July 30, 1999

James Christie, The Globe and Mail
Friday, July 30, 1999

Winnipeg -- There's an inherent problem in being an island nation. Both the geography and the thinking are insular.

When the head of the Cuban delegation for the Pan American Games stepped to a microphone yesterday to make his gripes about the problems that had beset his team, he had plenty of eager listeners among the reporters of the 42 Western Hemisphere nations at the Games. Some were even prepared to listen sympathetically.

By the time Jose Ramon Fernandez had finished his hard-line rant, he'd lost just about everybody.

A frontline Cold Warrior for Fidel Castro's Communist regime and head of sports for the past 24 years, Fernandez had the nerve to act surprised that agents of evil -- alias baseball agents -- wave contracts in an effort to lure Cubans to play in North America.

He railed about a tabloid paper printing a contest ballot that invites readers to guess the number of defectors. First prize, a trip to Cuba.

He complained that other countries were stealing Cuba's human natural resources.

"I can tell you our athletes are the product of the government of the people," he said.

They're not people in their own right, you'll notice in his carefully, dogmatic rhetoric -- but products. He went on about how the government invests in physical-education programs, how it develops the talents. He went on tediously about the spirit of sport.

First things first. Fernandez is very proud that Cubans never send B-teams to international Games. They show off the best their "poor and humble country" can produce. What did he think would happen when he put some of the most skilled players in the world on display? Did he think scouts would ignore them?

Where has the Cuban sports boss for the past 24 years been looking when athletes -- even without offers -- have walked away from teams. It happens almost every time a Cuban sports team plays in Puerto Rico. It happened at the world basketball championships in Toronto. At the World University Games in Buffalo, an outfielder went back, back, back for a fly ball -- and went over the wall himself. No one remembers whether the ball did.

It's a reality the Cuban sport supremo doesn't acknowledge. Of course, if he'd had any experience with a free market, he'd understand that when you have a quality product, someone is going to want it -- and pay handsomely for it.

Second, he obviously doesn't have a handle on the true spirit of sport he was bleating about. The point of an athlete's development is for him to be the best he or she can possibly be; to reach one's potential; to test oneself at the highest level. Fidel Castro himself once had major-league aspirations as a pitcher in the Baltimore Orioles organization.

Yet Fernandez would deny the same dream to today's players. They're not developed in the true spirit of sport, but as servants to a confined and confining system. Let them climb as high as they can within the workers' paradise, but make sure they can't see what lies beyond the border.

Third, he's put off by the cheeky count-the-defectors contest and calls the media "aggressive and hostile" for printing a story about a man who defected at the 1967 Pan Am Games.

Is the contest a bit childish, provincial and in bad taste? Yes, but tabloids reserve the right to put that spin on events -- and they have every freedom to do so.

Coming from a country where newspapers and broadcasts are strictly controlled by the government, press freedom is obviously an alien concept for him. Paranoia isn't.

Copyright © 1999 The Globe and Mail

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