Abusive Trainer-Athlete Dynamics in The Cuban Swimmer
This paper analyzes Milcha Sanchez-Scott's 1984 play The Cuban Swimmer, focusing on the abusive dimensions of the trainer-athlete relationship between Margarita and her father, Eduardo. Drawing on the play's text, the paper argues that Eduardo's self-appointed coaching role is driven by personal ambition and desire for media exposure rather than genuine concern for his daughter's athletic success or safety. The paper also examines how the broader family dynamic — including Margarita's mother — and the news media collectively mythologize Margarita while remaining oblivious to the physical and emotional toll of her swim. Ultimately, Margarita's solitary triumph is read as a rejection of her family's corrupt investment in the American dream.
- Introduction: The Athlete-Coach Cliché Subverted: Genre conventions overturned by Sanchez-Scott's play
- Eduardo's Coaching and the Abuse of Paternal Authority: Father's self-interest drives harmful coaching behavior
- The Family Dynamic: Beyond the Father: Mother and family prioritize image over Margarita
- The Media's Role in Mythologizing Margarita: Media amplifies family's exploitative framing
- Margarita's Solitary Triumph: Margarita's victory as rejection of family ambition
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper opens with a direct quotation from the play that immediately establishes the central irony — Eduardo's claim of control versus his actual lack of it — anchoring the argument in the primary text from the outset.
- It broadens its critique beyond the father-daughter relationship to include the mother and the news media, showing that Margarita's exploitation is systemic rather than individual.
- The paper integrates a contemporary critical source (Mitgang, 1984) to situate the play within a recognized genre convention, which makes the argument that Sanchez-Scott subverts that convention more persuasive.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates close reading of dramatic dialogue and stage action, using specific quotations and character behavior to build an interpretive argument. Rather than summarizing the plot, each piece of textual evidence is tied back to the central claim about exploitation, making the analysis purposeful and argument-driven throughout.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing the genre conventions the play challenges, then introduces its central thesis about Eduardo's abusive coaching. It proceeds through three analytical lenses — the father's behavior, the wider family dynamic, and the media's complicity — before arriving at Margarita's individual triumph as the thematic resolution. The structure moves from the general (genre conventions) to the specific (individual scenes and quotations) to the thematic conclusion.
Introduction: The Athlete-Coach Cliché Subverted
The proud young athlete mentored by a devoted coach is a common cliché in sports stories. As one critic has observed, "Hispanic Americans use athletic skills to propel themselves into the mainstream of middle-class life in this country. It's a traditional theme. The basic plot was advanced long ago in such plays as Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, and since then, in scores of films, books, and movies, members of ethnic groups have moved out of the slums" (Mitgang, 1984). However, in Milcha Sanchez-Scott's play The Cuban Swimmer (1984), this convention is turned on its head. The play highlights the potential abuses of the athlete-coach relationship by contrasting the young heroine's poetic and triumphant efforts with the crass desire of her trainer for media exposure. Her trainer is motivated by his own needs, not by his young charge's athletic glory.
The fact that the heroine's trainer is also her father further complicates the nature of the abuses Margarita suffers under his hard tutelage. Throughout the short play, her father brusquely directs her breathing and stroke technique, revealing his profound ignorance of the true nature of the water and of his daughter's increasingly weary body. Despite Eduardo's insistence that he has "everything under control" (Sanchez-Scott, 1984, p. 913), the play exposes how little control he truly has over his own emotions as he becomes caught up in the media frenzy surrounding his teenage daughter's determination and swimming prowess. The value of independence from a close-knit but corrupt family, in the narrative of the young ethnic athlete who "makes good," is the thematic contention of the play. Eduardo's training methods are ultimately condemned.
Eduardo's Coaching and the Abuse of Paternal Authority
Margarita's father is not even a swimmer. Rather, he has self-appointed himself as his daughter's coach. He loves the positive exposure her gifts bestow upon his own image. The play depicts Margarita attempting to win a prestigious open water swimming competition while suffering under the pressures of her trainer, her other relatives, and the media. "Her trainer, her coach, her mentor, is her father," the media voices crow, lapping up the supposedly perfect nature of this close-knit Hispanic family (Sanchez-Scott, 1984, p. 914). In actuality, however, Eduardo's investment in his daughter's swim is inseparable from his investment in his own public image. His directions are mechanical and uninformed, disconnected from the emotional and physical reality of what Margarita is enduring in the water.
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