Cuba challenges big bucks US baseball world

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba sent its national team on Monday to
play in the inaugural World Baseball Classic in a risky bid to
challenge the American professional sports world with its
Soviet-styled amateur system.

The Cubans, defending Olympic gold medalists, are among the
favorites to top the United States at its own game in the first
international baseball tournament to include Major League
players.

But defections of poorly-paid players to the Major Leagues
– lured by multimillion-dollar U.S. contracts — have hurt
Cuba’s team and national pride, particularly the 2002 loss of
its best pitcher, Jose Contreras.

And more could defect during the 16-nation tournament that
began in Tokyo on March 3 and ends in San Diego on March 20, as
Major League scouts look for young talent among the Cubans
ranks.

President Fidel Castro, dressed in his trademark green
military fatigues, gave the Cuban team a two-hour pep-talk on
Sunday night and sent them off with the Cuban slogan “Hasta la
victoria siempre!” (Always until victory).

Those were the parting words of legendary guerrilla Che
Guevara when he set off from Cuba to spread revolution to other
countries, only to be captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967.

The Cuban squad, which includes Castro’s youngest son
Antonio Castro as team doctor, left Monday for Puerto Rico
where on Wednesday it will play Panama.

For Castro, not a leader to shy away from risks, the
tournament is a chance to poke at his longtime enemy the U.S.
government, even if Cuba doesn’t win.

The Bush administration, seeking to isolate what it has
called “an outpost of tyranny” on its last legs, initially
denied the Cubans visas to play in Puerto Rico, a U.S.
territory.

But Washington relented under pressure from the baseball
world after organizers said the event could fold without Cuba.

REVOLUTIONARY SPORT

Castro’s government sees the baseball rivalry with the
United States as two-fisted politics by other means.

The president of the Cuban Sports Institute, Christian
Jimenez, compared the players with soldiers sent to fight
anti-colonial wars in Angola and other parts of Africa.

“We are convinced you will hold up our flag high defending
our revolutionary sport with honor and come back like the Cuban
soldiers who fulfilled important missions in Africa,” Jimenez
said at a ceremony.

Cuban baseball fans are worried about how well the team
will compete, though. They say their team’s Achilles heel is
its weak pitching.

Cuba lost star pitcher Contreras when he defected during a
tournament in Mexico in 2002. He was signed by the New York
Yankees to a $32 million contract, before becoming an important
cog in the Chicago White Sox roll to the 2005 World Series
championship.

He had been earning just $20 a month in Cuba.

Defections to the United States include pitchers Orlando
“El Duque” Hernandez of the World Series champion Chicago White
Sox and Hernandez’s brother Livan Hernandez, who pitches for
the Washington Nationals.

Among the players the scouts will focus on is Cuba’s star
hitter Yulieski Gourriel. The 21-year-old is the leading
slugger in Cuba this season with 17 home runs.

Anti-Castro exiles in Miami have called on the Cuban team
to defect, hoping for a repeat of the worst mass defection by
39 athletes and trainers during the Central American and
Caribbean Games in Puerto Rico in 1993.

But when it comes baseball, a national passion in Cuba
where the sport was introduced by American sailors in the 19th
century, most Cubans forget politics.

Even defector Contreras is rooting for Cuba.

“I want Cuba to win. I could never represent any other
country,” he said last week on U.S. sports network ESPN.
“That’s my team.”

Cuba considers defectors to be traitors, however, and their
names disappear from the Cuban media as if they had never
existed. Unlike Mexico and the Dominican Republic, Cuba did not
allow its Major League players to play for their national team.