Cuba’s baseball players are flocking to the US with dreams of the major leagues

Younger generation of ballplayers puts sport before national rivalry, finds Nelson Acosta

Children from the Downtown Havana baseball team listen to instructions from a coach during a match (Reuters)

Cuban eight-year-old Kevin Kindelan, a hot-handed shortstop for a Central Havana junior league baseball team, and his teammate and first baseman Leoni Venego, seven, both dream of stardom.

Kindelan says he wants to play for Cuba’s national baseball club, but Venego, recovering his composure after a big swing and a miss during a recent practice session, admits he’s set his sights on a bigger prize.

“I want to get to the Major Leagues and be like Yuli Gurriel,” he said, referring to a Cuban all-star first-baseman for the Houston Astros, a baseball team in the United States, Cuba’s long-time rival to the north.

Baseball fan Kevin Kindelan, eight, practises with his father on the roof of their house in Havana (Reuters)

Kevin plays with friends at a vacant lot in Havana (Reuters)

Success in baseball, Cuba’s national pastime and a favourite pursuit of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, is increasingly measured beyond its borders. That mirrors a broader exodus of Cubans from the stagnating communist-run island racked by social and economic crisis.

Cuba’s economy shrank 11 per cent in 2020 and has only inched upward since, official figures show, plagued by the pandemic and further throttled by the US Cold War-era embargo. Long queues for food, medicine and fuel are the norm, driving a nearly unprecedented exodus of more than 157,000 Cubans to the United States since October, according to the US Customs and Border Protection agency.

“In the past six years the number of baseball players that have left the country has also tripled compared with the decade between 2000 and 2010,” said Francis Romero, a Cuban baseball expert and book author who lives in Florida. “No baseball league … could survive that.”

Kevin is dressed by his father before a baseball lesson (Reuters)

Children play baseball in Havana (Reuters)

And many young players are no longer as motivated by communist ideology or love of country, Romero said, a force that for decades helped drive Cubans to great achievements including gold medals in baseball in Barcelona in 1992, Atlanta in 1996 and Athens in 2004.

“Players once waited a long time to emigrate, to prove themselves. Now they leave at 16 or 17 years of age,” he said.

“Many of the Cuban players are no longer aligned with the ideology or the politics of the government.”

A child watches a baseball match between Industriales and Artemisa at the Latinoamericano Stadium in Havana (Reuters)

A teenager plays baseball at a park in Havana (Reuters)

At the Ponton ballfield in central Havana, with its muddy infield and weed-shrouded foul lines, some of Cuba’s youngest players train, taking their first excited swings, playing catch and slapping hands.

But no one – not even these children – escapes the impact of Cuba’s grinding economic crisis – or the draw of migration, says youth coach Irakly Chirino, a former player in Cuba’s national league who began his career at Ponton.

“Here, we don’t have gloves, bats, shoes, or even balls to play with … and when we do, they are too expensive,” Chirino told Reuters on the sidelines of a late-spring practice.

Industriales baseball team member David Mena practises before a match at the Latinoamericano Stadium (Reuters)

Supporters of Industriales baseball team react during a match against Artemisa (Reuters)

Lack of supplies has led once avid ballplayers to the less gear-intensive sport of soccer, the favourite elsewhere in Latin America, or to dream of playing abroad from a younger age, Chirino said.

“Let’s not fool ourselves … we’re losing our best ballplayers before they even make it to the national series,” he said.

That is a bittersweet reality for coach Nicolas Reyes, who has seen more than a dozen of his alumni sign contracts in leagues outside Cuba.

“They started with me and now they’re in the Major Leagues. It makes me proud,” he said.

A child watches a baseball match between Industriales and Artemisa (Reuters)

A baseball fan smokes a cigar during the match (Reuters)

But he acknowledges the draw of fame and fortune increasingly trumps love of country.

“When I played, it wasn’t like that. You would never betray your country.”

Juan Reinaldo Perez, president of the Cuban Baseball Federation, said the continuing pipeline of talent – including those that leave Cuba – still fuels hope for the future of Cuban baseball.

“We are a country with a baseball tradition and that continues to grow,” he said.

Children from the Downtown Havana baseball team prepare to high five the Champions team after a match in Havana (Reuters)

Children high five after the match (Reuters)

Cuba’s limited resources, he says, now focus on keeping budding ballplayers from leaving.

In May, the Cuban federation inked a deal with World Baseball Softball Confederation that makes formal the right of Cubans to contract with professional leagues across the globe, without needing to abandon their home or nationality.

A similar deal, inked with Major League Baseball in the United States in 2018, would have granted Cubans the same right. Snuffed out by then-president Donald Trump before it could be implemented, many Cubans with big league aspirations felt they had little choice but to leave.

That lack of such a deal continues to be a major hurdle to keeping talent at home, Guillermo Carmona, manager of Cuba’s Industriales team said.

“Without a doubt, [that deal] was a great motivation [for our players],” said Carmona. “Now, many have left us.”

Reuters