Pitching Around Fidel
A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports
by S. L. Price
Ecco Press, 279 pp., $ 24
It's been a tough year for the Baltimore Orioles. The club is sinking into the bottom half of its division, and its owner, Peter Angelos, leads the league in moral error. In May, the Orioles' vice president of baseball operations, Syd Thrift, told a reporter from the Washington Times that the Orioles would be the first big league franchise to swear off signing ballplayers who escape from Fidel Castro's Cuba. Given the "good will between the two countries" that had been generated by two exhibition games last year between the Cuban national team and the Orioles, Angelos felt "it best not to do anything that could be interpreted by Cuba as being disrespectful or . . . encouraging players" to defect, Thrift explained.
Angelos retreated under fire from this position, saying he only intends to discourage defections. Even so, the message is clear: No matter how good the Cuban players might be, for Peter Angelos, deference to the easily bruised feelings of the Castro regime takes precedence over the Orioles' own desperate need for fresh talent -- not to mention the individual freedom of Cuban athletes. Some three dozen Cuban baseball players have fled the island in the last ten years (along with about seventy athletes from other sports), and American teams have extended them the same opportunity for fame, fortune, and professional fulfillment that their counterparts from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela enjoy. But the Orioles practically say "No Cubans need apply."
Peter Angelos needs to read S. L. Price's Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports. The most original and engaging piece of reportage on Cuba in recent years, Pitching Around Fidel documents the human costs of Cuba's state-run system of "amateur" sports. The billboards in Havana may say that "Sport is the right of the people," but in fact athletes have no more rights than anyone else in Cuba. The Communist party hack who currently runs Cuba's National Sports Institute tells Price that if an athlete "doesn't have an attitude where we -- the people who created him -- can have confidence in him, then he will never have the right to represent Cuba in an international event." Yes, top-flight athletes enjoy perks like private cars and decent housing. But they are constantly monitored for the slightest sign of deviation from the party line. Anyone who doesn't pass ideological muster risks being sidelined permanently.
The most famous such case, of course, is Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, the pitching ace who was kicked off the national team and sent to work in a psychiatric hospital because his half-brother, Livan Hernandez, left to pitch for the Florida Marlins in 1995. El Duque subsequently escaped the island and led the New York Yankees to victory in the 1999 World Series. There are others, though, less famous than El Duque but no less talented, still stuck in limbo down on the island.
Take Lazaro Valle. Price paints a marvelous portrait of this right-handed flamethrower, a pitcher arguably more dominant than El Duque. At the age of thirty-five, he is semi-washed up in Cuba, spending his days smoking, drinking, and bumming a few bucks from foreigners. He never left Cuba because he didn't want to break up his family. At the same time, he refused to join the Communist party, as many other top athletes did. When his best friend, pitcher Rene Arocha, defected in 1991, Valle was subjected to police interrogation and banned from traveling with the national team overseas for two years. (Arocha had been banned from the national team in 1982 because his local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, Castro's ubiquitous snoops, fingered him as disloyal.)
Valle "suffered and cried over the situation, the whole time," his wife explains. He was finally allowed to play with the national team in America, where he wandered around like a free man -- even partying with old friends in Hialeah, the working-class Cuban section of South Florida -- before going back to Cuba. That really made Castro's state security suspicious. Upon arrival in Havana, he was hauled in for more questioning. Nowadays, he's at odds with the Cuban baseball authorities, unwanted even as a coach. "I feel like an alien," he tells Price. "Nobody calls me. Nobody talks to me. My opinion doesn't count. I feel like an alien in my own country."
Another ruined career is that of Pedro Jova, a former manager of the national team who was banned for life from Cuban baseball in 1997 for supposedly talking to a defector on the phone. His son, a prospect, then jumped on a raft to the United States. Jova's ban has now been lifted -- but he's left coaching twelve-year-olds and doing some scouting.
Hector Vinent, twenty-five, one of the best light-welterweight boxers in the world, has been banned from Cuba's national team since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics where two of his friends defected. In Atlanta, the state security agents who accompany all Cuban athletic delegations abroad hounded Vinent. (By the way, why does the United States issue visas to these enforcers?) The surveillance has never let up back home. "They don't know I'm going to run, but they think it. That's my 'conduct' problem," he tells Price.
And so on. We learn from Price's Pitching Around Fidel that Castro raised hard currency during the 1990s by "renting" certain talented ballplayers to professional teams in Japan and Latin America; the Cuban state kept 80 percent of their earnings. The program was ended after three years because of jealousy and infighting among top Cuban players desperate for access to even this paltry opportunity.
Perhaps equally devastating, though, are Price's portrayals of the Cuban athletes who have not run afoul of the system -- the ones still officially regarded as heroes of the Revolution. His account illustrates the principle that, in Cuba, as in all Communist states, the privileged maintain their status at the cost of some freedom and dignity.
Teofilo Stevenson, the masterful heavyweight fighter who dominated the Olympics in the 1970s and 1980s, is now a vaguely pathetic figure, pawing women, drinking heavily, and clearing his remarks to Price with a handler from the official sports institute. In the case of Ana Fidelia Quirot, the phenomenal women's middle-distance runner, gratitude to Fidel is understandable. He personally oversaw her rescue by Cuban doctors after a household accident left her seriously burned. Still, can that explain or justify her love for Big Brother? "I'd rather have the CDR [the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution] watching me so that my children grow up healthy mentally and physically, so I can sleep well," she tells Price. "You can have a lot of money [in the United States], but you can be blackmailed. Life is healthy here. I'd rather have a CDR watching me all day long than live in a society like that."
S. L. Price started his journey through the Cuban sports world disillusioned by the commercialization of American sports and believing that poor, amateurs-only Cuba might represent an alternative -- that it might really be "one of the last places where athletes play for little more than the love of the game." Price, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, is not an ideologue but a politically ambivalent sports purist, and Cuba was to have been his purist's paradise.
But his initially hopeful view of Cuban amateurism collapsed under the weight of the facts. Given a choice between a sports system ruled by politics and a system ruled by the almighty dollar, Price surprises himself by leaning in favor of the latter -- largely because he has come to understand that most Cuban athletes would, too. Who are we to tell Cuban ballplayers and boxers that they, alone among all athletes in this globalized economy, must surrender their right to live and play where they want, for as much money as they want?
El Duque "was speaking of money again, of course, but the more I considered it the less it bothered me; because what El Duque's actions and words described were a man's right to make his own decision, free agency in its purest form, and who can argue with that?" Price writes. "I tried in vain to distinguish between a Cuban pitcher taking the defector's leap from Havana to New York and an American taking the free-agent jump from say Chicago to Atlanta."
"For me," he observes near the book's conclusion,
the game is over. Castro's country is a place best seen as a tourist, for from the distance of a decent hotel room it is easy to succumb to its charms. Go for the old cars or girls or rum, or a Cold War thrill, or a night at Kid Chocolate on a balmy winter evening, and you can convince yourself that any number of illusions are real. You can enjoy the passionate fans and the frenetic play, admire the skill, revel in the Cuban athlete's palpable joy, and allow yourself the luxury of wondering if this is the way sports were meant to be. But I'm no good for that any more. I've talked to too many men and women not to understand that the regime will, at the slightest sign of independence, grind even its greatest lives into powder. I left Cuba in December knowing too much and, worse, knowing that there are plenty who love a romanticized version of Cuba too dearly to listen.
As it happens, Peter Angelos's "baseball diplomacy" with Fidel -- strongly supported by Angelos' friends in the Clinton White House -- was basically a bust. At the first game in Havana, tickets were distributed "by invitation only," i.e., to members of the Communist party, the army, government, and their families. So much for people-to-people contact. The second game, in Baltimore, was spoiled by gripes from Oriole players about being forced to give up a much-needed day off, and by an ugly incident in which a Cuban umpire tackled and punched a protester who ran onto the field with a sign calling for freedom in Cuba.
There was one highlight in the dreary, rain-soaked second game (which the Orioles lost, 12 to 6). It came when Cuba's young third baseman, Andy Morales, clouted a three-run home run. As he rounded the bases, Morales threw out his arms and lifted his eyes joyfully to the sky in a gesture of bliss so pure that, for a moment, it was almost possible to believe again in the authenticity of Cuban amateurism. When was the last time you saw an American big leaguer look so grateful to be on the field?
Yet we now know that, at that very moment, Morales was actively contemplating defection. While in Baltimore, he made contact with sports agent Gus Dominguez, but ultimately decided to return to his wife and children in Cuba. Nevertheless, the Cuban authorities' retaliation was swift. Despite his heroic performance against the Orioles, despite his .370 batting average in Cuba's own national league, and despite the fact that Cuba is attempting to put together another gold medal team for the 2000 Olympics, Andy Morales was kicked off the national team.
Ruined as a ballplayer in Cuba, his youth ebbing, Morales finally clambered aboard a smuggler's boat and, together with fellow player Carlos Borrego, tried to make it to the United States illegally. He was twenty-five miles from Florida when the boat, loaded with thirty-three escapees, ran out of gas. The U.S. Coast Guard intercepted the vessel and, as is customary under a 1995 accord between Castro and the Clinton administration, sent the Cubans home. Back in Cuba, the official media disparaged his talents. Morales was summoned to meet the head of Cuba's National Sports Institute, who informed the media that the slugger had "repented" and expressed a desire to quit baseball in favor of some other job at the Institute. And with that Orwellian flourish, Andy Morales's career in Cuban baseball would appear to be over. He can do other things, but not the one thing he loves.
Still, Morales did set a record of sorts. He is the first prominent defecting athlete to have been denied political asylum by the United States. In the wake of the Elian Gonzalez case, it appears that the Clinton administration is redoubling its efforts to avoid appearing to give Cubans any special treatment in immigration matters. Morales did get an asylum interview on board the Coast Guard ship, but his request for a chance at the big time in America was denied. U.S. officials decided that he did not have "a well-founded fear of persecution" in his home country.
Charles Lane is on the editorial-page staff of the Washington Post.