January 17, 2006

Wrong Approach on the Baseball Game

By Wayne Smith

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria of Yale University had an opinion piece in The New York Times on January 11 in which he said the Bush Administration was right to deny a license to the Cuban team to play in the World Baseball Classic this coming March. I was in Cuba when the piece came out and returned too late to have a letter to the editor considered for publication. I take this means of commenting on Gonzalez Echevarria’s piece.

He says Cuba should indeed not be allowed to play because its government is undemocratic and repressive. But there are many such regimes in the world, with many of which the U.S. has close cooperative relationships. China, Uzbekistan and Egypt come immediately to mind and there are many others. If we refused to compete against teams from those countries, we could not compete in the Olympics at all. And more to the point, if we compete against their sports teams, as we routinely do, why not against Cuba’s?

More specifically Gonzalez Echevarria argues, Cuba should be denied because while U.S. players can choose to participate or not, Cuban players are expected to play. So his solution to this is to deny Cuban participation at all, thereby making it impossible for any Cubans to play, whether they want to or not! Does that make any sense?
Further, it is difficult to imagine that there are Cuban players who do not want to play. This essentially amateur event may not be a huge deal for American players, but for the Cubans it is.

And as for the Cuban people, whatever their feelings about their government, whether they approve of disapprove, the overwhelming majority are avid baseball fans and fiercely proud of their national team, the Olympic champions. They more than anyone want that team to play in the coming classic. Why should we deny them that small pleasure?

The overwhelming majority of Americans, who understand what sportsmanship is all about, also favor Cuban participation. What it comes down to, then, is that a tiny knot of Cuban-Americans, such as Gonzalez Echevarria and a few hard-liners down in Miami (but by no means the majority of the Cuban-American community), is dictating to the rest of us. He is right that they of course have the right to state their opinions and to try to influence policy. What they should not be able to do is to set policy against the will of the vast majority. But if the Bush administration accedes to their demands that Cuba not be allowed to play, that is exactly what it will have condoned. This is not the way democracy is supposed to work!