BEHIND THE HEADLINES
Playing Hardball: Cuba, the U.S., and Baseball Diplomacy
By Daniel Montero, Justin Jimenez and Reed Lindsay
August 14, 2024
If any single event encapsulated the historic opening between Cuba and the United States, it was the March 2016 exhibition baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays and Cuba’s national team at Havana’s Latin American Stadium.
The 70-year-old stadium, known as “El Latino” in Cuba, was jam-packed hours before the game even started.
“As great as our fans are in the U.S., they don’t come six hours before the game,” Major League Baseball (MLB) commissioner Rob Manfred told Belly of the Beast journalist Reed Lindsay from the field before the first pitch.
The final score (Tampa Bay won 4-1) did nothing to dampen the fans’ – and the players’ – excitement.
“Beyond baseball, this is about people from both countries growing closer with these new relations,” said Yosvani Torres, the starting pitcher for Cuba’s national team. “I hope a lot of good things come from this.”
The game marked the crowning moment of Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba. There are no luxury suites at El Latino, and Obama watched the game in the stands behind home plate alongside then Cuban President Raúl Castro.
But the biggest applause was reserved for a relatively obscure AAA player on the Tampa Bay Rays.
Dayron Varona, a Cuban-born outfielder who used to play for the Camaguey Bulls of Cuba’s national league, led off the game for the Rays. Varona had left Cuba via speedboat in 2013 in an attempt to establish residency in another country, a requirement before a Cuban player can sign with an MLB team due to U.S. sanctions. He later spent five months in Haiti before being kidnapped on his way to the Dominican Republic.
Varona became the first player who had abandoned his team in Cuba to come back to the island to play.
“There’s no greater feeling than that,” said Varona. “I could feel it rush through my body, from my toes to the ends of my hair.”
“The doors are opening”
The Tampa Bay game was purely symbolic but it heralded tangible progress in the relations between the two countries’ governments and their biggest baseball leagues.
With Obama loosening U.S. sanctions, an agreement between MLB and the Cuban Baseball Federation (FCB) seemed inevitable.
“The doors are opening,” Adolis García, who started that day in right field for the Cuban team and last year set playoff records with the Texas Rangers, told Lindsay before the game. “Cuba’s national sport is baseball and through it a lot of connections can be made.”
Three months earlier, an MLB goodwill delegation had visited the island, composed of current and future Hall of Famers Dave Winfield, Joe Torre, Clayton Kershaw and Miguel Cabrera as well as Cuban ballplayers Yasiel Puig, José Abreu, Brayan Peña and Alexei Ramírez.
“It’s been almost 17 years without seeing [my family], and for me to come back here and hug them and shake their hand, and baseball is what made everything possible,” Peña said in Havana at the time.
It took more than two years, but MLB and the FCB finally signed a deal in December of 2018, modeled off MLB’s agreements with other prominent leagues such as the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) and Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). In addition, the deal with Cuba would have eliminated the requirement that Cuban baseball players establish residency in another country in order to sign an MLB contract.
“Knowing that the next generation of Cuban baseball players will not endure the unimaginable fate of past Cuban players is the realization of an impossible dream for all of us,” said Abreu, a Cuban-born all-star first baseman playing with the White Sox at the time. “Dealing with the exploitation of smugglers and unscrupulous agencies will finally come to an end for the Cuban baseball player.”
Four months later, what came to an end was not the trafficking of Cuban ballplayers, but the MLB-FCB agreement.
Trump puts an end to ending human trafficking
In April 2019, Donald Trump squashed the MLB’s deal with the FCB.
The Trump administration labeled the MLB deal, which was designed to end the human trafficking of baseball players from Cuba, “a form of human trafficking” because the FCB would have received payments when its players signed with MLB teams.
This type of arrangement was not new for MLB.
When an MLB team signs a player from the NPB, it is required to pay a sizable percentage of their contract as part of a “release fee” or “posting fee” to gain the rights to the player.
For example, the contract for Japanese pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who signed with the Dodgers for 12 years and $325 million last December, included a $50.6 million posting fee sent to his former team, the NPB’s Orix Buffaloes.
The fees paid to NPB teams before the posting system was standardized in 2018 were even greater. In 2006, the Boston Red Sox paid the NPB’s Seibu Lions $51.1 million for the rights to negotiate exclusively with Japanese ace Daisuke Matsuzaka.
Similarly, the FCB would have received payments when its players signed with MLB teams, which would have presumably been used to help sustain Cuba’s financially-strapped league and baseball development system.
According to one estimate, if such an agreement had been in place from 2000 until 2016, the Cuban Baseball Federation would have received $181 million via posting fees for 49 Cuban players who ultimately signed with MLB clubs during that period.
Needless to say, Cuba’s baseball players did not see the MLB deal as “a form of human trafficking.”
“Every ballplayer here felt bad when they heard the news that Trump closed the doors to play in the MLB,” Cuban ballplayer Xiam Vega told Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández in the first episode of the documentary series The War on Cuba. “[Right now] I’d have to renounce my country and I wouldn’t want to do that. I’d want to play [in the U.S.] and return to my country to be with my family and not far from them.”
Cuban baseball in crisis
With the MLB deal scuttled, Cuba’s best ballplayers have continued to risk their lives trying to make it to the big leagues.
Some make the often dangerous journey to other Latin American countries and then sign with MLB teams once they receive legal residency, such as Yordan Álvarez (Haiti), Randy Arozarena (Mexico) and Adolis García (Dominican Republic). Others abandon their teams while competing in international tournaments.
Hundreds of Cuban baseball players have left in recent years.
And they are doing so at younger and younger ages. Two of the players who represented Cuba in the Little League World Series last year – the first time a Cuban team played in the tournament – have since migrated to the Dominican Republic with their families in the hopes of eventually signing a contract with an MLB team when they turn 16.
Meanwhile, baseball in Cuba is facing an unprecedented crisis. With its best players gone, attendance at national league games is lower than ever as is investment in youth baseball. These days, it’s more common to see Cuban kids playing soccer – which is cheaper and more accessible – than baseball.
“U.S. sanctions make it hard”
There is no sign MLB has taken any actions to revive the deal, even since Trump left office. With the Biden administration embracing Trump’s Cold War-era policy, big business interests like MLB have steered clear of Cuba.
“A lot of people who were very involved in Cuba all of a sudden disappeared because it was politically risky,” Cuban-American businessman Carlos Gutierrez, a former commerce secretary under George W. Bush who had encouraged corporations to invest in Cuba during the Obama opening, told Oliva Fernández in the documentary Uphill on the Hill. “We used to call meetings with business people and get 40 CEOs. Today it’s very hard to get two or three.”
Rob Manfred may be afraid of engaging with Cuba, but Dayron Varona hasn’t stopped trying to build bridges between the two countries.
Last month, Varona, who now coaches Little League baseball through his Miami-based Varona Bulls Academy, took two of his teams to play in Havana.
Most of the kids’ families are Cuban American.
“We decided to do this trip no matter what anyone could think,” said Teresa Hernández, the grandmother of one of the Bulls players.
“Being here with my family and having my Cuban family see my son play was a great idea,” said Ayleen Monteagudo, the mother of another Bulls player. “I think most people want to do this again.”
For Varona, it was special to be back too.
“Amazing, it reminded me of when I played as a kid,” he said.
Still, Varona laments what could have been had the dream of normalized relations, which appeared so close when he led off for Tampa Bay at El Latino in March 2016, not been snuffed out.
“The [U.S.] blockade makes things hard,” said Varona. “I want Cuban players to be able to play wherever they want without having to make decisions like riding a speedboat, risking their lives, that they can play in the U.S. without leaving Cuba.”