Cuban team elicits mix of pride politics

Posted on Sat, Mar. 18, 2006

BASEBALL
Cuban team elicits mix of pride, politics

Interest in the World Baseball Classic dissolved from a starting point
of marginal to negligible across most of America when the home team --
the one from the country that invented the sport -- was embarrassingly
knocked from the tournament.

South Florida is not most of America, as if you didn't know.

Many of us here remain passionately, viscerally interested as the
semifinal round plays out today, because Cuba remains alive. More
accurately: because Fidel Castro is but two victories from a galvanizing
triumph that would be seen as his island's equivalent of the 1980 U.S.
hockey miracle, and would be exploited as a propaganda coup.

Intense, often differing emotions can be found under the same roofs,
within families, as what it means and how it feels to be Cuban are
tested anew. Is one at odds to love his or her homeland while loathing
its dictator? Can one feel pride in the Cuban ballplayers even knowing
their success is Castro's great font of joy?

Those of us who are not Cuban can find it too easy sometimes to separate
the sport from the politics here, as if the line were visible. As if
hearts were not involved.

Across much of South Florida, emotion is invested. There is no choice.
How to feel about the Cuban team can be clear and intractable or open to
debate, sometimes across the same dinner table.

To Delia Pena of North Bay Village, the Cuban team and Castro could not
be more inseparable if Fidel himself were managing and fouling the
dugout with his cigar.

''I'm not cheering,'' she says. ``I've been here over 40 years. I left
Cuba when Cuba was Cuba. Anything exported out of Cuba, Castro is
behind. Anything that makes him happy, I'm just against.

``You know how Castro feels about the baseball. I do not sympathize with
his idea or anything he's in favor of. The players are pawns. I feel
very sorry for the players, and I could wish them to win as a team --
but not representing the Castro Cuba.''

That's old-school, and likely the majority opinion among South Florida
Cuban Americans. Those are emotions of a mind-set experienced, not
gathered in the recollections of others. Those are hearts that cheered
when a protester at one Cuban game held up a sign that read, Abajo Fidel
(Down With Fidel).

Yet there is debate even within the señora's family.

Her son, Jorge Pena, 43, of Miami Shores, an attorney, says his father
is staunchly anti-Castro, too.

Yet, Pena says, ``I am convinced he would express a cheer for Cuba if
they did well. I don't think he would want to say what he truly feels.''

Jorge Pena and his wife, Jennifer, are raising their two children ''to
know Fidel is a bad guy and to know it early, that he is a murderer, a
subjugator.'' Yet his 12-year-old son, a huge baseball fan, asked if his
father was cheering for Cuba, assuming he was, while his daughter
Jackie, 9, assumed he was not.

(The boy, Nicholas, was rooting for the United States team first but
Cuba second. For an American boy of Cuban lineage, that must have seemed
natural. Who knew baseball could get so complicated?)

Jorge Pena, born in the United States, is not old- school. He respects
his mother's vehemence but is able, in effect, to step out of his own
skin and see the situation dispassionately.

''A baseball game for me is truly just a baseball game. If they win, to
me, it is not going to be a political statement; all it will mean is
that they were a better team,'' he says.

``I don't look at it as a gesture for Castro. I can separate the two. It
is easy to be proud of the Cuban baseball players because of my
heritage. We all hate Fidel, but there is a lot of pride in the country
of our parents. I can't help but express that even though I have never
stepped foot in Cuba.''

He smiled.

''What I'm cheering for most is a defection,'' he said. ``That would be
the true political statement!''

Pena said he thinks he will root for the Dominican Republic to beat Cuba
today, ''out of familiarity with the [Dominican's major-league]
players,'' and because, ``maybe that would bother Castro more. The
Dominican is so close to him geographically.''

But he thinks ''maybe part of me would be rooting for Cuba'' in a
championship game against Japan or South Korea.

One imagines such feelings mixing across South Florida, where a
consensus of unequivocally despising Castro may not preclude rooting for
the Cuban baseball team from being a guilty pleasure for some, perhaps
even a small secret not shared.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/sports/14127770.htm