Havanna (AFP)
One player took off from the airport while another jumped out the window of his hotel room. Of the 24 members of the Cuban national baseball team who came to Mexico for the U23 World Cup, only about half came home.
This year, a record number of gamblers have emigrated from the communist-led island nation, where baseball is the national pastime but is going through its worst economic crisis in 30 years.
The mass conversion is “unprecedented in the history of baseball,” Francys Romero, a sports writer who has written a book about the phenomenon, told AFP.
The player who jumped out of his hotel room window? He told Romero that he had climbed down a palm tree to get to a waiting getaway car.
Cuban baseball players leaving their homeland are not new – when professional sport was turned upside down in the wake of Fidel Castro’s revolution, many sought better opportunities abroad.
After some defectors during the Cold War, the exodus picked up speed after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Since Rene Arocha left the national team at Miami Airport in 1991 to pursue a career in the USA, around two or three players have left their country every year. Nine Skipped Ships in 1996. These players are consistently treated as disloyal traitors.
Some left legally – an option made possible with immigration reform in 2013, but which was severely curtailed when flights were reduced due to the coronavirus pandemic.
A who’s who of major league stars have made the leap, including Orlando and Livan Hernandez, Jose Abreu, Aroldis Chapman, Yasiel Puig and the Tampa Bay Rays’ current standout Randy Arozarena.
– ‘War’ –
Not only has the number of players aiming for a career abroad exploded, their profiles have also varied: they are younger and, according to Romero, not always destined for Major League glory.
Then why are you risking it? “To change your life. Then comes the sport, ”he says.
The dropouts have been criticized on social media, but many Cubans just wished them all the best – they are all too aware of how difficult life is in Cuba these days, with food and medicine shortages.
When the Cuban national team came to the USA at the beginning of the year to play Olympic qualifying games, top talent Cesar Prieto, two other players and the team psychologist defected.
Cuba, three-time Olympic champion and 25-time baseball world champion, was unable to qualify at all for the summer games in Tokyo for the first time.
For Luis Daniel del Risco, currently the most senior official of the Cuban Baseball Association, “a war” is under way to “destroy Cuban baseball”.
He criticized what he called “a harassment campaign” by foreign recruiters who participate in most of the games that Cuba plays abroad.
“These people have access to the hotels (where the players are staying) and a lot of them just come to contact these young people,” with suggestions to play elsewhere, he said.
Recruiters also call and text players on WhatsApp, either directly or through their relatives, Del Risco alleged, saying such advances prevent players from focusing on the current competition.
– ‘Very complicated decision’ –
“I’ve heard many times that the state of baseball in Cuba reflects the state of the country,” says Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, a great baseball fan who has devoted a book to interviews with players.
“I think what happened is a representation of what is happening in the country, this mass exodus,” which was also seen in an increase in the number of Cubans trying to cross the Strait of Florida in rickety boats to enter the United States.
“You have to respect these young people’s choices,” added Padura, who supports the Industriales team in Havana, and said he has always dreamed of a baseball career.
“It is really a very complicated decision as you give up a lot.”
They leave “without their passports, which the delegation has,” says Romero. None of them are allowed to return to Cuba for eight years.
Del Risco says the players “have failed to meet their commitments to their teammates and the country” but admits that it is a “personal choice for each of them”.
For him there is only one solution: “Give the Cuban players the same chances as everyone else.”
“In order to play abroad, we have to give up our national team, give up being Cubans – that’s not fair.”
Major League Baseball and the Cuban Baseball Association reached an agreement in late 2018 that would have allowed Cubans to play in the United States without having to defeat first, but former President Donald Trump scrapped them in 2019.
© 2021 AFP
