Due to its chummy relationship with Cuba’s communist Castro dictatorship, the MLB is discriminating against professional Cuban players and not allowing them participate in the next World Baseball Classic.
Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter has the report and details about today’s protest:
Join Cuban baseball fans outside of Marlins Baseball park at 6pm on Sept 19th to protest discrimination against Cuban players by Major League Baseball
The Association of Cuban Baseball Fans (Asociación de Apasionados del Beisbol Cubano) is organizing a protest outside of the entrance to Marlins Baseball park at 6:00pm on September 19th “to protest against the discrimination of professional Cuban baseball players who will not be able to participate in the next World Baseball Classic”
Former Cuban prisoner of conscience Regis Iglesias in an OpEd in Diario Las Américas on September 11, 2022 explained the context that has led to this protest.
“The MLB institution or the MLB Players Association come up with the idea of ??allowing some franchises to visit Cuba for ‘friendly’ matches or much worse, to make ‘agreements’ with who enslave not only our athletes, but all our people. I will always protest and condemn those unsupportive positions. MLB cannot be a repressive extension of the Cuban Baseball Federation and the criminal and segregationist regime in Cuba.
“Rob Manfred is not the owner of the farm like the commandos of the island and he cannot pressure the players with simplistic reasoning and opportunism to maintain the status quo with the tyranny or take shameful steps of recognition of it. […] MLB’s agreement with the Cuban Baseball Federation cannot be proudly brandished as it is part of the recognition of an institution, supposedly independent from a free country, to a repressive and segregationist institution from a country subjected to the tyranny of a communist party.”
Major League Baseball (MLB) has repeatedly made two crucial mistakes, one that has been made by others, the professional baseball organization has confused the Castro dictatorship’s junta with the Cuban people, and to highlight social justice issues in the United States, but ignoring them outside the United States, in places like Cuba.
On April 11, 2021 Mary O’Grady reported “Major League Baseball says ‘values’ compelled it to move this summer’s All-Star Game out of Georgia. But this piety doesn’t square with its long record of collaboration with Cuba’s military dictatorship, one of the world’s most notorious human-rights violators.”
In 2016, Major League Baseball sent a proposal to the U.S. Treasury Department that would have turned Cuban baseball players into foreign workers of the Castro family while playing in the United States. This is not hyperbole, the point man that Major League Baseball was dealing with is Antonio Castro, vice president of the Castro regime’s International Baseball Federation, and Fidel Castro’s son.
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