COMMENTARY

Sport and Politics: US bans Cuban baseball team

by Sir Ronald Sanders, a former Caribbean diplomat, now corporate executive, who publishes widely on small states in the global community

Tuesday,  December 13, 2005

The powerful political lobby of Cuban exiles based in Miami have got their way once again in worsening relations between the US government and the government of Cuba’s President Fidel Castro.

But, this time it may backfire on them in the US itself. 

American lovers of baseball – a game whose following knows no bounds of colour, creed or class – will be especially annoyed over the latest anti-Castro move to ban a Cuban team from participating next March in the Inaugural World Baseball Classic.

The event was scheduled to bring together teams from 16 top baseball playing nations for games in Puerto Rico, mainland USA and Japan. And, if there is one thing Americans know and respect about Cubans, it is that they can play baseball better than most. 

The competition would have been a competitive spectacle few Americans would have missed.

The recent ban on the Cuban baseball team was imposed by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control since, as part of the now 45-years long embargo, the Castro government should be denied hard currency which the team would earn.

This was, of course, a technical argument.

The real reason for the ban was the lobbying efforts of the Cuban-American exiles in Miami who have great sway with the Bush administration, not least because of their financial support to Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the President’s brother. 

The Florida-based group are determined to isolate the Castro regime and have never given up the notion of promoting US intervention in Cuba to seize property they once owned and to change the governing regime.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican Congressman, who is also a Cuban-American from Miami, has publicised his own role in promoting the ban.

The Congressman has gone as far as to suggest that a team made up of Cubans living in the US, and playing in the major and minor baseball leagues, should be formed to represent Cuba at the games in March.

This has not sat well with the Major League Baseball (MLB) officials who had applied for the permit to allow Cuba to send a team in the first place. 

The MLB have retained lawyers to try to persuade the US Treasury to reverse its decision. This looks very unlikely.

For, the latest US government action comes on the heels of intensified activities against the Cuban government since the last US Presidential campaign.

A Commission, established last year, recommended increased support for Cuban dissidents, further restrictions on travel and remittances to the island, stepped-up propaganda efforts and measures to exert more international pressure on the Castro government.

In playing for the Cuban vote in Florida, President George W Bush promised “regime change” in Cuba, and since then millions of dollars have been allocated “to bring an end to the regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and to prepare to assist a post-Castro Cuba," as then Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega put it. 

But a significant part of the Cuban-American community has rejected the measures. Their family members suffer from restrictions on family visits (from every year to every three years), spending limits on visits, and reductions in gifts.

Increasingly, too, some State Governments in the US are resisting the Federal government’s embargo on Cuba. They have openly called for its end, pointing out that Cuba poses no threat to the US, and that more money is being spent on hurting Cuba than on some of the real enemies of the US. 

Indeed, in the fight against the two major plagues of the world – terrorism and drug trafficking – the US could not want a more willing and co-operative partner than the Castro regime.

Earlier this year, Cuba signed US$270 million in contracts with US firms to supply food. Among the deals that were signed were US$20 million worth of food, including 30,000 tonnes of peas, from the state of North Dakota, US$27 million with Nebraska and US$20 million with Virginia. 

Only last week, the Cuban food import firm, ALIMPORT, signed contracts worth US$50 million from companies in the US States of Maine and Virginia.

These figures could have been bigger had the Bush administration not imposed new restrictions in February requiring Cuba to pay in advance for US goods. 

There is, therefore, growing unhappiness within the US over the treatment of Cuba.

When the US government points to human rights abuses in Cuba including the jailing of political dissidents, critics have pointed to US support of regimes in Israel, Saudi Arabia and even Pakistan where human rights abuses have been widespread and the US government has been silent. 

Mind you, as I have repeatedly stated in these columns, respect for human and civil rights are vital to every society including Cuba’s, and within the ambit of preserving the country from deliberate, externally-motivated activity designed to destabilise the Government, the Cuban administration should learn to manage dissent and political disagreement through an open process of dialogue within the country. 

Demonstrations and marches against unpopular policies and actions of governments are a normal part of political behaviour in democratic societies. They are not reasons for jailing people. And, a long as the Cuban government continues not to manage dissent, it will continue to feed the arguments in the US that it is repressive of its own people and there is need for regime change.

Mr Diaz-Balart made the odious comparison between a ban on sporting contact with Apartheid South Africa and the ban on the Cuban baseball team. 

He is reported by the Associated Press to have said: “I don’t know why the double standard. It’s all right to oppress the Cuban people, I guess, if there’s a white dictator, but with people of mixed race suffering the consequences”.

The US Congressman displayed a crass misunderstanding of the suffocating and all pervasive nature of Apartheid which crushed people in all spheres of life on the basis of race, exploited their labour, extinguished their spirit, and deprived them of their humanity. There is no comparison between Apartheid and conditions in Cuba.

Peter Angelos was instrumental in helping Cuba’s national baseball team to visit the US six years ago to play an exhibition game in Baltimore.

The New York Times Newspaper reports Mr Angelos as saying of the recent ban of the Cuban team: “I think what’s worse is that, once again, the US – this huge colossus, the strongest country in the world – is picking on this tiny, little country of 11 million people. And, this time for what? For their participation in an international baseball event? That seems to me that it makes us look like the big, bad bully that our non-admirers say we look like”.

Mr Angelos may have summed up the views of many Americans who feel that it would have been exciting to see the competitive Cuban Baseball team in action against other nations including their own, and that this ban simply serves no purpose other than to satisfy the wishes of a small but politically powerful group of Cuban exiles in the US. 

(responses to: ronaldsanders29@hotmail.com) 

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