Mayabeque, Cuba: Of the many athletes who hold the distinction of the Glory of Cuban Sports in the current province of Mayabeque, Reina Estrella Valdés Hernández achieved relevance in artistic gymnastics during the 70s and early 80s.
She was born on May 31, 1960 at the La Filomena farm in Batabanó. She was unaware of sport, but before she was four years old, she performed movements and exercises in her games that required the necessary elasticity for gymnastics.
Before she was eight years old, a cousin residing in Havana visited her home and when she saw the exercises she performed in her games, she noticed the natural conditions and suggested that her parents take her to a gym in the capital for aptitude tests for gymnastics.
In December 1968, they attended a capital facility where the girl demonstrated her faculties in the face of specialty techniques that approved her and a Star to Cuban artistic gymnastics was born.
A few months later, she was a student of the Havana EIDE in El Comodoro and she participated in the VIII National School Games, where her team won a bronze medal.
During the following years, he continued his participation in the Olympics of Cuban schoolchildren except in 1971. His main results were achieved in exercises on the balance beam, a device in which he achieved the most relevant performances throughout his entire sports career.
In those school leagues, she monopolized numerous individual and collective medals, including the title of individual champion in her favorite device, results that she later repeated on several occasions when she moved to the youth category.
Promoted to the National School of Gymnastics, the specialists chose several girls to create an experimental group, which had to fulfill an intense special program of physical preparation with the inclusion of choreography; from the group, only four of the participants were chosen to integrate the National Artistic Gymnastics pre-selection, among them the little girl from Batabanó.
Estrella’s rise to the Cuban elite of that sport was dizzying. Since then she has been present in all the first category national competitions. In several editions she rose to the podium of individual awards as monarch.
She attended the Youth Friendship Games in the early 1970s, held in Romania, Germany, and the People’s Republic of Korea. In that Asian nation in 1975, among 17 delegations the Cuban women finished eighth.
At only 14 years old, she was part of the delegation of our country to the Central American and Caribbean Games in the Dominican Republic in 1974; there she was chosen along with her teammate Orisel Martínez, to escort Alberto Juantorena, bearer of our National Ensign in the inaugural parade of that multisport event.
In Quisqueya, Cuban artistic gymnastics won the gold medal. Four years later, she returned to the central Caribbean event in Medellín, Colombia and was awarded silver in the individual balance beam tournament and gold for teams.
Of those games, Estrella remembers: Upon returning, we were offered a reception with the presence of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz who greeted all the athletes…. When he saw me, he put his hand on my head and said: Are you the girl from Batabanó? … And how did a gymnast come out of that town?
In 1975 she participated for the first time in the traditional Riga-Moscow tournament; shortly after, in the Russian city of Shaskasov, the Cuban women carried out high altitude training sessions and there she Estrella celebrated her 15th birthday.
She was the protagonist in the VII Pan American Games in Mexico where the Cuban women won silver for teams. Her international career includes tours of Europe in knockout events for the Montreal 76 and Moscow 80 Olympics.
She entered the 1977 Riga-Moscow tournament for the second time, also competing in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In Cuba, she won gold medals in two editions of the Moncada International tournament, both on the balance beam.
In the last years of that decade, she suffered some injuries that temporarily took her out of some important competitions, but her will and her desire to remain in her elite made her recover and return to stellar planes; She presented herself to the 1981 elite national championship in Pinar del Río and won three individual medals, including the second highest accumulator.
After that brilliant performance she decided to put an end to her extensive sporting record of twelve years. For some years she worked as a coach in her native Batabanó. The Moncada Tournament held in San José de las Lajas was the scene of her official retirement ceremony.
In 1981 she became a National Referee and four years later she achieved the international category. She refereed in national championships of all categories and internationally she did it in Bulgaria and the Pan American Games in Santiago de Cuba.
She graduated in Physical Culture and Sports in 1991. She worked for some time with the national preselection at the School of Gymnastics. In 2002 she began a two-year collaboration as a trainer in Venezuela and between 2009 and 2010 as a High Performance methodologist.
She is currently a methodologist for the Competitive System in Batabanó. Reina Estrella Valdés Hernández, she is the Glory of Cuban Sports and was decorated with the Martyrs of Barbados and Rafael María de Mendive medals.
