Why Cuba's kids are kicking their bats to the curb

Soccer gaining ground in baseball-mad country, as Agence France-Presse reports.

First it stormed living rooms via television, then it took the streets, where joyous shouts of "Gooooaaal" have gradually replaced the bellowed "Strike!".

In the battle for the hearts and minds of Cuban kids, soccer is threatening to topple baseball as the island's most popular sport.

"Soccer here was on the floor and now it's heading to the top as the national sport," said a resigned Humberto Nicolas Reyes, who has coached young baseball hopefuls for 40 years.

Reyes is proud of his association with Major League Baseball stars like Yonder Alonso and Alex Sanchez, players he coached as young boys.

But crouching down to show a kid how to gather a ball in his glove during a recent practice, he admitted: "Almost everyone has gone over to football."

Strikingly, observers say the trend is gathering pace even as baseball is set to return to the Olympics in Tokyo 2020 following a 12-year absence.

Cuba, which has used its success in athletics, boxing, and baseball almost as an arm of diplomacy since Fidel Castro's 1959 communist revolution, can point to three Olympic titles and 25 world championships in baseball.

But on the streets, soccer is the new champ.

"Today the kids and young people are more inclined to take up football than to take up baseball," Cuba's national soccer team coach Raul Mederos told AFP as he watched players training at Estadio Pedro Marrero in Havana.

Once a rarity, it's now common for people to get up in the early hours to watch a European game, or to see kids playing street soccer wearing shirts bearing the names of superstars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

"We play everywhere we can," said sports student Alejandro Izquierdo, 19, as youths played an evening practice game under a glowing neon mural of Che Guevara.

Izquierdo said he dreams of Cuba qualifying for the World Cup finals, something it has managed only once, in France in 1938.