Cuba Travel: Baseball Star Rey Ordonez Allowed To Return Home Thanks To Obama Travel Policies

Cuba Travel: Baseball Star Rey Ordonez Allowed To Return Home Thanks To
Obama Travel Policies
Posted: 03/19/2013 9:44 am EDT
Cuba

When Rey Ordóñez defected from Cuba in 1993, he became only the second
baseball player to leave a club on his native island and try to make it
in Major League Baseball. Throughout the following decades, Ordóñez
traveled across America playing for the New York Mets, the Tampa Bay
Devil Rays and the Chicago Cubs, but never made it back to Cuba because
U.S. laws banned his return. This week, Ordóñez took advantage of the
Cuba travel policy enacted in January and finally returned to Havana,
where he was given a hero's welcome.

An AP reporter found Ordóñez hanging out in a hotel in downtown Havana,
taking pictures with his fans and generally having a good time. The
shortstop expressed his joy on returning to his homeland and his shock
at his star power, saying "It surprised me because I've been gone twenty
years and, really, I didn't play much in Cuba."

Ordóñez owes his trip to an Obama Administration policy, much criticized
by Marco Rubio, allowing so-called people-to-people trips to Cuba.
Though the process of going to Cuba is still extremely complicated, it
is now possible for savvy travelers and homesick ballplayers.

If there is a rebuttal to the argument against Cuba travel --
essentially that it helps prop up a communist dictator -- it is surely
the photos of Ordóñez seeing his birthplace and family again through new
eyes.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/19/cuba-travel-baseball-star_n_2906902.html?utm_hp_ref=cuba