Cuna Basketball
By Gerald Singer
The Cuna people live on the San Blas Islands, just off the Caribbean coast of Panama. Most of them stay within their Cuna culture, but some have found temporary work on U.S. military bases. It is there that they learned the love of basketball.
Cuna village
Upon returning to their native villages, the Cuna wanted to continue playing and to teach the sport to their friends, but they faced a serious obstacle: Every square inch of land was accounted for -- either for crop cultivation or for housing. There was simply no space to put a basketball court.
The Cuna, who had solved greater problems than this, soon came up with the obvious solution -- make the island bigger.
There was a shallow coastal area adjacent to the island that could be filled with rocks and then covered in concrete to make a basketball court.
Needless to say, this would not be an easy task. Rocks would have to be transported by canoe from the mainland some five miles away. These canoes, called cayucos, are carved out of a tree trunk and their rounded bottom makes them unstable.
The rocks would have to be hand-gathered on the mainland, loaded onto the cayucos in quantities small enough to allow a marginally safe crossing, and unloaded at the future basketball court site. As vast quantities of stones would be needed, this would be a monumental task. Where would this intense amount of labor come from?
The problem was approached in typical Cuna fashion.
Many cultures throughout the world have established laws, rules and regulations that are routinely disobeyed. The Cuna had such a law. Unmarried people of the opposite sex were forbidden to have any contact with each other -- even verbally.
Notwithstanding, Cuna teenagers would secretly meet their sweethearts after dark in prearranged locations. Actually it was not so secret, for the parents and elders of the village had broken the same law, in the same places and in the same manner.
The proponents of the basketball court construction decided to harness the power of teenage sexual magnetism to form new land. A strict enforcement of the law was called for, and the punishment was to gather, transport and deposit one cayuco-load of rocks for the first offence, two for the second offense, and so on.
Just one year after the passage and enforcement of the new law, the citizens of this beautiful island in the San Blas archipeligo were able to enjoy spirited games of basketball on their very own, brand-new basketball court.