has everything to put together a script that would perfectly intertwine human talent with her will for sacrifice to come out ahead in the most difficult moments. It’s a crime that Cuban cinema has not dedicated a feature film to Ana Fidelia Quirós (Palma Soriano, 1963), the indomitable storm that circled the track twice at an indescribable pace. ![]()
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