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BY JOSH ABEL

In print | Published March 5, 2009

The 2009 World Baseball Classic is set to debut tonight. The competition is baseball’s answer to soccer’s World Cup, pitting teams from 16 different countries against each other.

International baseball competition has very little in the way of a compelling history. Olympic baseball is flat due to its lack of major leaguers (it’s held in the middle of the MLB season), and this is just the second WBC, preceded only by the 2005 version, which was a big hit around the world.

However, all these competitions share one very compelling storyline: Team Cuba.

A lot of the fun of the WBC is seeing major league stars in a new setting. It’s like an all-star game, except people care about it. The Cuban team offers something different. These are some of the game’s great players, but they’re the ones you can’t see anywhere else.

Cuba’s relationship with the rest of the world is a controversial one, and you’re not reading a sports column for geopolitical insights. What is relevant here is how it affects the country’s great baseball players.

Cuba keeps its baseball talent under tight wraps. Movement to and from the island is closely monitored, and the Castro regime (Fidel Castro is a big baseball fan himself) is well aware of the allure of major league baseball (and major league salaries) for his top players.

As a result, Cuban baseball stars and their families are watched closely, and when they leave the country for international play, they are heavily guarded. Whenever the Cuban national team leaves the island, there is a very real risk of stars bolting in the night.

These escape attempts can be just as dramatic as they sound. Any casual baseball fan has certainly heard of Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez. He was one of the horses in the starting rotation that anchored the New York Yankees’ dynasty of the late 1990s, delivering his greatest performances in the most critical postseason games.

He was also one of the great pitchers in Cuban history, but was banned from the national team in 1996 because he was suspected of attempting to defect. Later that year, he and a few others piled into a shoddy sailboat with minimal supplies and set out for Florida. Mere hours later, the boat could no longer float, and they were stranded on a small desert island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. They remained there for four days, subsisting on what meager food they could scrounge together. Upon being rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard, Hernandez and his fellow fugitives spent time in a refugee camp in the Bahamas, and it looked as though Hernandez would be sent back to Cuba.
However, the U.S. Department of State eventually allowed him to enter the country. His MLB career began soon after.

Given that history, it isn’t so surprising that the spotlight of a New York postseason failed to faze Hernandez.

Every other Cuban defector who plays in the United States has a similar tale to tell (though often with less drama). Kendry Morales, a member of the L.A. Angels of Anaheim, reached the United States in his eighth attempt to escape. Jose Contreras of the White Sox fled the Cuban national team for the United States while in Mexico.

And by no means is the drama of the actual escape the only hardship these Cuban defectors face. For these men, leaving Cuba for the MLB means leaving their entire lives behind. It means leaving behind a family and not knowing when they will ever see them again. These defectors leave behind everything they have ever known for a shot at the major leagues. For many, it is worth it, but the costs are immense.

So when you watch a WBC game involving Cuba, there’s a lot more going on than you may realize. For instance, if you watched the WBC in 2005, you might have seen Alexei Ramirez playing for Cuba. On the surface, he was just a ballplayer. However, below the surface, he was struggling with the issues that have haunted so many Cuban players before him, wrestling with the idea of breaking through baseball’s iron curtain and pursuing a lifetime of wealth and freedom in the United States, while leaving behind his entire past. Two years later, he defected. In 2008, he was runner-up for the American League Rookie of the Year Award.

This is what makes the Cuban team so fascinating to watch. They are playing the game just like the other 15 teams (actually, they’re playing a lot better than most of the other 15 teams), but there are dynamics at work that go well beyond baseball.

For these players, there is a dichotomy between playing for Cuba and not. Once they take that step to leave, they are gone forever. And to outside observers, the players on the other side of that curtain are mysterious and intriguing — mysterious because they play in a baseball world separate from our own, but intriguing because they live in a world that is our own, and so we can sympathize with their struggle and contemplate the difficult decisions they face.

When you watch Team Cuba play, you’re not only watching baseball drama, but also getting a glimpse into a very powerful human interest story.

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