Maradona Revels in Cuban Beach with Daughters

Argentina’s former soccer star Diego Armando Maradona went to the beach with his daughters last weekend, a day after he celebrated his 44th birthday in a Cuban mental institution where he’s undergoing a rehab treatment for drug addiction.

Mr. Maradona spent a few hours in Tarara, a beach resort in eastern Havana, where he took a swim and had lunch with his two daughters, German Matzkin, a Argentinean friend of Maradona’s who lives in Cuba told Caribbean News Digital.

European tourists who recognized the star, asked him for a photo op. A quiet and kind Maradona, one of the greatest soccer players of all time, let sunbathers take pictures of him.

The beach outing has apparently been Maradona’s first attempt to venture out of the Havana mental institution that accepted him on September 20 to start a rehabilitation program against cocaine addiction.

Maradona celebrated his birthday last October 30 in the company of his parents and his daughters, Dalma Nerea and Giannina, who had arrived in Cuba a week before.

His parents, Diego and Tota, had been on the island nation for over as week a half. His sisters, Ana and Rita, traveled with the soccer star from Buenos Aires last September.

This is Maradona’s second chance to get fully rehabilitated in Cuba, a country he had traveled to on January 2000 in an effort to shun paparazzi and sportswriters in his own country. Shortly before that first trip to Cuba, Maradona had suffered an acute cardiac arrest at the Uruguayan beach of Punta del Este.