Jumping for the Goldby S.L. Price
In the city of fast bucks, where you can't walk three steps without getting hustled and people rent homes to strangers and the tourist is king, they are thinking Olympics today. We speak, of course, about Havana, which may be the one place in the Western Hemisphere that can match Atlanta in its rabid worship of the Yankee dollar and is certainly one of the few now mulling the fate of Cuban athletes. Who will be the next to defect? How will they go? Over the fence? Off the victory stand? Now? When?
Recent Cuban defections fuel speculation of more to come
Garbey (left) and Casamayor hit Cuba with a one-two combination.
photograph by
This is no shocker. Cuban athletes have been hopping the fence en masse for five years now, and it was always expected that a month in America would only encourage more. But the Olympic-eve defections of top boxers Ramon Garbey and Joel Casamayor and of the baseball team's best pitcher, Rolando Arrojo, have sent the usual speculation into overdrive. There are hints that the mighty Cuban sports machine is shuddering under the strain, and rumors now fly about superstars like third baseman Omar Linares, high jumper Javier Sotomayor and heavyweight Félix Savón. The pitcher with the best winning percentage in Cuban League history, Orlando (Duke) Hernandez, was left off the Olympic team, and many will tell you it was because the regime feared he would follow his half brother Livan and never come home.
"It's not true," says onetime Olympic hero Alberto Juantorena, now vice president of the Cuban Olympic committee. "Another pitcher was better than him. Many whispers, many stories, many bad news about my country that give the public a bad picture. Why all the time chasing the Cuban delegation, all the time trying to buy athletes, all the time under pressure ... why?"
This is a different Juantorena than the one many Americans may remember. At the 1976 Montreal Olympics he won gold medals in the 400 and 800 meters, and he has ever since served as the proud face of a defiant Cuba, disdainful of his countrymen who leave and gleeful in his condemnation of them. "Bad potatoes!" he would shout. "Out of the sack! Pigeons ... who fly awaaaay!" But on Wednesday, sitting in the cavernous lobby of Atlanta's Downtown Hyatt, Juantorena seemed sapped of his usual fire, more subdued and almost whiny, as if he knew that no amount of rhetoric could whitewash the latest embarrassment. "We aren't concerned about this," he says. "We don't care about people who defect. We focus our concern on people who really have a chance to win here, people who love their country, people they can't buy: Savón, Linares, Sotomayor ... there are many. They don't have the money to buy those athletes."
But Juantorena knows: They do have the money. Agents like Miami-based Joe Cubas—who in the past year has lured five players from the once-untouchable baseball program—can now point to huge contracts signed by Livan Hernandez ($6 million over four years with the Florida Marlins) and Osvaldo Fernandez ($3.2 million over three years with the San Francisco Giants) as proof of what awaits anyone with the guts to go. And the fact is, Havana today is more like Atlanta than like the old Moscow: Aside from the ever-dwindling pack of true believers, the typical Habanero is far more worried about making a buck than making revolution. The typical athlete? The older generation is like Duke Hernandez, who, nearing the end of his career, waited last winter, disgusted, for the car his government had been promising for years. "I can't believe it either," Hernandez said at the time. "They keep saying it and saying it, but it never comes."
And the younger generation, such as pitching phenom Omar Luis and triple jumper Yoelbi Quesada, has come of age when Cuban athletes and coaches earn money in Europe and Japan, and defection is more an option than a sin. Fidel Castro may call Arrojo a "Judas" who sold out his country "for 12 gold coins," but most Cubans now would like a piece of that action. Even the regime itself has encouraged small steps toward a market economy. That is one reason security around the team has eased in recent years and why you keep reading stories about a player walking unnoticed out of his hotel. That is why the defections will keep happening and the regime will do little to stop them. The regime figures, better to spit out poison than let it corrode your insides. The regime will tell you: Even with Cuba's best and brightest forsaking all they know to get out, the revolution remains strong.
"If not?" Juantorena says. He shrugs. "We disappear."
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