Baseball diplomacy or just baseball?
By
Saul Landau Read Spanish Version
In
March 1998, the Baltimore Orioles flew to Cuba to play its national
team in Havana. In a well-pitched game the O’s won 3-2, in the 13th
inning. Two months later, the Cubans routed the birds in Baltimore.
During the games, talent agents from various teams from both leagues
took detailed notes about the Cuban players. Indeed, such careful
studying, if practiced by U.S. diplomats in Havana, might actually
teach Washington policy makers something about the nature of Cuba.
This may happen when fish learn to sing opera.
The
games did not, as we know, lead to Washington’s lifting of its
embargo or travel ban. Baseball diplomacy did, however, lead to the
defection in 2002 of Cuba’s star pitcher, Jose Contreras, who had
held the Orioles to two runs in nine innings. He signed with the New
York Yankees for millions of dollars. Even in the 21st
Century, Dollar diplomacy still functions.
The
Orioles’ owner Peter Angelos, according to an accompanying sports
writer, “was pissed. He wanted Contreras, but didn’t bid high
enough. Why else would he force his team to fly to Cuba for a day?”
The
banal explanation unfortunately made sense. Angelos had not shown
himself to care deeply about social issues, other than those
affecting his fortune. For major league baseball, the visit marked
the first time a pro team played in Cuba since Havana was dropped
from the AAA International League in 1960. Let’s face it, sports
fans, baseball, like most of the great cultural institutions of our
country, is a major multi billion dollar business. Matters of state
take a very second place.
Before
the crowds filled Havana’s stadium, however, teams of kids from the
Baltimore-Washington area played their Havana counterparts through
Cuba’s capital city. Parents and kids of the Cubans and Americans
met each other and talked. The baseball excuse for a visit — okayed
by the Clinton Administration — also fostered dialogue between Cuban
and U.S. baseball nuts. Fidel, in his box seat, cheered for his team.
The Cuban crowd and the handful of U.S. visitors who got tickets
behaved politely. I noticed neither heavy drinking nor Santeria
spells being cast on the visiting Orioles — normal practices in
Cuban league games.
Four
years later, in 2002, the Bush Administration imposed draconian
limits on travel to the island: threatening jail and raising fines
for unlicensed travelers and limiting the amount Cubans in the United
States could send their relatives on the island. Since then, no hints
of sports diplomacy have wafted through Washington’s muggy air —
until July 8, that is. When Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL)
learned about a scheduled trip of 11- and 12-year-old kids from
Vermont and New Hampshire to Havana, he suffered a near panic attack.
He then demanded an emergency meeting with officials from the State
Department and Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
The obedient executive branch agency, of course, obeyed and scheduled
the session.
Diaz-Balart
and his brother Mario, who also represents a south Florida district
filled with Cuban exiles, get their knickers in a twist whenever they
learn of any event that might even slightly dent the harsh rules of
embargo and travel ban that they, along with the other members of the
Hate-Castro industry (not quite in the multi billion dollars range
yet), help preserve. For the Diaz-Balart brothers, and Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, their female south Florida counterpart, limiting travel
to Cuba ranks far higher on the priority scale than the banal issues
facing their constituents — unemployment, foreclosures, school drop
outs and lack of health care.
Ros-Lehtinen
and the Diaz-Balart brothers help guide the small but influential —
with the Bush family — Cuba Democracy Caucus on Capital Hill. On
July 10, this bastion of Castro haters invited all Members to an
“important” meeting with Bisa Williams, Coordinator for the State
Department’s Office of Cuban Affairs, and Barbara Hammerle, Deputy
Director of OFAC.
At
the meeting, according to the invitation, Diaz Balart planned “to
discuss the very troubling granting of a Treasury/OFAC license to a
Little League team to travel to Cuba in August. I have included links
to two newspaper articles that provide details on the issue.” (Al
Kamen, Washington
Post,
July 30)
The
Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen have pressured the Bush Administration
to convert OFAC into a Cuba monitoring agency. Some naïve
Members may have thought OFAC actually looked into Al Qaeda money
transactions, but an AP story reported that OFAC, supposedly
responsible for “blocking terrorists’ financial sources,”
confessed in a letter to Congress that only four of its full-time
employees investigated Osama bin Laden’s fortune. But 25 OFAC
officials monitored U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba and other
supposed violations of the embargo and travel ban.
Montana
Democratic Senator Max Baucus noted that instead of the agency
playing a key role in the war on terrorism, it interferes with
Americans touring Cuba on bicycles.
From
1990 to 2003, OFAC monitors held 93 investigations into terrorism,
and since 1994, have collected just $9,425 in fines related to
violations of regulations against the funding of such activity.
During that period, however, they opened 10,683 investigations
related to Cuba and collected more than $8 million in fines, mostly
from individuals who traveled to Cuba without licenses or from Cubans
who sent more remittances to their families than the regulations
permitted. (John Solomon, AP, April 29, 2004)
To
emphasize how OFAC operates as an arm of the anti-Castro industry,
Ted Levin, a coach for the Vermont team said it took him “20 months
and three rejections before OFAC approved the trip in April.”
Lincoln
Diaz-Balart offers the rationale of “punishing” Castro by denying
money to Cuba. Vermont’s Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie scoffed at
such notions because he believes the trip “will lead to a better
and more secure world and I believe it’s through grass-roots
connections of people-to-people and baseball teams playing one
another that we expand our understanding and that’s consistent with
the objectives of our initial trips to Cuba.” (Rutland
Herald
July 31)
Vermont’s
two Senators, Democrat Patrick Leahy and Independent Bernard Sanders,
also backed the informal mini baseball diplomacy trip as did New
Hampshire Republican Senators Judd Gregg and John Sununu as well as
the House Members, democrats Paul Hodes (NH) and Peter Welch (VT).
Major
league baseball mavens seem unconcerned since talent scouts didn’t
get invited and thus no serious recruitment could get done. OFAC
issued travel licenses for only 14 players and a few coaches. But
Leahy didn’t “like the idea of the government telling ordinary
Americans, let alone Little Leaguers, where and when they can travel.
If the president can go to China at taxpayers’ expense, these kids
ought to be able to go on a privately paid trip to Cuba to play some
baseball.”
The
Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen seem to share bicameral minds, as
sociologist Nelson Valdes puts it. From one mind chamber comes
statements about Cuba being a dangerous terrorist state and therefore
meriting isolation; in another, they call for the assassination of
Fidel Castro. (Ros-Lehtinen in 638 Ways to Kill Castro).
All
three have championed the causes of self-proclaimed bombers Luis
Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch — responsible for downing a Cubana
airliner and killing all 73 aboard. Now, along with Senator “Holy
Joe” Lieberman (I-CT), they demand a pardon for Eduardo Arocena,
who was convicted of assassinating a Cuban diplomat in New York City
and attempting to bomb Cuban UN ambassador Raul Roa in 1980 and nine
other bombings. He’s not a terrorist, according to those requesting
Bush to free him, he’s a freedom fighter. Indeed, he has fought
freedom very dramatically.
That
the power of such morally bipolar legislators has captured the Bush
administration’s Cuba policy should in itself be frightening.
Imagine when the Diaz-Balart brothers and Ros-Lehtinen read the
August 5 AP dispatch and learn that OFAC has granted licenses to the
University of Alabama baseball team! Beyond mood disorders, such news
could case a serious attack of hemorrhoids, giving new meaning to the
term Crimson Tide.
Meanwhile,
these bastions of the anti-Castro industry continue to push hard to
free imprisoned anti-Castro industry terrorists. Ah, the fanatics!
Some
government officials might see a baseball game as a means to refocus
their Cuba energy, toward athletic competition and away from puerile
vengeance. Play Ball!
Saul Landau’s 1968 Fidel film, Castro plays baseball. Available on
DVD at http://roundworldproductions.com
