Cuban baseball players defect during World Cup tournament in Mexico
At least nine members of a Cuban national baseball team have defected during a tournament in Mexico. The players were participating in the Under-23 World Cup in the northern state of Sonora.
The defections occurred after the Cuban team lost the tournament’s bronze medal game to Colombia on Saturday. The identities of the defectors were not released, but 24 players traveled to the tournament.
Since the country’s revolution ended in 1959, Cuban athletes have often defected while competing in tournaments outside the island. However, the defection of nine players is one of the biggest such losses the country has ever experienced.
The incident was described as “vile abandonments” by state media and Cuba’s National Sports Institute.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/ny-9-cuban-baseball-players-defect-world-cup-mexico-20211004-4oc25hqxangn7otl36fs6h2sty-story.html
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This article was written by Peter C. Bjarkman
“I know what everyone knows: Cuba is the worst place on the globe to be an athlete today. But I’m sure I know something even stranger. It is also the best.” — S.L. Price, Pitching Around Fidel
Livan Hernandez
Cuban “defectors” have been one of the biggest MLB stories of the early twenty-first century and the immediate impact on big-league diamonds of the likes of Aroldis Chapman (2010), Yoenis Céspedes (2012), Yasiel Puig (2013), José Abreu (2014), and Aledmys Díaz (2016) have elevated interest in the island nation’s communist baseball enterprise to an all-time high.1 The compelling rags-to-riches tales of these escapees from the reported restrictions of Fidel Castro’s realm seemingly provide dramatic feel-good sagas guaranteed to appeal to the bulk of flag-waving American fans. Big-league boosters in Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, New York, and elsewhere across the Organized Baseball map have loudly welcomed the stunning splashes made by a small handful of stellar Cuban players on their favored hometown teams. They have in large part also cheered the apparent blows struck at the demonized Castro regime in the waning days of a half-century-old Cold War standoff that has kept Cuban baseball mostly off the radar for five decades. But what we find on closer examination is also a saga with a truly ugly underbelly — one threatening the integrity of big-league operations almost as much as it is decimating the sport in one of its most tenacious international outposts. And the phenomenon of Cuban player defections is also a story with more misconceptions attached than perhaps any other headline-grabbing event involving the North American national pastime.
A vexing problem with most of the media stories surrounding Cuban baseball defectors — such as “El Duque” Hernández and José Contreras (a pair of ace pitchers who both ended up starring for the Yankees, and also teamed to bring Chicago its first world championship in nearly a century) or more recently Puig, or Céspedes, or Abreu — is that in many if not most cases the stark truths have been embellished by enthusiastic journalists and hyperbolic player agents. For the journalist there were scoops to be found and newsprint to be sold; for the agent, high stakes attached to the player’s promised MLB payday. El Duque’s desperate December 1997 “freedom flight” from Cuban shores on a makeshift leaky raft was later exposed by intrepid Sports Illustrated writers (November 1998) to be a heavily fictionalized version of precisely how manipulative agent Joe Cubas had arranged and carried out the star pitcher’s clandestine removal from his homeland and onto the lucrative MLB free-agent market.2 Defector stories have also heavily distorted the true picture of baseball talent on the island of Cuba, forestalling any fully accurate portrait of the modern-era Cuban League as a legitimate alternative baseball universe.
For an American press corps devoted to the capitalist free-enterprise economic and political model, the expanding story of Cuban athletes abandoning a socialist sports structure fits all too perfectly into the deeply-imbedded Horatio Alger Myth — the classic American success story and archetypal American character arc with its pilgrim’s progress from rags to riches. It is the replaying (in this case with an enriching anti-communist political overlay) of the search for the true American Dream. And the American Dream by almost anyone’s reading always equates directly to the search for untold American dollars.
Not surprisingly, the saga of “El Duque” Hernández and his hair-raising escape from unjust Cuban oppression thus reads exactly like an expected Hollywood script. There were, indeed, suggestions during the ballplaying fugitive’s earliest months in the States that film rights to the adventure, with its heartwarming overtones of a desperate search for the Great American Success Story, were actually being marketed to Hollywood producers. It had all the elements of a masterful drama after all, one designed to sell well all across Middle America. There was the unjust INDER (Cuban sports ministry) suspension that took away a star ballplayer’s rights to his livelihood in Cuba. Then the staged show trial by the Castro government that transformed the former national hero into a shunned pariah and social exile. There was the thrilling escape by a handful of refugees who somehow survived shark-infested waters and a dangerous marooning without food or water on an isolated cay in the Straits of Florida. Add an unlikely fortuitous rescue by the US Coast Guard. And for extra drama there was also a true knight in shining armor who appeared on the scene in the form of crusading ballplayer agent Joe Cubas, who was able to head off possible deportation back to Cuba. Finally comes a fittingly climactic dreamlike big-league season with the anointed “America’s Team” — the storybook New York Yankees — and a full dose of 1998 World Series heroics thrown in for good measure.
More:
https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/the-hernandez-brothers-livan-and-orlando/
Joe Cubas, left, former baseball "agent", now banned permanently from US baseball.
