Written by Russian BJJ blue belt, Alexander Fedotov. He is a good friend of BJJ Eastern Europe and is a IBJJF Rome Open gold medalist as well as London Open silver medalist. 

My name is Alexander Fedotov, I am from Russia and am a member of Kristian Cestaro Russian team family (Ribeiro Jiu-Jitsu) and I currently work and live in Havana, Cuba . It’s hard to call my team in Russia, my academy because we are like a family. It was a hard decision to leave my friends teammates family for a year. I wanted to change atmosphere and start to earn more money then I did in Russia. My wife agreed and I moved to Cuba and started to work in a new company there. I have already spent 6 weeks here. My wife and daughter will come soon to join me.

I want to start with the biggest problem I have faced – there is no BJJ in Cuba. It’s ridiculous but the only BJJ academy I found on the internet is located in Penar del Rio and it’s 200 km from the place where I live ( Havana). Another problem is that there is no information on the internet… So you can take your google search and put it directly in your … You know what I mean. That’s why you have to ask people, but my Spanish is not so good yet. The other problem I’ve faced after I found some Judo and Greco-Roman style academies, were the schedule of their trainings. They start too early, at 16:00 or 18:00 . So it was not acceptable for me because I work from 8:00 till 19:00,19:30. I was very disappointed since I had been searching for some acceptable wrestling gym for 2 weeks and I failed….

Havana, Cuba

One bright day, I was finally rewarded for my efforts. It was evening and I was going back home from my office and saw people in a building which looked like a Japanese dojo and located 50 meters from the flat where I live… I entered and saw people practicing hapkido ( Korean martial art – mix of judo and tae kwando ). So I asked their coach if I could have a practice with them and I told him that I am looking for wrestling practice ( I didn’t want to scare people with words like Brazilian jiu-jitsu because as you all know, they might think it’s capoeira ))) He said ok.

The author, Alexander Fedotov

Next day I came to my first class … The situation was very strange for my because I was the only blue belt and was surrounded by black belts )))) some were ex judo guys some were ex tae kwando ( as we all know tae kwando guys are born with a black belt) . I joined strange workouts , it was not a big problem for me  because I had a good experience in Muay Thai before I started BJJ. At the end of training they started to work on wrestling and there were some strange wrist locks and throwing techniques … I told them that those ways of takedowns are not so good because it is easy to counter them . That was the key moment! They asked me to counter their take down. The takedown in question was when you kick with a high kick and your opponent grabs your leg outside and pulls your leg with his own leg and you go on your back. So as you see they just jump into your triangle. I did 5 flying triangles in a row! After that I was asked to have a roll with all of them. Hapkido is for the streets as you know so they were all trying to poke my eyes … So I started to use spider guard and a lot of wrist control. I had a 1 hour non stop roll with constantly changing partners. During this hour I did as many submissions as I did during the previous year training in Moscow! They all was surprised by BJJ ground game and then I was asked to come to another training to show them techniques .

From that moment the “word of mouth ” started to spread and people  from MMA, Greco Roman , Judo academies started to participate in evening classes with me . People were asking me to roll . I was very happy because finally I found some tough guys with good wrestling back grounds. From that moment untill now I have around 3-4 BJJ trainings a week and sometimes I am able to face tough wrestlers. But most of the time I am just teaching in a way of showing a base and drilling.

I also met a good guy he is Russian and he works as camera man for Russia Today channel. He asked me to teach him some stuff. He is mastering moves very quickly. To end this story I want to say something about ego of some guys … some become very frustrated because when they’ve spent 5-7 years training their deadly martial art and lose to a person who train his less then 2 years…. It really makes them crazy. To prevent bad attitude towards me I told them that I am practicing BJJ for 3 and half years! If you are going to visit Havana come to Calle 70 y 7A villa Roma palace or connect with me on my Facebook. Because now it is the only place in Havana where you can practice BJJ!