cuba skate

In addition to his work empowering and uniting skateboarding communities, Williams is chairman of Cuba Skate, designed to create people-to-people exchange between communities in Cuba and the U.S. “Cuba Skate is our nonprofit that's based in D.C. and here in L.A. and what we do is we bring boards back and forth to the kids that are in Cuba and we also promote educational exchange between the skaters that are here, skaters globally and the skaters that are in Cuba.

As US Secretary of State, John Kerry, reopens the American embassy in Havana, Will Grant reports on how skateboards are being used to establish bonds between the old enemies. NGO Cuba Skate is helping to strengthen that bond through skateboard diplomacy. 

Like listening to rock music in the 1960s, interest in such a uniquely American import marked the young skaters as socially suspicious, and sometimes for rough treatment by police and arrest, though their experiences were perhaps not all that different from confrontations between U.S. skaters and civic authorities concerned about the destruction of public property.