One of the best players of the Cuba Women’s Volleyball National Team in the 2022 Pan-American Cup, Yamisleydis Viltres, left the delegation from the Caribbean after the quarter-finals.
The big talent of Cuban female volleyball, Yamisleydis Viltres, left her country’s national team that competed in the 19th edition of the Pan-American Cup held in the city of Hermosillo, Mexico, which concluded this Sunday. Sources close to the Cuban delegation confirmed to the Play-Off Magazine that the middle blocker escaped from the hotel on Saturday night, after the quarter-final match in which Cuba lost to the United States. After reviewing the security cameras, it was found that Viltres ran away around 10:30 p.m. Following the incident, the same source explained, there was a meeting with the rest of the team in which the use of mobile phones was restricted.
The 21-year-old player was contracted in Uralochka-URGEU, the youth team of Russia’s Uralochka-NTMK, which competes in the second division, since 2019. She doesn’t have the club for 2022-23. Viltres had an outstanding performance in the 2018 Junior NORCECA Championship in Aguascalientes, Mexico, where Cuba reached the semi-finals, and in the 2019 FIVB U20 World Championship in the same city. So far, the Cuban federation hasn’t commented on the defection of Viltres. Cuba Women finished fifth in the 2022 Pan-American Cup after defeating Puerto Rico a day after Viltres left.
It seemed that volleyball was exempt from defections in recent years, at least from members of the national team, after the Cuban authorities, a few years back, allowed its players to go abroad without having to suffer consequences as before. But, reality shows otherwise. Last year, there were defections of two Cuban boxers, the Olympic canoe champion in Tokyo 2020, Fernando Dayán Jorge, one discus thrower, and three baseball players.
