Why do Cuban boxers historically underperform at Heavyweight?

All three of your examples were also fat. The amateur system in Cuba teaches skill, but apparently not discipline.

Once they get a taste for American cheeseburgers, there's no holding 'em down.

 

Ortiz was pretty good until Sam Langford ruined him.

 

What you see when many of them get their chance is that they are not fit, certainly not fit enough to compete at the higher end of professional boxing.

Solis wasn't fit for the Vitali fight and he got stopped extremely early. Luis Ortiz lack of stamina cost him the title vs Wilder, he was probably one combination away from stopping Wilder but gassed out at the crucial moment. Those are two high profile examples.

The other thing is that the successful amateur style over the years has often resembled "tag" or "you are it", and with HW boxing as a professional you need to land heavy shots regularly to be successful. The Cuban HW's spend a lot of years from a young age as an amateur and its difficult to reprogramme themselves to fight in a style effective for professional boxing.

In fact very few are capable of adjusting to professional boxing who were higher level amateurs for a long period of time in general. Staying amateur for too long is a bad idea if you want to make payola as a professional boxer at the highest level. But in Cuba being an amateur boxer is probably very well paid relative to other professions so they stay on too long.

 

CST80 nailed it. Their chins are not sufficient for the strenuous rigours of serious competition.

 

because they're wee blokes

 

Probably because they start boxing at age 40

 

Yup. Chins matter in boxing!!

 

They don’t underperform as a whole. Show me a single country that small that produces heavyweights that are that good.

Usyk is the only southpaw at 38 to perform better than Ortiz did against Wilder.

JLG never developed and Solis let his career fall apart after the knee injury, but that’s about it.

Cuba produced Ortiz, Solis, Gomez, Sanchez, and Pero since 2000 despite being the size of LA and requiring their pros to defect.

 

Ortiz was never a great amateur, he probably overperformed as a pro based on his age.

US has 30x the population, when you factor that in Cuba has probably outperformed them at heavyweight post 90's.

There's definitely been some talent there, we can only speculate how guys like Savon, Stevenson and others would have done at pro.

 

1 Simply not good enough
2 Their amateur style doesn't translate well to the pros
3 They don't have good chins
4 They lack discipline when they leave communist Cuba to the USA
5 They are overhyped from their amateur success in tippy tappy running 3 round fights, and are deluded in thinking they are better than they actually are.

 

Devil's advocate then -- why do eastern european amateurs do so well when they turn pro? They stay as amateurs forever, then speedrun a pro career, and it works.