May 3, 1999
By David Morgan
BALTIMORE (Reuters) - Hundreds of anti-Castro Cuban Americans crammed the sidewalks outside Camden Yards stadium on Monday to pour loud condemnation on a second round of ``baseball diplomacy'' between Cuba's all-stars and the Baltimore Orioles.
``The game that will be played inside will give a vision to the world that everything in Cuba is fine,'' U.S. Rep. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, told the crowd from the back of a vintage Chevy pickup truck.
``You give testimony to the reality of Castro's brutal dictatorship,'' he said as a gray spring sky drizzled rain.
Only a few hundred yards away, a 25-man Cuban National Team sought revenge for a 3-2 loss to the American League Orioles on March 28 at Havana's Latin American Stadium.
The unprecedented series is aimed at putting a human face on U.S.-Cuban relations, which have been marred by mutual political hostility and a punishing U.S. economic embargo since the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.
But anti-Castro activists fear the game will lead to a normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations that would leave the Communist leader in power.
Menendez and U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican led about 500 demonstrators including many who converged on Baltimore from New Jersey, Florida.
The boisterous crowd blew horns, sounded sirens, chanted slogans such as ``No Castro; No Problem'' and ``Human rights for Cuba,'' and blamed the island's Communist government for holding hundreds of political prisoners and letting an untold number freedom-seekers die in the Florida Straits.
Diaz-Balart also bemoaned Cuba's lack of independent political parties, labor unions, a free press and free elections.
``Why does the rest of the world deserve them and not the Cuban people?'' he said.
A smaller and far more sedate crowd of demonstrators opposed to the U.S. economic embargo stood a block away, wearing red baseball caps and carrying white placards.
A banner that pictured a meeting between Castro and the late civil rights leader Malcolm X called for ``jobs and justice.''
``The embargo is a crime, and a violation of the human rights of Cubans who need food and medicine,'' said Dr. Oscar Perez Mesa, a New Yorker who left Cuba in 1956.
Fearing the possibility of mass arrests, the city ordered more 100 police officers with nightsticks to form a barrier between the anti-Castro protesters and passing baseball fans. Mounted police also stood by in case of trouble.
However, many of the most vocal protesters who avowed hatred for Castro also admitted loyalty to the Cuban squad.
``I am a Cuban and I have a lot of pride in my nationality,'' said Ruth Montaner. ``But I suffer for the players, who have no freedom and no liberty.''
``My blood calls me. We are not against the players. They are our brothers,'' added 68-year-old Miguel Boluda, who held a sign denouncing Castro's Cuba as the ``Gulag of the Caribbean''.
21:56 05-03-99
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited
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