Kendall man works with Cuban government to build public skatepark in Havana

Kendall man works with Cuban government to build public skatepark in Havana

Rene Lecour organized Havana skaters to celebrate International Go
Skateboarding Day
The Kendall man founded Amigo Skate Cuba, "the Red Cross of skateboarding"
Lecour is working with Cuban officials to build a public skatepark near
the Malecon
BY DIEGO SALDANA-ROJAS
Special to the Miami Herald

More than a month before Secretary of State John Kerry presided over a
flag-raising ceremony in Havana, two men carrying U.S. and Cuban flags
rapidly skated down the Malecon, followed by more than 100 other
skateboarders.

Rene Lecour, 47, of Kendall, organized Havana skaters on June 21 to
celebrate International Go Skateboarding Day. At the time, he told his
wife he feared being arrested, but that didn't happen.

The 11-mile Cuban skateboard tour, which at one point cut through a
parade of the Havana Biennial Art Fair, was organized by Lecour and the
movement he founded, Amigo Skate Cuba.

"To me, what we do is more rewarding than any kind of trouble we can get
into. I don't see that I'm doing anything wrong. To me, I'm like the Red
Cross of skateboarding," Lecour told the Miami Herald earlier this year.
"If Mother Theresa and Joey Ramone were to have a love child, it would
be have been Amigo Skate Cuba."

Lecour moved from Atlanta to Miami-Dade County two weeks before
Hurricane Andrew struck in August 1992. He hitchhiked to South Beach to
become a DJ. Throughout his 20s, he would spin records on the beach,
around the U.S and Puerto Rico until 2002.

Lecour was a warehouse manager in Coral Terrace when he unexpectedly
lost his job in 2003. At that time, he and his two sons; Cheyenne, then
5, and Kaya, then 9, would regularly skate at Peacock Park in Coconut
Grove on Saturdays and Sundays.

"That was way over a 100 bucks a week," he said, tallying up parking,
lunch and the then-$10 park fee per person.

To save money, he worked out a deal with the park's managers in which he
would maintain the Peacock skate park so his sons could skate. "I did
that for about a month," he said.

By the end of the summer, his life had changed: He had been hired to
become the skate park's general manager and moved into a historic home
on Grand Avenue.

The skate park's management waived the fee for many of the Grove's
impoverished youth at the summer program Lecour supervised. "These kids
would come over without eating breakfast, none of them had skateboards,"
he said.

Slowly, he began collecting worn and used skateboards and began giving
them to the same Grove teens who skated for free. He also fed and
sheltered some of the neighborhood boys who skated at the park during
the day.

"Amigo Skate Cuba was my house at that point," he said.

In 2010, son Kaya showed him a YouTube video, The Cuban Skateboard
Crisis, detailing the difficulties the islands skaters go through trying
to obtain skate equipment.

The video inspired him to do as he did in the Grove — collect
skateboards for those who needed them.

Since then he's flown to Havana at least once a year, joined by several
international skateboarders all hauling large duffel bags with new and
used donated skateboards.

Amigo Skate's efforts did not go unnoticed. "The Cuban government
somehow got an email to us letting us know they knew who we were and
what we were doing. At first, I was a little scared," Leour said.

The emails, sent in February, thanked Lecour for his work and asked to
collaborate with him on future skateboarding projects.

"I'm actually surprised they didn't do it earlier," said Sebastian
Arcos, associate director for the Cuban Research Institute at Florida
International University, who commends Lecour's grassroots effort, but
sees Havana's contact with him as a means to maintain control and
legitimacy. "The essence of any totalitarian state is control, the only
provider of anything is the state," he said.

Arcos said the Cuban government is likely more weary of Lecour because
he is a Cuban American. "They have an established propaganda that says
Cuban Americans are bad. So a Cuban American coming in and giving
something to the average Cuban breaks that propaganda."

This month, Lecour will fly to Havana to deliver plans for a skatepark
to be built near the Malecon, where he and the others skated in June.

"We've had about three meetings with them already. Everything is done
more on a handshake than anything else. We've gotten a lot further than
anticipated," Lecour said.

If the Cuban government signs off on the designs, Lecour said, they can
immediately start looking for funding, a process that, from his
experience in the U.S, can be a lengthy one.

"We're not the kind of guys that can just sit still," said Lecour, who
this month — without government permission — will make several plazas in
Havana's poorer neighborhoods more skateboard friendly.

"Go in, do it fast, drop off equipment with the kids, throw a little
party there, and just be gone and let that little thing just turn into
its own little epicenter of skateboarding in that neighborhood," he said.

Source: Kendall man works with Cuban government to build public
skatepark in Havana | Miami Herald -
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article42646428.html