A False Choice for Cuban Baseball Players
There’s an article today in Vox, which states:
“Because of the US embargo, most Cuban players have to use smugglers to get themselves to the United States. What’s more, due to a quirk in Major League Baseball rules around contracts, those Cuban players often first have to travel to a third country, like Mexico — a difficult process.”
The first sentence is patently false. However, the second is definitely true.
This topic has garnered a lot of attention recently, pursuant to an LA Magazine feature on Dodgers star Yasiel Puig’s harrowing journey out of Cuba, where he had to promise smugglers and Mexican cartels a percentage of his future MLB earnings under physical duress.
First of all, the reason why Cuban baseball players have to resort to smugglers is because the Castro regime will not let them leave the island to independently pursue contracts anywhere.
Hence — it’s due to the Castro regime that most Cuban baseball players have to use smugglers to get themselves to the United States.
Recently, General Raul Castro has “generously allowed” some baseball players to play in Mexico and Japan — but only as a tool of the regime, whereby he negotiates the contracts and keeps a substantive portion of the salary.
To reiterate — under this scheme, foreign teams do not sign contracts with the Cuban players themselves, but with Castro’s sports monopoly, known as INDER.
Perhaps some people (including the author of this Vox story) would like to see MLB teams directly contract with the Castro regime for “permission” to use — and profit — from Cuban players.
But for Cuban baseball players, it would mean either handing over a small percentage of their earnings to smugglers or a large percentage to the Castro regime.
That’s a false choice.
In any other country in the world — perhaps with the exception of North Korea — athletes are allowed to sign contracts with foreign teams, play wherever they’d like and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
But in Castro’s Cuba, athletes are owned by the state. Thus, they are currently deprived of normalcy — the ideal solution.
Continue reading HERE.
What an irony, during his second term General Batista stopped wearing the military uniform for he no longer represented the military. Yet, this pimp and fraud, who was never in the military, never takes off his (which in essence is a costume).
Because, you know, we all wear military fatigues to go see a baseball game under 90 degree weather. Not even the hangman of Ramiro Valdes behind him or any of those communist pieces of shit serving as shield.
Yes, Fidel was a fraud and a BS artist, and yes, his eternal military get-up was a ridiculous costume, but the real problem is that, by and large, both he and his costume were taken at face value for decades by pretty much everybody except “those people.” The same goes for his brother now, who keeps running around wearing utterly fake military bling while impersonating a four-star (!) general as well as an elected president, not to mention a real Castro (it’s highly likely that he and Fidel had different fathers). Again, nobody questions that, even though it’s not that hard to figure out the truth–assuming, of course, one’s interested in the truth, as opposed to adopting the most convenient pose. It all reeks, big time, but the stench has been around so long it’s become “normal,” so it’s treated as such.
Batista, btw, was actual military but not a real general, as his rise to that rank was based on politics. He certainly didn’t push the military thing on people anywhere near as much as Fidel, especially as acting president, when what he wanted was to project the image of a statesman and a gentleman.