Goodwill trip to Cuba is a big first step for baseball
Antonio Castro, center, talks to MLB executive Joe Torre, left, and Dan Halem, MLB’s top lawyer and the point man on talks with Cuba.
A huge photo of Antonio Castro’s father flanks the scoreboard of the main baseball stadium in Matanzas, a bay city about 60 miles east of Havana.
There’s another one under the grandstands, just as there are murals of the old man — bearded and in green fatigues, gripping a bat — throughout most of island’s stadiums.
From an early age, former Cuban President Fidel Castro immersed his son in two things: baseball and politics. And now the son of the revolutionary wants to lead his own rebellion, using baseball as a tool to heal more than five decades of antagonism and mistrust between Cuba and the United States.
This week’s three-day goodwill tour of Cuba by a group of Major League Baseball players and officials was a good first step toward that goal.
“We’re conscious of what baseball means. And what we’ve experienced these last couple of days is very exciting,” Castro said Thursday as more than 150 kids took part in a clinic led by eight big leaguers, including the Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig and three other Cuban defectors.
“For the kids who are there participating with major league stars, for the Cuban players who were stars here in their country, this exchange is very important. [But] this is just the beginning. I hope to one day be able to say, ‘Well done.’
Left aside was the question of who was most responsible for the alienation of the old relationship: the U.S., which slapped a punishing economic and political embargo on Cuba shortly after its 1959 revolution, or Castro’s father, who banned professional sports and locked down the island and its players for nearly five decades.
What both sides agree on, though, is the fact it must change.
“The current system,” said Dan Halem, MLB’s chief legal officer “is not acceptable.”
That’s an argument MLB has pushed for years. The difference now is someone on the other side agrees with it. And as vice president of the Cuban baseball federation and a former top official of the International Baseball Federation, Castro has long been a quiet voice for change in the game.
But making that change happen will require something of, well, a revolution.
The U.S. embargo bans most economic transactions between the U.S. and Cuba, and the Republican-led Congress seems unlikely to overturn that any time soon. The Cuban government, meanwhile, has long considered the players who skirted the embargo by defecting to the U.S. to be traitors.
So it was significant that this week’s goodwill tour included four defectors — the Dodgers’ Puig, the Chicago White Sox’s Jose Abreu, free-agent infielder Alexei Ramirez and St. Louis Cardinals catcher Brayan Peña — who returned home to give instructional clinics to more than 300 schoolkids.
All four were greeted as celebrities by most Cubans, including Castro.
Also significant was the fact Thursday’s clinic took place on the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s move toward normalizing relations with Cuba — without which this tour never would have happened.
“This should be a very happy day for everybody,” Castro said in Spanish. “We’ll work so that one day we can say this is just one of many anniversaries.
“We don’t work to celebrate anniversaries. We work to live in a normal world, where we can all live in peace through the game of baseball.”
Talks between MLB and Castro have grown more frequent and more substantive in recent months, with the two sides discussing a range of issues, including the staging of two exhibition games in Cuba this spring and the possibility of a regular-season game in the summer.
Major league teams have not played against one another on the island since the 1959 revolution.
As the relationship continues to grow, more topics will be brought to the table. But Halem and Tony Clark, the executive director of the players union, cautioned this week’s visit was only the first step — albeit a big one — on what figures to be a long journey.
“It’s been fascinating,” Clark said as the American and Cubans flags flapped side-by-side atop the center-field scoreboard, just above the picture of Fidel Castro. “I think everyone has the question about what’s next, all while trying to live in the moment and appreciate what’s happening.
“Once everybody gets home and takes a deep breath and kind of reviews what all may have happened and what dialogue happens hereafter, we may truly realize just how historic this goodwill tour has been.”
Follow Kevin Baxter on Twitter: @kbaxter11
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