by Amaury Pi Gonzalez
OAKLAND–As in previous articles I wrote that Cuba is the only country outside the US and Canada to ever have a professional baseball club in a regular league, affiliated with Major League Baseball. Until 1960 when Fidel Castro told John F. Kennedy, the US and the world in a speech: “Cuba will be a Marxist-Leninist state until the day I die”. The Havana Sugar Kings were one of the eight teams in the old International League until 1960.
That league also had teams in Toronto, Buffalo, Richmond, Rochester, Columbus, Miami and Montreal.
What would have to happen for Cuba in order to have another professional team, even maybe this time in the Major Leagues? For starters the most important thing they need totally new political leadership. There is only one boss in Cuba: the government. The people there are told what to do, what to say(or not to say)where to go to get their food allowance and so on.
Of course there is no infrastructure, no Major League quality stadium in place today, a flight from Miami to Havana is less than 30 minutes. My Aunt Violeta used to live in the US and used to visit my family in Cuba, and as I remember, she would travel via Ferry boat,(Miami-Havana-Miami) in which you could put your car, and then with a permit drive it in Havana or anyplace in Cuba.
The memo never arrived to the Castro’s, Fidel and Raúl, that communism has collapsed, that it doesn’t work, that even in China(who’s government is communist)they are big capitalist players in the whole world. For those of you old enough, you probably remember when Bob Hope used to make jokes about stuff that said: “Made in Japan”. Well that was decades ago. Today nobody makes fun of stuff made in Japan, as a matter of fact they are #1 with Toyota as the biggest car manufacturer in the world.
With China, same thing might happen, they are developing so fast and making stuff very cheap right now, with the world’s largest population. Hard not to see all the stuff we buy that says “Made in China”. But that could change in the future. Raúl Castro, who is now President, was made Chief of the Cuban Armed Forces, years ago when Fidel could think for himself, he was lucid and would make four to five hours speeches, so long that many in his own communist party, would fall asleep during his speeches.
Remember in 2013 the San Francisco 49ers “who have it better than us?” That slogan by then coach Jim Harbaugh, applies today to the rulers in Cuba. Fidel and Raúl and the two-thousand or so communist party rulers eat very well, can travel anyplace they wish, have nice homes, what embargo? There is no embargo for them. Two days after President Obama said that the US would lift the embargo, dozens of Cuban dissidents were arrested, some later released.
I was 16 and living in Cuba when Fidel made some of those speeches, I remember I had to go to bed to get up early in the morning to go to school, and I would listen to some of those speeches and really fell asleep. I really didn’t understand what communism was, to take from the rich to give to the poor and all that, redistribution of wealth, all that I knew is that the Havana Sugar Kings were no more, that things were changing, that one day Fidel abolished all pro-sports in the island.
While the top rulers of Cuba have all the privileges, and their is no blockade for them, they can get anything the want, the Cuban people have to live with food rationing and other goods rationing All that stuff that I heard Fidel in his speeches about all of Cuban being equal and nobody ruling over anybody, was a bunch of caca. In Cuba everybody is poor, and the government is rich.
One thing that keeps Cuban sane, is their great sense of humor, in or out of the island. I once read a cartoon in a Miami newspaper which read, that Fidel Castro was once making a speech, saying that no Cuban should go to bed hungry, then one little guy in the corner shouted “Fidel I go to bed hungry”, and then Fidel replied: “Well, then the solution is to stay awake, do not go to bed”. Cubans joked that Fidel Castro had a response to every criticism, of course he is always right and 11 millions Cubans are not.
As I remember today those hectic years(I lived through the revolution, Batista leaving Castro taking over)I didn’t understand much about politics, but I was really upset that I could not listen to the games on the radio when the Havana Sugar Kings played. Their games were heard in Cuba, that upset me the most. After 1960 the Havana Sugar Kings were gone! Eliminated, not because the Major League teams(who ran those affiliates in the International League) extracted the team from the league, but because the Cuban government made the decision to eradicate all professional sports, including baseball, always the most popular in the island.
We had dictators in Cuba prior to Castro, but they never “nationalized” or took baseball away from us, Cuba always had professional sports, even before the Castro’s were born. I want to make this point very clear, the Havana Sugar Kings were not taken away from the International League by that league, or by the Major League teams, but by a final decision by the radical Cuban government.
The current government could have said many years ago (and made the first move) that they wanted to re-establish relations with the United States, and-in return- they would open up Cuba to the rest of the world. But they never said that. Some people come to me and tell me “so and so is in Cuba” like this was a great tremendous achievement, when in fact, if you are a US citizen and have a US Passport you can fly to Cuba from Mexico, Canada, Spain and many other countries. There is nothing heroic about going to Cuba, neither is it to see the caliber of baseball in that country, which after the USA was the best in the world decades prior to the Castro’s.
So maybe destiny will have the Oakland Athletics moving to La Habana, Cuba in 2020, but then again the Giants might claim Cuba as part of their territorial rights, after all the hated Brooklyn Dodgers trained in Havana in the spring of 1947, the historic year when Jackie Robinson was about the break the color barrier and the end of the Negro Leagues was at hand. However, in 2020 Cuba might still have the ball, they have never initiated anything, with such arrogance they like to tell the world that they have beaten the US and the embargo, when in fact they have actually beaten themselves, destroyed a country that until 1960(you can research this it is documented) was one of the most advanced countries in all of Latin America.
Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for Oakland A’s baseball and does News and Commentary on http://www.sportsradioservice.com
Sports Radio Service 