Serie Nacional 65 rosters: eight provinces have named their 32

Eight of Cuba’s sixteen provinces have now made their Serie Nacional 65 rosters public. The federation set a filing window of 15 to 20 September and a technical congress on 1 October to ratify the squads, so the remaining eight announcements are due within days.

No English-language outlet aggregates these. Each province publishes its own list through its own provincial outlet, and those outlets do not link to one another, so the league-wide picture only exists if somebody assembles it. That is what this page does: who has filed, on what date, under which manager, and how the 32 places were divided. It will be updated as the rest report.

Which provinces have named their 32

Still to report: Artemisa, Camagüey, Cienfuegos, Guantánamo, Industriales, Isla de la Juventud, Mayabeque and Santiago de Cuba.

The seven lists that gave a position breakdown all total exactly 32, which confirms the federation’s new roster cap is being applied uniformly. Where they differ is the pitching allocation: Las Tunas kept 13 arms, Matanzas 15, and every other province settled on 14. Matanzas, the defending champions, bought that extra pitcher by carrying only six outfielders; Las Tunas went the other way with eight.

The format these rosters are being built for

Serie Nacional 65 returns to a two-zone, four-group structure, a response the federation has described in terms of fuel economy rather than competition. Each province plays 44 games in the preliminary phase.

The 44 games resolve cleanly against that structure: two four-game subseries against each of the three rivals inside a province’s own group is 24 games, and a five-game subseries against each of the four remaining teams in its zone is 20 more. The top four in each zone advance, seeded by a Page playoff, and the two zone champions meet in a best-of-seven final. Our full breakdown of the SN65 format has the rest.

Provinces are naming players who are contracted abroad

The most consistent pattern across this week’s announcements is that a roster place is not the same thing as an expectation of appearing. Villa Clara’s 32 includes several athletes under contract in foreign leagues, Cristían Rodríguez and Jonathan Moreno among them, per Radio Reloj. Holguín named Yasiel González — the most valuable player of Serie Nacional 64 — while he is under contract in the Chinese league, and carried four reserves explicitly to cover him and its junior national-team call-ups. Granma took the opposite route with Raico Santos, leaving the Mexico-based outfielder off the list while its manager said publicly that Santos had indicated he would join if the Alazanes reached the playoffs.

Readers tracking Cubans abroad should treat any Serie Nacional roster line as a claim on a player’s rights rather than a fixture in the lineup. We keep the separate picture of Cubans playing in Japan updated for the same reason.

Names worth noting in the eight

Frederich Cepeda will open a 27th national series for Sancti Spíritus at 46, the oldest player on any list published so far, alongside the youngest man in his own clubhouse: his 18-year-old son, Frederich Cepeda Jr. Six rookies and fifteen players with one or two series behind them fill out a squad that also carries José Isaías Grandales, a ten-game winner in the Italian league, and Yankiel Mauri, the saves leader in China.

Granma’s list is built around Alfredo Despaigne and Roel Santos under a debuting manager in Marcos Naranjo, who inherits a team that finished twelfth in Serie Nacional 64. Matanzas will defend its title without Yurisbel Gracial or Ariel Martínez, both unavailable for the whole season on commitments abroad. Las Tunas lost Yordanis Alarcón, who left over a housing dispute with provincial authorities, and welcomed Yunieski Larduet back from Mexico. Ciego de Ávila was the only province to publish an average age: 25.7 years, with nine under-23 players and seven rookies, six of them pitchers, under another debuting manager in Franklin López Agustín.

What is still missing, and one date that does not agree

The fixture calendar. Rosters are arriving in volume and the technical congress is a fortnight away, but no game-by-game schedule for Serie Nacional 65 has been published anywhere. Our Serie Nacional 64 schedule remains the most-used page on this site, and the 65th has no equivalent yet. We check daily.

There is also an unresolved discrepancy about the start. The August format announcement, JIT on 15 September and Radio Reloj on 18 September all give 4 October. Escambray, announcing the Sancti Spíritus roster on 14 September, wrote that the series “arrancará el venidero 6 de octubre” — 6 October. We have not been able to establish which is right, and we are not going to pick one for the sake of a clean sentence. Treat 4 October as the working date and expect the congress on 1 October to settle it.

One more caution that applies to every row above: the federation has said the squads are ratified at that 1 October congress, so each of these 32-man lists is provisional until then.

Sources

• Escambray, 14 September 2026 — Sancti Spíritus
• Telepinar, 15 September 2026 — Pinar del Río
• Tiempo21, 16 September 2026 — Las Tunas
• Prensa Latina, 17 September 2026 — Matanzas
• Televisión Avileña, 17 September 2026 — Ciego de Ávila
• La Demajagua, 18 September 2026 — Granma
• Radio Angulo, 18 September 2026 — Holguín
• Radio Reloj, 18 September 2026 — Villa Clara
• Periódico Girón, 19 August 2026 — format, roster cap and congress date
• OnCuba, 19 August 2026 — group composition

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