Photo credit: seattletimes.com

By: Amaury Pi-Gonzalez

The Trump administration on Monday declared a December deal between Major League Baseball and the Cuban Baseball Federation illegal. That would have allowed Cuban athletes to play in this country without having to defect the island. This was intended to prevent Cuban players from risky escapes. Kendrys Morales, now playing with the A’s, unsuccessfully tried for nine times before he finally could escape to the US. Cuban players are sometimes with paid smugglers, and at other times on their own in home-made crafts. The deal was similar to those countries in the Major Leagues with foreign players, like Japan and other countries. The American baseball clubs would pay to those countries for the rights to acquire their players.

I believe this was the right decision because the Cuban government was trying to make money using their players as chips in a country with no freedom of movement. This deal would have only benefited the Cuban government, who for over half century has ruled the Cuban people, under a dictatorship. It was Cuba who abolished professional sports, including baseball, in 1961 when communist dictator Fidel Castro gave the order.

To this day, the average Cuban citizen still risk their life to defect the island. The deal that was abolished gave preference just to Cuban baseball players and not the regular non-baseball Cuban citizen. This is the hypocrisy of the Cuban dictatorship that was willing to use Cuban players to leave the island legally while making money from MLB, while the average Cuban citizen could not take advantage of such a thing. The difference here is that although the US has similar deals with Japan and other baseball-playing countries, these are all countries with friendly relations and commerce with the US. Cuba does not. The Cuban government still maintain the line of the old Russian/Soviet Union communist system of hostility towards the US.

As recently as late last year, US diplomats at the US Embassy in Havana were mysteriously getting sick — at least 25 of them were ill. I do not believe that government should interfere with sports, but in the case of what Cuba has been trying to do with their baseball players, I agree with the new policy. I am sure that Cuban baseball players will continue arriving in the US, because like any pro baseball player, their goal and dream is to make it to the MLB.

I never forgot the last time I sat and talk with Cuban baseball star Orestes “Minnie” Minoso in Chicago in 2007. He sat with me on the radio broadcast, as I was doing the LA Angels’ play-by-play in Spanish and when I asked him about the first time he arrived from Cuba to play in the MLB, he told me: “When I first arrived in the US in 1949 I would have played for free just for the privilege to be in the Major Leagues” Years later(in the 1950’s) Minoso signed a $25,000 contract with the Chicago White Sox, at that time one of the most lucrative contracts for a Hispanic player in baseball.

Note: In 1958 the average salary in the US was $10,000 per year, a new car $1,900 to $3,000, gas was .24 cents per gallon, bread was 0.19 cents a loaf, and a first-class postage stamp was 0.4 cents.

The dream of all Cuban baseball players is that someday their country can truly be free and allow their people to travel freely in and out of the island — therefore, giving them the opportunity to come to the US to play baseball. Minoso and many others had that opportunity, but today, Cuban players have been denied the freedom of travel since 1960. That was a law established by the Cuban dictatorship and not by an US administration.

For most of us who are spoiled with technology, it was until 2018 that the Cuban government allowed internet access via cell phones to their 11.2 million citizens.