In Santiago, Cuba's second-largest city after Havana and home to one of the island's top baseball teams, informal soccer games fill the streets and plazas, despite tropical rainstorms and the Caribbean summer's steaming temperatures.

"If they're playing baseball on television, we play baseball. But if they're playing soccer, we play soccer," said Osniel Macias, 9, as he watched his buddies push around a slightly deflated ball on a patch of grass near their homes.

Actual soccer balls are rare on the island. So, too, are the sprawling fields with fresh-cut grass and sprinklers like those in suburban America. But like their resourceful parents who find creative solutions to combat scarcity, the kids skillfully incorporate their environment into the game, jumping up on curbs while passing and bouncing the ball off the park benches that jut into their makeshift fields.

Goal posts are rocks and tree trunks, and jerseys are bare backs. Many kids play barefoot. Some run the fields with one sneaker, sharing the other with a friend.

"I really like soccer," said Omani Debro Guzman, 11. "I feel like I'm getting in good shape when I play ¡ª I can feel my muscles getting stronger. Soccer's really good for the abs."

The boy, however, said baseball is his favorite sport. His city's team, Santiago de Cuba, was last year's champion of the island's National Series, and made it to the finals this year before being defeated by Havana's Industriales.

In the World Cup, most Cubans are rooting for either Brazil or Argentina ¡ª Latin America's regional powerhouses. But many say they think Germany will win. Games are transmitted ¡ª some live, others delayed ¡ª on radio and television. Shouts of "Gooooooolllll!" echo through the streets, competing with the repetitive strains of reggaeton coming from nearby homes.

"Ever since the World Cup started we've been playing soccer," said Siukin Gongora, a 20-year-old accounting student playing at the Santiago waterfront. "It's a type of fever that comes over us."

Even Cuban authorities have caught the bug.

Jose Ramon Fernandez, president of Cuba's Olympic Committee, said the government plans to launch an island-wide campaign to further develop soccer, overshadowed for decades by baseball. Cuba's baseball team won the gold medal for baseball in the

Olympic Games in 2004, 1996 and 1992; the last time the island's soccer team even participated in the World Cup was in 1938.

But in the 1920s and 1930s, Fernandez said, soccer was even more popular in Cuba than baseball.

"It's not about introducing something new, it's about recovering something that's been forgotten," he told journalists in Havana this month. "I see the televised transmission of the World Cup as an incentive, along with the actions we take, to awaken the interest of the youngest Cubans, and the populace in general, in soccer."

Fernandez, also a vice president in Cuban President

Fidel Castro's cabinet, said he envisioned "thousands of people kicking the ball on any of the street corners where champions come from, just like in baseball."

The concept is alive in Santiago's streets.

But at least one local resident said it wouldn't be long until attention is back on baseball.

"The second the World Cup is over, everyone will stop playing soccer," said David Muniz, a 19-year-old physical therapy student. "Just watch."