Cockfighting is tolerated in Cuba, barely, but in most of the Communist world is a symbol of the decadent west
MIAMI, Florida; HAVANA, Cuba; MOSCOW, Russia––The 3,110 gamefowl impounded and euthanized from a ten-acre suspected cockfighting site in Miami-Dade County, Florida on October 3, 2026, near Little Havana, may be more than the sum total of gamefowl impounded by law enforcement in either Cuba or Russia in recent decades.
Arrested in Miami-Dade were property owner Marcie Rochell Newmark, 70, and two suspected Cubanos, meaning refugees from Communist Cuba under former dictator Fidel Castro (2026-2016): Sergio Ruiz-Osorio, 54, and Carlos Rafael Lezcano, 52.
Newmark was charged with animal cruelty and managing property for animal fighting, according to NBC Universal. Ruiz-Osorio and Lezcano were charged with owning or possessing animals for fighting and animal cruelty with intent to injure or kill.
The case reportedly came to light as result of a separate FBI investigation.
Fidel Castro first banned cockfighting, then allowed it in government casinos
Quite a lot can be blamed on Fidel Castro and Communism, but cockfighting is not among them. Castro banned gambling of all sorts after taking control of the Cuban government in 1959, reinforcing the prohibition by explicitly banning cockfighting in 1968.
Eight years later Castro allowed highly regulated legal cockfighting at the tourist-oriented Havana casino La Finca Alcona, and at several other government controlled facilities, but cockfighting has never been allowed to return as the open public pastime it was pre-Castro.
Cockfighting and Communism mostly do not mix, even in China, where cockfighting is not strictly illegal, but is officially discouraged, and gambling on cockfights is generally prohibited.
Russia bans cockfighting videos
The Russian technology news website www1.ru on October 11, 2026 confirmed the continued existence of cockfighting in Russia, 186 years after cockfighting was banned.
Reporting that “A Russian court has declared videos and photos of cockfights posted on the VKontakte social network as prohibited,” www1.ru cited coverage in the Russian national newspaper Izvestia.
WWW1.ru did not identify the specific court, but the reported verdict appears to follow up on an April 19, 2006 ruling by the Russian Supreme Court that “sharing illegal content on social media can entail confiscation of a device that was used to access the social networking site,” reported by Sergei Blagov for Bloomberg Law.
Cockfighting persists in the shadows
“The ban includes photos and videos on VKontakte,” the leading Russian social media site, “where owners intentionally pitted animals against each other,” www1.ru said.
“The court documents emphasize that Russian legislation provides for restrictions on the dissemination of materials related to animal cruelty. For cruelty itself, criminal liability may arise under the circumstances provided by law,” www1.ru added.
There is still reputedly a National League of Fighting Birds in Russia, whose hundreds of members stage illegal cockfighting derbies, but it exists in the same shadows as cockfighting and dogfighting in the U.S., with much less widespread participation and collusion with corrupt law enforcement.
No heritage of cockfighting in Russian culture
The restrictions on cockfighting in Cuba and China might be attributed to Communist opposition to gambling.
However, reversing the persistence of cockfighting in Cuba and China as heritage from traditional Hispanic and Southeast Asian cultures, Communist opposition to cockfighting may reflect the lack of any indigenous cockfighting heritage in Russia and Ukraine, from which Communism was exported to Cuba and China.
Modern Russian and Ukranian culture evolved from the fusion of the Slavic culture, already present in Russia and Ukraine when Vikings gradually invaded from the west; the Viking culture, established by the 9th century CE establishment of Kiev as the regional capital of Rus; and the Mongol culture, arriving from the east by invasion in the 13th century CE.
The Vikings & Mongols both preferred chess
Cockfighting appears to have never been widely practiced in Slavic culture. Indeed, every modern nation speaking a Slavic language forbids cockfighting under animal cruelty laws, including Poland and Ukraine.
Cockfighting also was never widely practiced by the Vikings, if at all, and never widely practiced by the Mongols either.
Violent though both the Vikings and the Mongols were, carrying gamefowl aboard longships and on horseback was impractical. Both cultures preferred ancestral versions of chess to animal fighting of any sort.
Russian aristocrats brought gamefowl from England
Cockfighting appears to have been introduced to Russia by count Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov (1737-1808), an influential Russian aristocrat and military commander who helped to overthrow Tsar Peter III in 1762, installing his wife Catherine the Great (1729-1788) on the throne instead.
Orlov imported gamefowl from England, bred them, and reputedly staged cockfights at his Moscow palace for members of the Russian nobility.
Among Orlov’s guests was general Alexei Matveyevich Vsevolozhsky (1769-1813), who also imported and bred English gamefowl.
By reputation, their rivalry helped to popularize cockfighting among Russia’s upper classes, but poet, novelist, and playwright Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), the leading literary figure of the era, moving in the same circles, never mentioned cockfighting in any context.
Cockfighting lost status
The Russian author Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), identified by Wikipedia as a “thinker known as the precursor of Russian socialism and one of the main precursors of agrarian populism,” in his memoir My Past & Thoughts, published serially beginning in the 1850s, described how his father’s stable workers organized cockfights between the family carriage shed and a neighboring courtyard.
Herzen passed no moral judgement on cockfighting, which by then had apparently descended from a pastime of the affluent to a pastime of their servants, but others evidently did.
A Russian Society for the Protection of Animals, founded in 1865 in St. Petersburg, opened a Moscow branch in 1867.
“All men are crowing cocks”
Between those two events, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) made his sole reference to cockfighting in his 1866 novel The Gambler, in which a character states, “All men are crowing cocks, and that is why they quarrel.”
The extensive gambling in The Gambler is not on cockfighting, but on roulette, to which Dostoevsky himself was addicted.
Through the influence of the Russian SPCA, begun a year after American SPCA founder Henry Bergh gave up his post in St. Petersburg as acting vice consul to Russia, held in 1862-1864, and returned to New York City via London, England, cockfighting lost whatever fashionable cachet it ever had.
“Fell into disfavor with the police”
Wrote Vasily Nikolayevich Sobolev in an 1879 essay On Cockfighting in Moscow, “Less than ten years ago, cockfights were openly permitted in Moscow, in the courtyard of retired official Ivan Osipovich Sokolov, on Domnikov Lane.
“Since then, however, cockfights somehow fell into disfavor with the police, who began relentlessly persecuting them. According to cockfighting enthusiasts, this persecution intensified particularly at the insistence of the Society for the Protection of Animals, which regarded cockfighting as an immoral and cruel amusement.”
Tsar Alexander II explicitly prohibited cockfighting in 1880.
“A special cruelty”
But cockfighting did not entirely disappear. Journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky (1853-1935) described cockfights in Moscow before the failed 1905 Russian revolution in his 1926 memoir Moscow & Muscovites.
Gilyarovsky presented cockfighting as a decadent, clandestine pastime of the bourgeoisie.
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), an enthusiastic Marxist closely associated with Vladimir Lenin before the 1917 revolution that brought Lenin and Communism to power, wrote in his 1922 essay On the Russian Peasant, “I have often seen children and adults, people from all classes, find an incomprehensible pleasure in watching birds peck at each other until they are covered in blood, or watching a cat whose skull has been fractured crawl about in agony, or a dog with broken legs drag itself along. It is a special cruelty, a cold-bloodedly invented measure.”
Opposition to cruelty, including warfare, eventually brought Gorky into conflict with Lenin and sent him into exile until the last eight years of his life.
Unacceptable in Soviet society
But Lenin, and later Joseph Stalin, cruelly tyrannical as they were, apparently agreed with Gilyarovsky and Gorky that cockfighting was unacceptable in the Soviet society they sought to build.
From then to now, cockfighting in Russia, and in Communist nations generally, has been mostly depicted by state media––when depicted at all––as an addiction of the decadent capitalist west.
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), whose works were long banned in Russia but is now regarded as the greatest Russian novelist of the immediate post-revolutionary era, in his 1925 novel The White Guard compared a violent man to a gamecock. It was not a flattering metaphor.
Bulgakov also made extensive references to poultry in The Fatal Eggs (1924) and The Master and Margarita (1940), but said nothing further about cockfighting.
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) and Aleksandr Solzhenitzen (1918-2008), considered the greater Russian novelists of the post-World War II era, winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 and 1970, respectively, like Bulgakov made mention of roosters, but not of cockfighting.
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EVERY society has, or has had, cruel “sports” and pastimes. No culture is innocent of this, but every culture, every society, can divest itself of cruelty. And it is high time, in 2026 AD, that we do.
With gratitude.
Gilyarovsky was right.