Out (of Touch) at Home

US Leaders Trying to Boot Cuba
from World Baseball Classic

Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

What do all of these men have in common, besides being president of the United States?

Fidel Castro (throws right, bats right) has called President Bush a fool for trying to prevent the Cuban baseball team from participating in the upcoming World Baseball Classic.

The answer is these men were all heads of state in our country during the tenure of Fidel Castro, el presidente of Cuba. Cuba is, of course, that little island nation in the Caribbean, some 90 miles south of Key West. Castro has been numero uno in Cuba since 1959 and has actually outlived five of his American counterparts. And considering that he is still giving speeches that routinely last four hours or more, you’d have to say he’s still going strong—sort of the Energizer Bunny of World Leaders.

It is no wonder, then, that some politicos in our country would do anything in their power to make life miserable for Fidel and his supporters. Last week, however, they went too far.

The U.S. State Department is working diligently to keep the Cuban baseball team out of the inaugural World Baseball Classic, under the guise that the tournament would be profitable to Cubans and therefore violate the four-decades-long economic embargo that we have against Cuba. Even after Cuba stated that the team would donate any money it receives for playing in the tournament to Hurricane Katrina victims, the State Department continued its effort to keep the commies off the diamond.

For those unfamiliar with the World Baseball Classic, let me backtrack a bit. The World Baseball Classic is a World Cup Soccer-style 16-team tournament organized by Major League Baseball. The tournament will be played in March in ballparks in Puerto Rico, Japan, and the United States, with the finals scheduled for San Diego March 20. The tournament replaces the Olympic baseball tourney and allows Major Leaguers who would not normally have free time during the Summer Olympics to show off their skills as the best players in the world.

Some of the really good players, as it turns out, come from Cuba. The country is, in fact, the defending gold medal winner from the 2004 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Unlike the United States, Cuba is a basically a two-sport country, with passions running extremely high for baseball and soccer.

It’s a perfect opportunity for the Bush Administration to administer a little smackdown to Fidel and his people. And as we all know by now, our government never passes up an opportunity to hurt Cubans.

Last year the Bush Administration refused to give visas to a group of Cuban musicians so that they could perform music from Ry Cooder’s award-winning Buena Vista Social Club on a tour of the states. This past summer the United States refused an offer from Cuban physicians to fly to the Gulf area and provide medical aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

I would call those decisions the very definition of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

The situation with the World Baseball Classic has gotten so out of hand that Israel Roldan, the president of the Amateur Baseball Federation in Puerto Rico, was quoted last Thursday in the newspaper Primera Hora as saying Puerto Rico was renouncing its decision to be a tournament host because Cuba was being excluded “for reasons not regarding sports or the Olympic spirit.”

Some U.S. politicians have spoken about the controversy as well. Rep. Jose Serrano, a congressman from New York has asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Treasury Secretary John Snow to soften their hard-line stance on the issue.

“Let’s leave the politics out of this,” said Serrano. “The World Baseball Classic should not be tainted by our grudge against Cuba’s government. Cuba produces some of the finest baseball talent in the world and they deserve to participate.”

For Fidel Castro’s part, he laid the blame for the situation squarely on the shoulders of George W. Bush.

“He is very much a fool,” said Castro of Bush last Friday. “He doesn’t know who these Cuban baseball players are, or that they are Olympic and world champions. If he knew, he would know something about this country’s government.”

That thing that our president doesn’t seem to recognize about Cuba is that it is a thriving part of the Caribbean nation community, and very much less a communist entity than, say, China, a country we do business with on a monumental scale. Cubans are generally as poor as those citizens of other Caribbean islands but vastly more educated. Despite the fact that we Americans are prohibited by our own government from visiting Cuba, the country has a thriving tourist industry based on visitors from Canada, Germany and other lands. Cuba used to have unilateral economic support from the USSR and other communist regimes but has replaced that in the past two decades with friendlier sources of income. And it has done so without falling into anarchy and destitution like Haiti and a few other Caribbean nations. In that regard, you’d have to admit that there is something to be said for a little presidential continuity, even if it is time for Cuba to look around in earnest for Castro’s eventual replacement.

In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan spoke directly to USSR President Gorbachev during a public speech and implored that communist leader to help him tear down the Berlin Wall separating East and West Germany. Our current president should take Reagan’s lead and work with Fidel Castro to find ways to “tear down” the economic embargo and other walls separating the U.S. and Cuba.

The first step in that process would be for Bush to say to the Cuban baseball team, “Play ball!”