There’s a photo where it seems like I’m dancing with the Miami Marlins stadium security guard while sticking my tongue out, but it’s an involuntary figure, an unexpected image amidst the noise or ecstasy. Already the eighth inning of the semifinals of the V World Baseball Classic between Cuba and the United States was played on a field located in none other than Little Havana, the neighborhood now an island museum populated by Central Americans that for decades was the cultural heart of the Anti-Castro Exiles. The improbable strings together the parts of the political spectacle in a clear, elementary order.
No major league team could afford the North American team’s payroll, a new breed of Dream Team. There’s no money for quality like that. The Cuban team, on the other hand, carried an even more disturbing peculiarity, made up for the first time of local baseball players, a small minority, and others already in foreign leagues, athletes whose exodus once turned them into traitors. This state has not changed for her, it has only shifted. Now a significant portion of the exiles considered them accomplices of the communist regime because they represented the country at a sporting event of this magnitude.
Inclusion in the team had a political bias. Baseball players who had left an official delegation by that time could not attend, nor could anyone who had made statements against the regime or any of its leaders. However, Roenis Elías, one of the team’s main pitchers, had recently said: “I know the government sucks, but I want to represent my country, my thing is to play ball.” Elías, who had also come to show solidarity with the prisoners of the peaceful July 11 protests, also belonged to the independent organization that Major League Baseball players were trying to promote a few months before the Classic and which raised the alarm of baseball Federation triggered La Havana.
Carlos Manuel, is escorted by security forces. MEGAN BRIGGS (Getty Images via AFP)
Other members of this Separatist effort, such as José Adolis García (Texas Rangers) or Yordan Álvarez and José Abreu (Houston Astros), received the Federation’s call to compete in the Classic but turned down the proposal. Those who accepted, including Yoan Moncada and Luis Robert Jr. (Chicago White Sox), distanced themselves from any act of political propaganda as they knew, because they knew, leaders dismissed sports delegations as if they were sending them to war. Athletes become docile instruments of triumphant rhetoric. At the same time, baseball players agreed not to explain any risky, unhealthy ideas or ideological confusions that they might have acquired in the poisoned lands of capitalism. There was a pact of silence that sealed the experiment.
In Miami, a journalist asked Moncada if he identified with the motto Patria y Vida, the slogan of the civil resistance in Cuba. Moncada didn’t answer and his face was confused, almost as if he had been asked in Havana to whom he dedicated the victory. For decades, press reporters have herded together the winning athletes at international events like this one. The triumph could not be dedicated to the Commander-in-Chief. However, some unreleased scenes leaked out from behind these well-known skirmishes. Catcher Ariel Martínez, who was hired by the Cuban Federation in Japan, laughed as he explained that he loves Miami and that he would like to sign for the city’s team. They asked him if he would eat a sandwich at the Versailles restaurant, the legendary headquarters of political protests in exile, and he said that at Versailles, a sandwich and whatever. If someone said something similar some time ago, they could not go back to the island directly.
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I continued to believe, despite the clear efforts of many to reject a team instrumental in the totalitarian machine; a team that didn’t say everything they wanted to hear, like they wanted to hear – that exile had disembarked and captured part of the heart of Castro’s symbolism. Of course, we weren’t about to break an absolute record, desire is always a partial win in politics, but we landed a juicy pike in Flanders. For the first time, the baseball players didn’t look like soldiers, they looked like people, and that, to me more than soldiers from another army, was a denial of Castroism.
Game participants protest from the stands. ERIC ESPADA (Getty Images via AFP)
This team, debuting with two losses, was nothing, a heap of rubble, the representation of a broken country, and basically the initial disdain gave them reason and gave them the treasure of anger. From there, they chained three straight victories to reach the semifinals in Miami. They invented rituals, a celebratory gesture, suddenly obsessed with a rare pleasure that the Cuban teams were unaware of, or at least feigned for the past decade. It didn’t look like a communist team because it wasn’t a scared team, and people didn’t quite know where to put it from the moment a National Series guy got in the lineup behind a big league boss hit.
Anyone who has lived through it knows that since the ten million harvest, totalitarianism exaggerates its triumphant grimace most, but triumphs least. This explained his futile effort, in my view, to mold this mixed group, which polluted the purity of his segregative ideology, into the Newspeak mold. He also found that you can’t build a political alternative out of cynicism, after all you always have to want something. One cannot afford to suppress lust in the form of indemnity for justice. Even though it came from certain politicians, vocal influencers, and almost everyone who has made the freedom slogan a business, there were still people humbled, an unforgivable exodus, who still found my proposal reasonably flawed.
***
I arrived at Marlins Stadium in the early afternoon. Thousands of Cubans moved through the site from many positions or affective combinations that escaped any binary scheme. I even found fans wearing Team Asere jerseys. This moniker, which emerged from a meme page, was enthusiastically embraced by the regime’s top brass and immediately tainted. So many subtleties made my position even stranger, determined to save the players from outrage and trying to find signs in them that would allow me to appropriate them without joining the established ways of celebrating.
Like Michelet, he might say, “I appreciate the popular arm, but I hate crowds.” Outside, with the usual protests, I sensed the deep politeness Ramon Saul Sanchez, leader of the exile and a dying patriot, an elegant, stern, and leisurely man who wore a guayabera and called for peaceful protest without opposing the game dispute. I was moved by his presence, how was it possible that this man could not live in Cuba?
The meeting quickly fell into disarray. The United States beat Cuba from the start and the focus immediately shifted to a different type of duel. In the fifth inning, artist Danilo Maldonado, known as El Sexto, stormed onto the field from midfield with a sign calling for the July 11 release of political prisoners. It was an inspiration. There were public waves and choruses of anti-communism or national affirmation. The shocking gesture opened the season of disobedience. A little while later, a boy did, Antonio Fernández, with whom I later spent the whole early morning in a prison in Doral.
Then I was afraid, a known nerve. I spoke to my girlfriend and we planned something. I went to the bathroom and walked the corridor of the third section for a while, scared. It was necessary to burn off this spasm first. Once the fear is overcome, that is, once exhausted, once suffered, the event occurs automatically, a series of impersonal steps. This phase difference guarantees the action, the fright is always delayed. We went to the right field area where the guard ends and I asked a fan for his Cuban flag with the Patria y Vida sign. My friend suggested to a lady that she record with her cellphone. I ran down the stairs and just as I was about to finish the drama, I suddenly fell to the ground, stunned.
A slow man, almost limping, tried to cut me off, but I moved diagonally, looking for second base, and easily passed him. I saw the open field, a blooming succession, like a blinding calamity. I entered the rhombus between first and second place and stopped near the lime line in front of the guests’ shelter, the bench of the Cuban team. It was my team’s bench, the cast I’d been torn to pieces for since childhood, and for that very reason the cast I had to face up to, if need be, annihilate each other once and for all in a rending, love-streaked dance of failure There is no path to freedom that does not desecrate our altar of emotions.
I should have run more, stopped from tiredness, but I tried to turn around and a group of uniformed men reduced me. A big man gave me a spectacular tackle and my head bounced off the grass. I was never able to fully unfold the flag, the wind crumpled it but also puffed it up like a ship’s sail stranded in a cone of light, which is a ball field, after all. “Look here,” I wanted to say to the Cuba team without opening my mouth. “What are we going to do? Whatever we’re going to do, defeat the master, let’s do it together.” I trusted the language of my sprint.
I learned later that for some, prisoners of didactic slogans, an evil of Castroism sadly exported into exile, the flag and my bullfight didn’t seem to be a sufficient definition. But my body was the definition because it was the body of an outcast. What else? Then why should he run? Finally, he was also grateful for the loose sign that no one could fully appropriate it. I was going to offer a play – a broad term ranging from Lyotard to Vin Scully – which I was also gladly refused. In the heart of exile, a place so powerful that I still live on my own, the emote could trap my opponents. Freedom is the risk of being confused and then the abundance of embracing that confusion as your own. I had to act in spaces where what I am did not entirely depend on me.
Back on the street, after ten hours in detention, I received majority support. So much so that I was embarrassed, but I think it has to do with the fact that we are saturated with words and orphaned with facts, even facts outside of Cuba, with far fewer consequences than any act committed out of the pressure cooker becomes. However, I also had to deal with the local watercolor painters, those costume notaries of posterity, like the writer Néstor Díaz de Villegas, who tried to ban me from my gesture and turn it into an illiberal episode, a seedy fable of self-pity.
In any case, such efforts are ultimately unsuccessful, because the trick is to run ahead and keep chasing. The stadium’s stage was just one of those moments where my career crosses the general gaze to later continue in the shadows. “Why did you do that?” a police officer asked me on the way to the prison. “Because I have friends who are political prisoners,” I told him, also paraphrasing an idea of Wislawa Szymborska related to poetry: “I prefer the ridiculousness of throwing myself in a ball field than the Ridiculous not to throw myself in a ball field”.
I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, not even my loved ones’ former team, to belong to my country.
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