Cuban Athletes' Defections Prompt Calls for Change

Jakarta Globe, Anne-Marie Garcia, August 21, 2011

Cuban national team volleyball player Roberlandy Simon, right, is reported
by state newspapers to have defected. (AP Photo)

Havana. Cuba has become accustomed to the cream of its sporting talent defecting to the United States, and now it is considering the once unthinkable: the free market.

Communist Cuba has always had a problem keeping its prodigious sports and cultural talent on the island, not to mention its doctors, lawyers and other professionals.

Appeals to patriotism have proved only partially effective, so a new solution is being considered to combat the problem. As President Raul Castro’s government embarks on a wide-ranging initiative to let more people work for themselves instead of the state, there are increasing calls for the same to apply in sports.

Cuba must find a way to “stop the robbery of players,” baseball great Victor Mesa said. While hundreds of thousands of Cubans suddenly are going into business for themselves, he said, it is unfortunate that “there is no proposal to contract athletes to play abroad.”

Mesa, who manages Matanzas in the Cuban league, said he favors letting Cubans play for pay in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Japan, South Korea or Mexico after eight seasons at home. He did not mention Major League Baseball in the United States.

His comments reflected the chatter among Cuban athletes, coaches and fans, but it was significant that they were even published. In the past, sports people have gotten into trouble for disputing the official line, and talk of defectors was discouraged.

Now, Mesa is not alone in airing his views.

“Times change ... There are Cuban players who have wanted to test their luck,” Rey Vicente Anglada, former manager of Industriales and Cuba, told Prensa Latina. “They see themselves as having possibilities and see others who have done well.”

Delegates at April’s Communist Party summit on economic reforms approved the general idea of “a reference to athletes being hired abroad,” although the idea remains under discussion.

There is precedent: In 1999, the Cuban Sports Institute allowed a few volleyball and baseball players to work abroad, especially at the end of their careers, at salaries negotiated by officials. But that opening was shut in 2005.

Most Cuban sports players get monthly government salaries of $16. Olympic medalists receive an additional lifetime monthly stipend: $300 for gold medal winners and less for other medalists.

The government pays for entertainment, education, health, travel, housing and cars.

Its another world from that of hard-throwing pitcher Aroldis Chapman, who left the island and signed a five-year contract with the Cincinnati Reds for $30 million.

Defections drew rare mention recently in state newspapers Granma and Juventud Rebelde, which detailed the “abandonment” by the pitcher and reigning league rookie of the year Gerardo Concepcion during a tournament in the Netherlands. After his departure, the national team lost the final to Taiwan.

The papers also reported that captain Roberlandy Simon and players Joandry Leal and Raydel Hierrezuelo had quit the national volleyball team that was the runner-up at the 2010 world championship in Italy. The reports said they left the team for personal reasons, but their absence sparked rumors they wanted to defect. Hierrezuelo has since returned to the squad.

Six volleyball players defected in 2001 during a tournament in Belgium, the beginning of an exodus of many others.

From the beginning of the revolution he fomented more than 50 years ago, baseball-loving Fidel Castro placed high value on sporting and cultural talent to burnish his cause abroad.

Cuba eliminated for-profit sports in 1961, but Castro put significant resources into a highly organized system of free education and training. Successful athletes are considered heroes and national treasures. When offered millions of dollars to fight Joe Frazier for the heavyweight title in 1972, Cuban boxer Teofilo Stevenson famously responded: “What is $1 million compared to the love of 8 million Cubans?”

Associated Press