Cuban Baseball an Emotional Topic

As a U.S. resident of Cuban origin, I watched the game between the Orioles and the Cuban national team with mixed feelings. It was hard for me not to root for the Cuban team, representing the land where I was born, but I also wanted to root for the Orioles, representing the U.S., the nation that has given me everything I have.

I was neither happy nor sad with the result of the game. However, what really amazes me is the treatment given by the press to the incident in which a Cuban-American protester was beaten by a Cuban umpire during the game. The protest had nothing to do with the umpire and he should have allowed the police to deal with it. It seems to me that the actions of the umpire only prove that older Cubans are right. In the island, any action against the government is met with repression, only this time the umpire forgot he was on U.S. soil.

PEDRO M. GONZALEZ, Downey

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We fight, thousands of miles from the United States, against a regime that abuses human rights and makes its own citizens emigrate to other countries. At the same time we play baseball with a Cuban team that represents the worst human-rights abuser in this continent. Castro must be having the time of his life watching major league baseball play his kind of game.

MARIO ABELLEIRA, North Hollywood

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Tom Lasorda [May 4] feels a baseball game is no way to better relations between our two nations. Well, maybe since the U.S. embargo and travel ban have failed to end the enmity, someone thought of another way, Tommy.

RICHARD BAKER, Beverly Hills

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What I learn from J.A. Adande’s column on Cuban baseball is that Tom Lasorda will never forgive Fidel Castro and his followers for spoiling his baseball trip there when the revolutionaries took over Havana in 1959.

Imagine, Lasorda had to break into a market to get food for his son, and the Cubans had the nerve to print the baby-food labels in Spanish. Meyer Lansky’s loss of the Havana Riviera Hotel pales in significance when compared to the affront against the man who made the Slim-Fast diet famous.

MARK R. DAY, Vista