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The Italian daily La Repubblica in its Monday March 13 edition has dedicated an entire page to a bit of news that simply does not exist. In substance-the article is not available online-the usual Omero Ciai’s fanciful pen holds that since an exodus of biblical proportions of Cuban baseball players toward the US is now in progress, the perfidious Fidel Castro would like to extirpate baseball from Cuba and substitute it with cricket.
Omero Ciai goes on for an entire pagelet with his little tale, without citing any datum, number, reference, or source. In reality, that wasn’t even the news It was only a blank space that needed to be filled with free-wheeling, anti-Cuban vignettes. But when one speaks of Latin America, the true news, as for example [http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2006/marzo/juev9/11constitiz.html the Constituent Assembly in Bolivia], are hidden by La Repubblica. Instead, propaganda and folklore is done about faux news.
During the first year of any school of journalism, Omero Ciai’s piece would’ve been mercilessly trashed. But since journalism should be made of news, of facts, the legendary five W’s and 1 H of US journalism, let us see if we can dot our i’s and cross our t’s.
Data on Cuban baseball players in the United States are available, for example, on the [http://mlb.com Major League Baseball’s site] (the US’s professional league) and on hundreds of other specialized sites. If Omero Ciai (whom some call Omero CIAi) had wanted to substantiate his article, he would have been able to spend a few minutes at the honest exercise of his profession, researching the data on how many Cubans play in the major leagues, how many other foreigners, and of which nationality, and contextualizing the information given in an at least dignified manner with respect to the inconsistencies in the article served up to La Repubblica’s readers.
Moreover, La Repubblica is a master in making graphs, pie charts, bar charts, and so on.... To contextualize Ciai’s piece with a chart that would unmistakably demonstrate the exodus was the least a serious daily could do. Where is this exodus of which your newspaper speaks, Editor-in-Chief Ezio Mauro?
Ciai writes from Buenos Aires, as though it were all the same. He does this while all of the world of baseball’s eyes are on the United States for the 2006 World Baseball Classic (the First Classic of Baseball, as it is translated in Spanish), a sort of world cup, where the locals are about to be eliminated, until now spared but for a referee larceny to Japan’s detriment. But the Classic doesn’t interest Ciai. He’s not even interested in baseball. He doesn’t dedicate a single line to explain George Bush’s great defeat, in having tried, until the last moment, to exclude Cuba from the tournament. The US president had to bow before the fact that all the world of baseball, the International Baseball Federation, the rival national federations who would have had an interest in excluding the highly regarded Cubans, but even the selfsame local organizing committee, all joined and held firm to the determination that “without Cuba, there is no baseball.”
Interesting, isn’t it? Why doesn’t Omero Ciai dedicate a single line to this? Because the US organizing committee is in reality a communist front in disguise, Silvio Berlusconi and Omero Ciai would say in unison.
Cuban baseball’s reality is entirely different from that which is described by Omero Ciai. Cuba’s National Baseball Series (Series A) is comprised of 16 teams, one for each province, plus the team for the Isla de la Juventud (Isle of Youth). Havana, which has two teams-the Industriales and the Metropolitanos-is excepted. Every team is comprised of 35 players for a total of 560 athletes. The number of those who free themselves from “Castro’s odious shackles” has always been less than ten a year. The latter are rarely ever from the national series. They are good players who go on to earn millions of dollars with a resulting propagandistic drumbeat every time this happens. Even though Cuba is the strongest country in the world of baseball, the island is merely the seventh exporter of players to the MLB (the US professional league), after Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
It wasn’t like this before the Revolution, when practically all Cuban players emigrated to the United States. When the Cubans emigrate (and who wouldn’t be tempted by a professional league that pays an average of FIVE million dollars a year?) they are news, and when they don’t emigrate, La Repubblica writes that there is an exodus even without naming names.
During the Pan-American Games in Indianapolis in 1987, three Cuban players left their team and asked for political asylum in the United States. It was a world event, with hundreds of articles published about it. That same day, the Dominican Republic’s entire team (35 players) did the same, and scattered in order to not return to the miserable conditions under which they were living and under which they live in that country. And yet this news came to the attention of very few people, since it was completely ignored by the world press. The 35 Dominicans remained with the 3 Cubans, but the only ones to make the news were the three Cubans. Then, under the cover of silence-while the three Cubans were being given political asylum and awarded million-dollar contracts-the 35 Dominican nationals were forcedly apprehended, loaded onto an airplane, flown to the Dominican Republic, and unloaded there like so much ordure.
To hold, as Ciai does, that the Cuban government may want to curtail the spread of baseball is neither true in Heaven nor on Earth. Or else, he should cite concrete facts! He had an entire page, 800,000 copies of which were printed in Italy’s second largest newspaper and he doesn’t cite one. Faced with the exclusion of baseball from the Olympics-wanted by the United States-Cuba has fought with all its strength (even in order to defend, be it said, an almost sure gold medal). And it continues to fight to this day to bring baseball back to the Olympic Games. In the meantime, the country’s 35 best players are competing to win the 2006 World Baseball Classic (the First Classic, as translated in Spanish, a terrible oxymoron) in the US’s home court. And they are, as always, the favorites. Why would “Castro’s terrible dictatorship” ever give up such a formidable source of national consensus?
The truth is that next to the Latin American sports disaster-it is an event if an Ecuadorian runner or a Mexican cyclist win a gold medal for an entire continent-Cuba is the positive exception, whatever La Repubblica’s ravings. Baseball is Cuba’s national sport. As was said, these days the entire island is cheering Cuba’s participation at the 2006 World Baseball Classic in progress between the United States and Puerto Rico. To think of depriving Cubans of baseball would be the same as depriving the Italians of football’s series A or putting the World Cup on pay per view.
During the last decades, Cuba has triumphed in most world championships, intercontinental cups and baseball Olympics, beating or almost always beating the United States, who in fact have actively sought to eliminate baseball from the Olympic Games. But no one talks about this at the Old Havana bar in Miami where Omero Ciai is a regular.
Gennaro Carotenuto is a contributor to the Uruguayan weekly Brecha and a visiting professor at the University of the Republic in Uruguay. He is a member of the Italian Order of Journalists, and a professor of Contemporary History and Latin American History at the University of Macerata in Italy. He has also logged over 600 hours of baseball commentary on Italian radio.
Translated from the Italian by Flávio Américo dos Reis