WH blocks agreement to let Cuban baseball players come to US.
Last week, Cuba’s baseball league said 34 players eligible for US teams—meaning about $2.5M paid to Cuban baseball in release fees.
WH doesn’t want Cuban govt to profit off America’s pastime.https://t.co/0w9yyU14et
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) April 8, 2019
Every day is a new opportunity to fuck something up. To make something worse for vulnerable people out of spite and habit. To be GREAT. https://t.co/7DsOLp99VN
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) April 9, 2019
Rich sportsball team owners & other creeps, not to mention being racist, Trump loves. Brown people (however gifted) from ‘Mexican’ countries, not so much. I didn’t know the backstory here, which is why I am gratful to Dave Roth at Deadspin:
For decades, every Cuban-born player in Major League Baseball arrived in the United States only at the end of a long and dangerous extralegal process. That process was, by its nature, run exclusively by and mostly for the benefit of an international collection of creeps, from violent criminal gangs to lawyers who knew what questions not to ask. All of which is a strange thing to remember when, say, watching José Abreu line an unremarkable two-out single to right—that man had to eat a fake Haitian passport on a flight to the United States. Yasiel Puig was held hostage at a dingy hotel in Mexico by smugglers while they attempted to sell him to the highest bidder, and then he was kidnapped from those smugglers by other criminals, and then some time later he was traded by the Dodgers to the Reds in an offseason salary dump to create room for the Dodgers to sign A.J. Pollock. Even as these players slip over time into the background noise of baseball, the fact of all this is there. “There is only one way for a Cuban player to get to the U.S.” a lawyer for one of the men who smuggled Abreu out of Cuba said in 2017. “They have to escape.”
It’s just one of those fucked-up things. A deal made last year between Major League Baseball and the Cuban Baseball Federation that would allow Cuban players to come to the United States without first escaping from the island and formally defecting was designed to address it. On Monday, the Trump State Department rejected it.
Business is business, and so there was a great deal of sketchy shit inherent even in the deal between MLB and FCB that sought to drag this scuzzy process aboveboard. But where the men who smuggled Abreu into the United States wanted 25 percent of his future earnings, the deal between MLB and FCB simply worked out a two-tiered system for Cuban players that was modeled on the posting system that MLB has with Japan’s NPB. Many of the immigration-related hoops that slowed the process down in the past were still in effect, but the sinister shit had been mitigated—Cuban players would still have to apply for U.S. work visas from a third foreign country, but they would no longer require the services of gangsters and smugglers to get there. FCB teams would receive a fee from MLB teams for the players they sold to the Majors, and Cuban nationals would pay Cuban income taxes on their MLB earnings. They would also, crucially, be able to return to their home country…
Anyway, all of this was subject to State Department approval, and on Monday—days after the FCB released a list of 34 young players that would be allowed to sign with MLB teams—the Trump State Department announced that it did not approve of the deal. This was always a possibility, both because of specific longstanding conservative grievances with Cuba—Florida Senator Marco Rubio called the deal “both illegal and immoral” after it was announced—and because of the general atavistic grievance and hostility that defines the current administration. The stated issues with the deal were amorphous …
As has been said before: With Trump and his administration, the cruelty is the point. Play ball!
cmorenc
Trump, Pompeo & Bolton are doing everything they can for a do-over of every part of US post-World War 2 history where the US has built alliances with Europe and succeeded in backing the world away from another global (potentially nuclear) conflict or else transformed toward peaceful normalization. Trump doesn’t believe in cooperation, only in bullying, which is difficult to pull off when the rest of the world correctly views him as a narcissistic ass-clown who is impulsive, easily manipulated, and who never bothers to do his homework on anything.
Trump’s Cuba baseball tantrum also has a lot to do with Trump still seeking petty revenge on Obama for perceived insults in 2013 by trying to undo everything Obama accomplished, irrespective of merit or benefit to the U.S., but another part of it is wanting to undo cooperative relationships in favor of bullying.
Ruckus
Decades old bullshit that doesn’t benefit anyone still reins supreme in this country/world.
Along with profiteering from the misery.
randy khan
The deal that MLB and the Players Association reached with the Cuban baseball federation was objectively good. The Deadspin article only scratches the surface of what players have gone through to get out of Cuba and play in America. And Rubio’s objection to the players paying income taxes is bizarre.
Anonymous At Work
This weekend, Puig tried to fight the entire Pirates team, plus coaches. I think a small Secret Service detail and history’s most cowardly President do not intimidate him. Yet another reason President Trump will never attend a sporting event.
JCJ
I read about this last night. I thought it made no sense to do something like this. Thank you for the explanation.
tokyokie
Yet Il Douche will still react angrily when this year’s World Series champs decline the invitation to eat crappy fast food at the White House.
The U.S. economic embargo of Cuba is possibly the stupidest U.S. foreign-policy initiative ever. Other Western countries didn’t join it, so Cuba could still carry on trade. A half-century of sanctions and in the end, it wasn’t U.S. economic measures that drove Fidel Castro from office, it was cancer.
Brachiator
Trump is really feeling full of himself
This nails it. Trump loves to be cruel.
The thing is, I don’t think that Trump is doing this to “appeal to his base.” Nobody gives a shit whether we let Cuban baseball players come to the US. I don’t think that this is even a big deal for Cubans in Florida, at least not more than a half dozen people.
But Trump is obsessed with this image of Fortress America, and with designating in capital letters who does and who does not belong.
He is sick in the head. And the sad thing is that the GOP leadership meekly go along with this. And his supporters eat it up in retrospect.
ETA: I hear Trump wants to slap some more tariffs on EU nations. He wants to fuck with the already fucked up mess of BREXIT, as well as stick it to the EU. He also probably hates the fact that Germany’s leader Merkel respects Obama.
Barbara
@Anonymous At Work: Knowing Puig’s background makes me understand that brawl a lot better. Having represented asylum applicants I can tell you that they are some of the gutsiest people I have ever met.
(((CassandraLeo)))
At some point, if Dump [spit] keeps up this performative cruelty, the Republican Party [spit] will no longer be able to count on the votes of Cuban-Americans. They’ve already lost much of the younger generation.
Mart
@Anonymous At Work: Puig is another one of those violent thugs from a shit hole country, we are full and have no room for his ilk. (I kid)
rikyrah
Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) Tweeted:
In all seriousness, I know it’s fun to joke about Candace Owens, but her being given a platform to speak on the same level as @KristenClarkeJD at the hate crimes hearing is a mockery and disrespectful of the very real violence black Americans have always faced in this country. https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1115753919639162885?s=17
Roger Moore
@(((CassandraLeo))):
I think the performative cruelty is the only thing that’s letting them hold on to the older generation of Cuban-Americans. They still seem to think the communist regime is on the brink of collapse, and just one more push will finish it off.
trollhattan
Our acting president.
Mike in NC
Fat Bastard hates Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. Yet most of them speak better English than he does.
He took great pleasure in refusing to let Sean Spicer meet the Pope.
Kent
So what is preventing the average Cuban baseball star from just hopping on a plane to anywhere else to play baseball? Like say Mexico where there is a vibrant professional league?
Is it the Cuban government that keeps them trapped there? Or the US government that forces them to deal with these human smuggling operations? I tend to think this is more on the Cubans. Because baseball players from every other Latin American country from Mexico to the Dominican Republic to Venezuela don’t seem to have difficulty signing major league contracts.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Roger Moore: That may well true for the oldest ones, but it also depends whether they know anyone affected by policies like this. Republicans [spit] are broadly OK with performative cruelty as long as it doesn’t affect anyone they know, particularly family members and the like. Then it’s all the same old sob story about leopards eating faces. The more policies they enact like this, the greater the chance that their policies alienate people.
However, even if they’re successful in the short term, these policies will also solidify a gap in politics, because younger Cuban-Americans are not OK with policies like this. Far fewer of them have firsthand memories of Castro, and the ones that do don’t have firsthand memories of the time when he was backed up by the Soviet Union. I’m not trying to defend Castro, exactly, but he was sort of Castro Lite in his old age. He seems to have softened up a bit. A lot of the younger Cuban-Americans want detente. Not all of them, but enough that at some point strategies like this are going to stop being successful for the Republican Party [spit].
It should also be noted that there are different enclaves of Cuban-Americans, and even disregarding the generation gap, they have somewhat different views on policies like this. It’s been awhile since I looked at polling, but IIRC the Miami-Dade area Cuban expats were a lot more heavily Republican-leaning [spit] than the Tampa/St. Pete area Cuban expats, despite the latter area being overwhelmingly Democratic overall. This seems to have held true across generations, though in all cases the younger Cuban-Americans were more Democratic-leaning. It’s been awhile since I looked at polling, though.