Big leagues struck out in early secret bid for games in Cuba

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer

Major League Baseball wanted to play in Cuba. In late March. U.S. officials argued that the game would ``help break the ice in relations with Cuba, even though Havana was showing no moderation.

Sound like the run-up to today's Baltimore Orioles' game in Havana?

Wrong. It happened 24 years ago, when baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn waged a secret six-month campaign to push Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to allow a U.S. all-star team to play in Havana.

``Baseball diplomacy is not a new idea, but . . . it is an idea whose time has finally come, Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, wrote Thursday of the archive's discovery of 18 letters and declassified State Department memos detailing the campaign. The archive, a foreign policy research institution based at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., posted the documents on its Web site, www.seas.gwu.edu/ns
archive

The documents show that Kissinger eventually rejected Kuhn's bid despite strong support from Assistant Secretary of State William D. Rogers, then carrying out a series of secret negotiations with Cuban officials on behalf of Kissinger.

Rogers, still an influential voice in foreign policy debates, was more recently a key backer of a proposal for a bipartisan commission to review U.S. policies on Cuba, perceived as a veiled attempt to lift the U.S. embargo on the island.

State Department officials reject any parallel between the game today -- with a return match scheduled in Baltimore on May 3 -- and the matches proposed by Kuhn in 1975.

U.S. view of the games

While the 18 documents show an intent to use baseball to ``bridge the gap in U.S.-Cuban relations, Washington now insists, at least in public, that the Orioles games are designed to increase contacts with the Cuban people while continuing to isolate President Fidel Castro and his government.

``It would really be a major misconception to call this baseball diplomacy, a senior Clinton administration official told reporters Thursday. ``It's people-to-people contacts, pretty simply.''

The 18 documents and the current controversy over the Orioles' trip to Cuba show how little has changed in relations between Washington and Havana since 1975, despite the end of the Cold War.

Kuhn opened his campaign with a note to Kissinger on Jan. 14, 1975, reporting that Preston Gomez, Cuban-born manager of Houston's major league team, had met in Havana with Cuban sports officials who had ``indicated a strong interest in a U.S. team playing a Cuban squad on March 28-30 of that year.

Rogers weighed in four days later with a memo to Kissinger mentioning Kuhn's proposal and noting that the commissioner was ``a former client of mine. Rogers was a Washington lawyer before joining the State Department.

Baseball's `magic value'

Rogers later notified Kissinger that Kuhn had proposed a game for March 29, to be broadcast on U.S. television, and was advocating Major League Baseball's ``magic value in projecting a positive image of the U.S.

But Rogers added a caution: ``As to Cuba, I am frank to say that I have seen nothing on the Cuban side so far which could be taken as a move to which the baseball trip might be considered a responsive gesture.

On Feb. 14, 1975, Kissinger's staff sent Rogers a note: ``The secretary said he is against proposal to send a baseball team to Cuba at this time, but would like to hear reasons for it.

Just four days later, Rogers and Culver Gleysteen of the State Department's Cuba Desk sent the secretary a two-page memo with a detailed list of arguments for the baseball game:

The game ``would undercut the demonology in Cuban propaganda about the U.S., it said, and ``serve [to bridge] . . . the gap between the Bay of Pigs and a new relationship with Castro.

This isn't ping-pong

Kissinger's approval of ping-pong diplomacy -- permitting an American table tennis team to play in China in 1971 -- had been ``accepted by the U.S. public as a good way to break the ice between countries separated by decades of hostility, the memo added. And Cuban exiles would ``find it difficult . . . to take issue despite their general uneasiness about any change in U.S.-Cuban relations.

Rogers wrote Kissinger on Feb. 24 that he had ``called off the baseball game and that Kuhn had realized there were ``problems somewhat larger than baseball.

But the commissioner launched a second campaign May 13, proposing that Kissinger give him permission to announce that a U.S. baseball team would play in Cuba the next spring, in 1976.

Rogers went to bat for the new Kuhn proposal, writing Kissinger on June 21 that Cuba had by then returned the $2 million ransom paid to a hijacker who had commandeered a Southern Airways jetliner to Cuba.

``A baseball visit might be a tidy and apolitical gesture of response, Rogers wrote. He added that Kissinger could give Kuhn the go-ahead to announce the 1976 games or to continue working quietly on the details with Cuban officials and await later approval from Kissinger.

Kissinger's handwritten note on the margin of the delay option reads: ``This is the option I like.

Four months later, Castro sent 18,000 troops to Angola to support the Marxist side in a bloody civil war. Kissinger ordered Rogers to stop his secret meetings with Cuban officials.