The late former Cuban president Fidel Castro saw as one of his sporting dreams, converting his country’s amateur baseball, considered a national sport, superior to the Major Leagues, it never happened and on the contrary, the best Antillean baseball players were the first to desert and deny the political system in which they lived.
None of the Cuban figures and prospects wanted to stay on the Caribbean island and, on the contrary, they always looked for a way to leave the country and have the opportunity to achieve their best performance, even at the cost of endangering their lives, leaving their families and not being able to go back.
Despite the economic embargo, they also managed to overcome the legal obstacles through third countries that allowed them to become professionals, stars and millionaires.
Right-handed pitcher Liván Hernández was the first of the great stars of Cuban baseball to reach the majors, and he did so to play for the Miami Malins, who gave them a World Series title in 1997, when he received the Most Player award. Valuable (MVP), as well as being named to the All-Star Game twice.
Hernández also won the National League MVP title in 1997 and the Silver Slugger in 2004.
But if Liván triumphed, even better was his stepbrother Orlando “El Duque” Hernández, who followed in his footsteps and defected from Cuba when he was the pitcher of the future of baseball in his country.
“El Duque” played with the historic New York Yankees with whom he won four World Series titles from 1998 to 2000 and then in 2005, in addition to receiving the American League MVP award in 1999.
Later, in 2003, another spectacular and winning pitcher would arrive, also right-hander José Contreras, who was signed by the Yankees to later go to the Chicago White Sox with whom in 2005 he won the World Series title.
From that moment on, the departure of Cuban baseball talent to the Major Leagues has been permanent and today, despite the embargo, there are already more than 20 Cuban baseball players in the majors.
Which means the permanent decline of the amateur system of baseball competition and the rest of the sports that exists in Cuba under the communist regime, where they cannot develop their best talent.
Despite the fact that former President Castro was always a staunch defender of baseball, who came to play in his youth, he used it as an image of the “goodness” that his regime had in the area of sports development and the exchange of goodwill in relations with the United States.
Hence, it was precisely through the sport of baseball when a Major League team, the Baltimore Orioles, went to compete for the first time in Cuban territory on April 28, 1999.
It was something unforgettable in Cuba, with the country paralyzed to see that its national team could beat a Major League team, something that did not happen with Fidel Castro present at the game together with the commissioner of the majors, Bud Selig, and the Orioles owner Peter Angelos.
The event was unprecedented and opened a window of hope in the complex political-sports scenario between two antagonistic countries.
The prestigious Cuban national team, double Olympic champion and more than 20 times world champion, would play for the first time against a ninth of the “demonized” American Major Leagues since the political victory of Fidel Castro in January 1959.
Castro, the same one who had declared on January 14, 1962 during the start of the I National Series (Amateur) that the renunciation of professionalism “was the triumph of the free ball over the slave”, sat affably next to Selig and Angelos.
The most politically savvy thought they saw “ping pong” diplomacy – used by the United States in the early 1970s to encourage a thaw in relations with China – now with the sport of baseball in the middle.
As always happened with Fidel Castro, everyone was wrong, regarding that gesture in order to sell the image of the quality of the national baseball team to the outside world, generate changes in the island’s political system and allow the players to reach to the best baseball in the world without having to give up their country.
The Cuban baseball players showed that they could compete as a Major League team, but nothing changed in the rest because everything remained the same for ordinary citizens and athletes who could not compete abroad as professionals.
The sporting confrontations also left a tie with the Orioles winning 3-2 in 11 innings played at the Latin American stadium, on March 28, and defeating the American team at their field at Camden Yard in Baltimore (12-6), the April 3.
It took 17 years for the Major League competition to return to Cuba, on March 22, and this time with the Tampa Bay Rays and US President Barack Obama as a luxury spectator, in Havana, together with the current Cuban president Raúl Castro.
Nor has anything changed in Cuba in the political or sports section, but the recognition has already been given by Tony Castro, vice president of the International Baseball Federation (IBAF, for its acronym in English) and son of the former president Castro, that the current model “does not work” and advocates what everyone asks for within the sport of national baseball, such as having the freedom to play in the foreign leagues they want.
The question now is whether, with the death of Fidel Castro, Major League Baseball ceases to be “demonized” in Cuba and returns to being the national pastime sport that unites both countries in a new historical reality. EFE