Ed Vulliamy Baseball
Before he pitched his first ball from the mound at Yankee Stadium earlier this month, Orlando Hernandez paused and looked around at the crowd with an expression that mixed disbelief, joy, awe and a little pain.
It was the end of a rainbow, and of a six- month journey, for the Cuban. His nickname in his homeland was El Duque (the Duke) but last December he was earning $9 (R50) a month as a psychiatric nurse, banned by the Castro regime from ever playing again. So he embarked on a perilous voyage by sea to the Bahamas, and was then tossed ashore and between governments while he festered in a deportee camp.
To complete the irony, the reason for the regimes ban on Orlando was that his brother Livan had moved to the United States three years earlier. And last year, only 256km from Havana, Livan Hernandez had won the World Series Most Valuable Player award playing for the Florida Marlins. But, said Livan, his brother was 10 times better than I am.
So this was one end of the rainbow: a $6,6- million (R36-million) deal for Orlando with the Yankees, the team he had supported as a boy but had never expected to see, let alone play for.
But at the other end of the rainbow, in the shadows, are three more Cuban baseball stars and a leading coach, dispatched by the Bahamian government last month back to the native land they too had fled, along with 61 of their compatriots. They had taken to the sea after leaving their families and spending five days and nights hiding in tunnels built by Fidel Castro as defences against US bombing. While Orlando Hernandez steps up to the mound, they are home, convinced they face persecution and a lifelong ban.
Baseball migration across the Straits of Florida has become the stuff of high politics. It is a migration between the country that boasts the worlds best amateur team to that in which baseball stars are multi-millionaires; between rotting but defiant Marxism and the seductive temple of capitalism. Baseball is now the currency of the last throes of the Cold War.
Accusations are levelled that the US is playing dirty: waiving its treaty with Havana whereby it agrees to return boat- people, instead accepting those who show promise for the major leagues. And behind the baseball defections is a hidden hand. This hand received Livan Hernandez when he arrived in Florida via the Dominican Republic and Mexico in 1995, and negotiated his contract with the Marlins. Now it has organised Livan Hernandezs brothers deal with the Yankees.
Likewise when the four now- repatriated stars arrived in the Bahamas last month, the hand was there, dealing through the fence of the detention camp: the hand of Joe Cubas, El Gordo as they say in Cuba Fatty.
Hes made himself to Cuban baseball what Don King is to the fight game, says Bill Clark, chief scout for the Atlanta Braves. Self-appointed commissioner and God all rolled into one.
Son of emigr Cuban parents, Cubas was a Miami-born construction merchant motivated by two things: a love of baseball and a hatred of communism. Then the defection of Cubas superstar pitcher Rene Arocha gave him the idea of combining both into a healthy business.
Cubas turned sports agent in 1992 and has since shown the way to 17 of the 30 or so players who have fled Cuba to grace the US major leagues. He struck gold at the Atlanta Olympics when the Cuba baseball team began their tournament with an exhibition game in South Carolina against the United States, winning four runs to two. Rick Lawes, who covers baseball for USA Today, recalls, as the sun went down, [Cubass] silhouette creeping across the diamond literally a shadowy figure.
Cubas joked that he would need a Greyhound bus to transport all the would-be defectors. His own car proved sufficient: days before the games, he whisked the star pitcher Rolando Arrojo into his Mercedes under the noses of the players minders. Four more followed.
Last Christmas the defection of Orlando Hernandez was an international drama. The pitcher, his wife and six other Cubans were washed up on an island off the Bahamas, having lived off raw conch for five days, and were then interned behind razor-wire.
The US immediately offered humanitarian parole to Hernandez, his wife and another man only. Hernandez said he would not accept without his co-travellers. Cubas moved in, and secured asylum in Costa Rica for all of them.
The move appeared exemplary. But there was another motive: by taking asylum in a third country, Hernandez was able to be represented as a professional free agent, open to offers of millions and an automatic right to work in the US. Had he gone straight to the US, he and Cubas would have been subject to strict laws governing the amateur draft, attached to one club, and to tight immigration laws, with dire financial consequences.
On the day Hernandez arrived in Miami to begin training with the club that eventually secured him, the Yankees, word reached the Cuban capital-in-exile that four more players had been washed up in the Caribbean. Cubas was clearly expecting them.
The report proved half-true. On a spit of land in the Bahamas the catcher Angel Lopez, second baseman Jorge Diaz, first baseman Jorge Toca, the national teams teenage short-stop Maykel Jova and a pitching coach, Orlando Chinea, had been rescued by fishermen. Their journey had been an odyssey.
Toca had married a Japanese, and Chinea had been banned from coaching after he went to collect the bride from Havana airport. The older players had been banned in a previous purge, the teenager soon afterwards.
In March, bidding their families goodbye, they set out in a rental car, carrying only a few photographs and a Bible. They headed for the eastern Cuban shore, where they heard broadcasts claiming they had been wrecked at sea. In fact they were hiding in a safe-house in the town of Holguin and later in the bomb shelters, in 10cm of water.
My heart was aching, said Chinea, I wanted to call my wife and tell her I was safe. But I couldnt; we had to maintain our silence.
They were at sea 10 days; two men became delirious. Their boat then capsized and they were picked up by fishermen, who took them to Ragged Island, off the Bahamas, where they were detained.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the rainbow, Hernandez was in wonderful form against Tampa last week: mentally tough, with Zen- like command over his pitches, moving them in and out, up and down.
He has his own hallmark ball: a slurve, theyre calling it, part curveball, part slider. His documents say he is 32, he insists he is only 28 and the Yankees fans dont give a damn.
ENDS