A rush of hope reverberated across the Straits of Florida last week when the Cuban flag was raised in Washington, D.C. for the first time in over 50 years. But the thawing of relations between the two countries hasn’t stopped Cuban athletes from defecting to the U.S. In fact, it is likely the driving factor behind a spate of recent abdications.
This year alone, there have been at least 15 defections by Cubans representing their country in international competitions. In February, two baseball players defected while playing in Puerto Rico and were joined by two more in North Carolina in July. Four soccer players participating in North America’s Gold Cup this past month absconded and around half of the men’s field hockey team defected during the Pan American Games in Toronto, forcing them to play with only eight players (field hockey allows 11 on the field).
Cuba’s economy is currently in a rough state. In fact, 79 percent of Cubans are dissatisfied with the economic system, according to a Washington Post poll from April. Fifty-five percent of Cubans want to leave the country and, among those, 52 percent want to travel to the U.S.
Despite the recent resumption of diplomatic ties, the U.S. still has economic sanctions and travel restrictions in place against Cuba. The Obama administration said earlier this year that the current “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy — where Cubans found at sea are returned but those who make it into the U.S. can gain asylum and citizenship faster than average immigrants — would remain in place. But athletes continue to defect when on foreign soil because they fear that normalizing diplomatic relations will lead to a normalization of American policy toward Cuban immigrants, meaning that making it to American soil might not be enough to gain asylum.
“In the last month or two there’s been a fear in Cuba that normalization will change U.S. policy and Cubans getting to U.S. shores will be treated the same as any other immigrant,” Peter Bjarkman, an expert and historian on Cuban baseball, told ThinkProgress. “A lot of Cubans are trying to rush to the U.S. before policies change.”
Cuba removed a ban on foreign travel in January 2013 and since then have also raised salaries for athletes. Cuban baseball players are now allowed to play in Japan — so long as they return to Cuba to play in the winter league and compete with the national team.
While other athletes don’t stand to make as much as Cuba’s top baseball prospects, or in many cases, even hope to have a professional career as an athlete in the U.S., experts believe the main reasons for defecting are financial. Cuban soccer players aren’t as sought after as their baseball counterparts and many aren’t thought of as good enough to compete in Major League Soccer (MLS) or the European leagues, where the world’s top talent flocks. Still, they continue to leave their country behind.
“The economy is so bad in Cuba that they think they’ll have a better life even if they don’t play soccer,” said Bjarkman, whose book, Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story of Major League Baseball’s Hottest Issue is set to be published early next year.
Baseball players on the other hand see their compatriots making astronomic financial gains playing professionally in the U.S. And they aren’t the only ones to take notice. Human smugglers, sometimes affiliated with notorious Mexican drug cartels, are said to be involved with the defection of a number of high-profile Cuban players.
As Bjarkman wrote in a February article in the Daily Beast:
There is hard evidence of an unsavory business that can only be labelled human trafficking in the removal of athletes from the island. Details of a smuggling operation headed by Zeta cartel operatives that spirited [Yasiel] Puig through Mexico made headlines last April. Courtroom litigation in Miami — including several actions filed by Cubans reportedly now suffering repercussions for their roles aiding defections — has surrounded big leaguers Yoenis Céspedes, Leonys Martin, and [Aroldis] Chapman. Recently several Miami gangsters were jailed for their involvement in transporting Martin out of Cuba. Stories abound concerning the unsavory activities of some player agents who seem just as bent on striking political blows against the Castro regime as in upgrading MLB rosters. And some agents have lured numerous lesser-skilled players off the island and then quickly abandoned them in Mexico or Haiti when big-money dreams did not pan out. While MLB clubs are benefiting from the defection phenomenon and its immediate talent pool, there are assuredly those in MLB circles who hope for a cleaner system that might come with diplomatic relations.
As relations improve between the two countries, there are hopes that the migration of Cuban players to the MLB will be legitimized and the shady middlemen will be cut out. That might be something to look forward to in the long run, Bjarkman said, though as long as the embargo and travel restrictions remain in place, not much is expected to change.
Cuba’s baseball success brings massive pride to the Castro regime and stopping the defection of the island’s top talents will surely be on the mind of Cuban diplomats during talks with the Americans. “There are probably already discussion we just don’t know about — high level talks behind the scenes,” Bjarkman said. “How much MLB has been involved, I don’t know. They’re probably not involved much but the governments talk and that’s one concern of the Cubans.”
In the meantime, expect defections to continue.
“Everyone knows what happened to our team,” Cuban field hockey player Roger Aguilera told AFP after a 13–0 loss to Trinidad and Tobago. “We have seven of them in the United States.”