Cubans in Major League Baseball: Contracted or Adjusted to the Laws of the United States?

Nothing in the sporting world today moves without a sum of green papers as a driving force. High competition demands money, and lots of it. On the one hand, technological advances astronomically increase the prices of tools and facilities, while on the other hand, exaggerated commercialization and professionalism have made the sport along with its competitions and competitors into one of the most profitable businesses today.

As much as they try to disregard ideology or depoliticize the issue, one does not need to go to a university or get a doctorate to realize that commercialization and professionalism are the children of capitalism and the prevailing international economic order. They need the rules of the market and the flow of goods that enrich it, and as in any other industry this movement comes from the south to the north.

Although the millions generate an accelerated development and support a spectacle of extremely high quality, turning the human geography of athletes into perfect machines and pushing them to unheard of heights, it also carries with it the side effects of doping (or what is essentially a trap, one so dangerous that it has already cost some lives); corruption, which has reached even the top leadership of the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the purchase and theft of athletes, and the dispossession of many nations. Cuba, white like the few whose talents are stolen in the sport, is taking part in that world with its pros and cons with baseball as the preferred target.

Euphemistically, the thieves themselves say that baseball players are the ones who escape to an environment of freedom, but what freedom are we talking about?

Why have none of the 30 Major League Baseball (MLB, by its initials in English) teams in the U.S been interested in Cuban baseball players for anything since the initiation of the recruitment policy regarding them? Why haven’t they approached the Cuban Federation for that purpose instead of putting them in the hands of the international crime of human trafficking?

The truth is that in the so-called country of freedom, they don’t have the freedom to do so. One federal law, which in addition to trying to starve and deprive this island of necessities, prevents medicine from reaching a sick child and prohibits the owners of baseball teams from rapprochement. This is not communist rhetoric. That body of law known as the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba that has been in place for more than 50 years has been condemned by the international community for more than 20, has been without support in the North American country itself, and does not allow one to hire as many Cuban ball players as he or she would like.

However, the one who makes the law can also break it. Another legislative text says that any Cuban who reaches U.S. territory, regardless of how, even as a victim of human trafficking, is automatically granted a work and residence permit. The well-known and equally criminal Cuban Adjustment Act is adjusted to the baseball players.

That is to say, the baseball players of the national series, those who wear the uniform of the country’s national team, who recognize the quality of the MLB and would like to prove themselves there, or the sports owners and executives of teams from that circuit that would possibly be interested in having them, are deprived of a normal relationship, such as the one which they have today with that organization of over 240 athletes from 16 nations involved in the elite United States tournament. In other words, you are eligible if you give up Cuba.

One cannot be naive; forcing them to leave their nation’s baseball, which just like in the United States, is passion, national identity and culture, where they are idols, leaders of opinion, admired by children, youth, and adults, has as its object the miserable objective of turning heroes into traitors, for which tons of millions are set aside. Any similarity with unconventional war is no mere coincidence.

Today there are more than 10 Cuban baseball players that have gone through that route and now play in the MLB with excellent results, like José Dariel Abreu from Cienfuegos, with 36 home runs, 107 batted and a 317 average, in addition to being the first in slugging with 581; his compatriot Yasiel Puig (297 on the offensive) or the 104 strike-outs by Aroldis Chapman from Holguín in 53 innings with 35 saves, only help ratify the quality of baseball in the Greater Antilles and the education that they received here.

I remember when in 1999, at a press conference before the second encounter with the Baltimore Orioles in that North American city, Luis Ulacia, a stellar shortstop of the Camagüey teams, was asked whether he wanted to play in the Major Leagues. He responded with the following:

“Of course, here great baseball is played, and we would like to play it, but if to do that I have to catch a boat and escape from my country, risking my life, no thanks.”

That lack of freedom to establish a contractual relationship with our baseball players is the same one that prevents those who opted for illegal immigration to represent their country in the first international events. It is not Cuba who denies it; rather, it is the laws themselves to which they were “adjusted” which would prohibit them from wearing four letter jerseys, because they are no longer free to have that sovereign right.

Last July the boom was the arrival of Antonio Pacheco, the captain of captains in Tampa, Florida. An avalanche of press dispatches flooded the air, since the man who has the most hits in Cuban baseball, second baseman for 18 years on the national team, and one of the best Cuban players in the rich history of this national pastime aspires to train or lead a team from the MLB. Pacheco was and is a result of the efforts of the Cuban Revolution for the sport, as are those who today triumph in it; he is and will be remembered for all that he made his fans feel. Nevertheless, he is already another victim, as he himself has declared that he has gone to take advantage of the Law of Adjustment, after deciding to abandon his contract in Canada, where he worked in a baseball academy.

He has the capacity and preparation which he acquired in his learning process in Cuba to fill such an aspiration, and like those who are making the stands of MLB stadiums go crazy, there will be no shortage of offers for him after this step that is adjustable to U.S. laws and policy against his country. Having the Cuban title of Graduate in Physical Culture and the experience in his homeland as a player and manager will bring him a considerable sum of money, improve his economic situation, and he will find comfort, but will he feel happy?

The United States has not rested a single minute in its war against Cuba. To do so, for more than 50 years they have not cared about the stick or the carrot, which can be understood as subversion. And baseball is another one of those edges.