WHEN THE first batter from Cuba's all-star team steps to the plate tomorrow at Camden Yards, thousands of baseball fans in the stadium and watching on television will be treated to a unique example of sports diplomacy -- and a new inning in the long and acrimonious history of United States-Cuban relations.
On the level playing field of the baseball diamond, there will be no hint of decades of U.S. efforts to invade Cuba, to assassinate Fidel Castro and to overthrow his government. There will be no evidence of Cuba's long-past practice of supporting revolution against U.S.-backed governments in the Third World. Instead, the talents and professional conduct of players from two very different nations will be on display. If the first game, played in Havana on March 28 is any indication, this rematch will thrill baseball fans on both sides of the Florida straits.
The U.S and Cuban governments are playing down the political significance of this competition. But in the 40 years since the advent of Fidel Castro's revolution -- years dominated by U.S. hostility and aggression -- every gesture and every event has reverberated politically in U.S.-Cuban ties. Baseball, despite its nonpolitical nature, will be no exception.
When the Baltimore Orioles traveled to Havana last month, I was fortunate enough to go along to witness the historic international matchup. The connection the team made with the Cuban people was evident before the game began. When Brady Anderson deliberately fouled off the pitches from the 80-something-year-old former baseball great who threw out the first ball, (instead of whacking it over the fence) he instantly endeared the Orioles' to the Cuban nation. Baseball "provides a cultural common denominator," said Richard Shaeffer, a Baltimore sports agent who along with Washington journalist Scott Armstrong first broached the idea of going to Cuba to the Orioles management in 1995. For Armstrong, the cultural exchange on the playing field represented "people-to-people diplomacy" at its best.
Anderson, Charles Johnson, Albert Belle and the other players weren't the only baseball diplomats. Armstrong and Shaeffer negotiated and agreement with the U.S. State Department and the Cuban government to bring a planeload of kids from the Baltimore-Washington area. They played several pickup games with Cuban youngsters and as a gesture of goodwill gave away most of their mitts and other equipment.
"When we arrived, Cubans greeted us with hugs and high fives," Anthony Brown, one of the youngsters, wrote in his travel journal. A teammate, Anthony Taylor, reported that, "I gave them the same respect they showed me."
As a precondition for allowing the youngsters and their chairpersons to go to Havana, the State Department provided a "briefing book" on U.S.-Cuban relations. The white binder contained articles and official statements on Castro's crackdown against dissidents, as well as a "Chronology of Cuban Affairs."
But the chronology conveniently omitted the most egregious U.S. acts against Cuba over the years: the CIA's efforts to assassinate Castro between 1960 and 1965. Nor did it contain any reference to the extensive destabilization program known as Operation Mongoose -- in 1962, the largest and most expensive covert operation ever mounted by the U.S. government against another nation.
These acts of aggression set the tone for four decades of U.S. hostility toward Cuba. Even after the Soviet Union's collapse and the Cold War's end, the United States remains stuck in the past, unable to break the grip of a strong, if small, anti-Castro lobby in a key electoral state, Florida. The result is that the United States has maintained a punitive policy of isolating Cuba, through trade embargoes and diplomatic pressure, as the rest of the world has pragmatically established normal relations with Castro's government. In the end, our policy has done more to isolate ourselves than the Cubans.
For its part, the Cuban government wants to be treated as a sovereign nation. Yes, it is a repressive communist government -- but the United States has had normal, albeit difficult, relations with many such nations. If Washington can work out a modus vivendi with Vietnam the United States can certainly normalize relations with a neighbor 90 miles away, many Cubans believe.
Over the past 18 months, the status quo in U.S.-Cuba policy has begun to slip. The January 1998 visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba, during which he urged the United States to "change, change" its punitive posture, dramatically bolstered the concept of a dialogue with Castro.
The emergence of a business lobby, Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba, led by big name corporate players such as David Rockefeller and Paul A. Volcker, brought a powerful new set of voices into the debate.
Last spring, the U.S. military released a long-awaited report that specifically declared that Cuba posed no national security threat to American interests, eliminating the justification for the U.S. embargo. And last fall, 24 Republican senators, led by John W. Warner of Virginia, and three former secretaries of state, Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, urged President Clinton to set up a blue-ribbon commission on Cuba to re-evaluate the U.S. embargo under current world circumstances.
Clinton rejected the request, fearing it would open a political Pandora's box for Al Gore as the 2000 election campaign gets under way. But Jan. 5, he did announce some small, unilateral changes in U.S. policy, including allowing the sale of agricultural goods to select Cuban farmers. To mollify the growing constituency for a change in Cuba policy, Clinton finally gave the Orioles the green light to play the Cubans, after delaying their request for three years.
That is the political context in which the teams take to the field tomorrow.
Baseball diplomacy is not a new idea; almost 25 years ago, Bowie Kuhn, then-commissioner of baseball, proposed bringing major league players to Havana. At the time, aides to Secretary of State Kissinger argued in top-secret memorandums that baseball could be to Cuba what pingpong had been to China -- "a good way to break the ice between countries separated by decades of hostility," and a way to "bridge the gap between the Bay of Pigs and a new relationship with Castro."
But Kissinger vetoed the idea precisely because, as one memo stated, "the story would go beyond the sports pages" and be seen as a significant U.S. gesture toward more normal ties.
Despite fears of the die-hard anti-Castro lobby, the Clinton administration is not planning to normalize bilateral relations. But some White House officials understand that the exhibition games provide a high profile, politically neutral vehicle to take the stagnant policy debate over Cuba beyond the Beltway -- that the people-to-people publicity of baseball diplomacy can generate a broader constituency for relaxing the long-standing U.S. approach of trying to destabilize Castro's government through punitive economic and diplomatic pressure. A policy of constructive engagement toward Cuba, they believe, will do far more to advance U.S. national interests in a stable, peaceful Caribbean than the outdated Cold War policy of destructive isolation.
The games are having an impact, in Congress and on future sports exchanges with Cuba.
Rep. Jose E. Serrano, a New York Democrat, has introduced the Baseball Diplomacy Act which would provide special visas to Cuban ball players to play in the U.S. major leagues without having to defect from their homeland. Several bills are pending that would lift the 35-year-old embargo on the sale of food and medicine to Cuba, a prohibition that only hurts the Cuban people.
Faced with the absurdity of prohibiting U.S. citizens to travel freely to a country with which we are at peace, the Treasury Department is preparing to ease restrictions that prevent most Americans from experiencing Cuba's reality for themselves. The travel ban, said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who attended the first Orioles-Cuba game in Havana, "is beneath the dignity of a great nation."
Leahy plans to continue the people-to-people diplomacy by sending a case of Ben and Jerry's ice cream to Havana -- if he can obtain an exemption to the trade embargo from the Treasury Department.
And teams are lining up to become the sports diplomats of the future. The Harlem Globetrotters have applied for a license to spend a week touring through Cuba, conducting basketball clinics and exhibition games. The Anaheim Angels, owned by the Disney Co., have announced that they want to play in Havana during spring training next year. Other major league clubs are sure to follow as ambassadors of goodwill in an environment of decreasing tensions.
Slowly but surely, the professional interaction in the sports arenas will influence the arena of U.S.-Cuba policy. When the two teams take to the field tomorrow, it will be clear, in Scott Armstrong's words, "that these are two peoples that can get along. Why not let them?"
Peter Kornbluh writes frequently on U.S.-Cuban relations. He is editor of "Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba" (The New Press: 1998).