'Historic' game in Cuba ignores the pain so many people endured

'Historic' game in Cuba ignores the pain so many people endured
play
9:54 PM ET
Dan Le Batard

comment
Another loss. That's what this already feels like to so much of Miami --
before the "historic" baseball game has even been played. As if the
Cubans who fled to this country haven't already felt enough of those
losses over the decades. Lost childhoods. Lost roots. Lost families.
Lost land. Lost freedoms. Lost lives in the ocean that divides Cuba and
America like the million miles of distance between desperation and hope.

So much happy coverage on the television this week. Historic visit!
America and baseball celebrating themselves. President Barack Obama,
Derek Jeter and ESPN head toward communism like it is another cruise
port, so many symbols of Americana descending on a rotting island stuck
in the 1950s, and it doesn't feel quite right back in Miami, like
watching a funeral morph into a party. The history of my own people
feels like it is being either ignored or trampled, and I'm not quite
sure which of those feels worse.

I'm not too emotional, but I cry just about every time I write about
Cuba. My pain is very much borrowed. My grandparents and parents endured
it so that my brother and I never would. It stings just the same. The
fear and desperation of my grandparents combine with the suffering and
sacrifices of my parents to produce an odd combination of sorrow and
guilt and gratitude that won't stay down.

I've never known anything but freedom. My grandparents and parents made
sure that was so. Now my grandparents are dead, and my parents are old,
and the Cuban regime that strangled them somehow lives on ... lives on
to play a baseball game with our country this week. America extends its
hand toward a dictator who has the blood of my people on his own hands.
And now my parents, old exiles, have to watch Obama and Jeter and ESPN
throw a happy party on land that was stolen from my family -- as the
rest of America celebrates it, no less. That's going to hurt, no matter
how you feel about the politics.

The Tampa Bay Rays visit Havana, Cuba, to play the Cuban national team
in an exhibition game at 1:30 p.m. ET Tuesday on ESPN, ESPN Deportes and
The embargo didn't work. I get it. America does a lot of business with
dictators. I get it. My parents aren't close-minded, heartless or
blinded by unreasonable rage. They'd be all for normalized relations
with Cuba if it meant helping, you know, the citizens of Cuba. And maybe
this will. Or maybe it won't. Why would my parents trust a communist
government built atop a lifetime of lies?

As teenagers, my parents were put on planes by their parents, not
knowing if they'd ever see one another again. How desperate would you
have to be to send your not-ready-for-the-real-world 16-year-old to a
foreign country without knowing if you'd ever be reunited? A lot of
things have happened to Cuba since my parents fled it. Change doesn't
appear to be one of them.

The ocean between our countries is filled with the Cuban bodies that
tell the story, lives literally thrown to the wind in desperation,
hoping to reach America's possibility-soaked shores on boats made of old
tires and wood and poverty's debris. No free press. No elections. No
freedom. That's the Cuba that still surrounds the baseball diamond where
we play this game. That's the Cuba people still get on makeshift boats
to flee today.

My mother? All this happy news coverage has brought the bad memories
back. She has some post-traumatic stress disorder from the communism.
She feels it in her heart whenever she is shipping medicine to her
brother stuck in Cuba. She feels it in an esophagus that hasn't worked
right since she was put on that plane, with the communism literally
choking her a little bit with every breath she has taken since.

She had her phones tapped back home. She endured neighborhood spies
coming into her home whenever they pleased. She attended services for
students and intellectuals killed for fighting for elections and a
constitution. For attending those services, she was chased through the
streets by police dragging chains. Her brother was a political prisoner.
Whenever she visited him, she wondered if the fresh blood on the
firing-squad walls might be his. He spent almost 10 years in that prison
for his politics. Why the hell would she trust any of that today?

Understand something, please: My parents are exiles, not immigrants.
There is an enormous difference. They didn't come to this country
looking for money. They left money behind and came here to risk poverty.
They did so because they were exiled from a land they didn't want to
leave and still miss, a land they will not visit until this regime is
ousted or they see real change that can be trusted. My grandmother put
my mother on a plane believing they might see each other again in three
months. It took 12 years. Grandma put her on a plane because she
couldn't stomach the idea of both of her children being in jail at once
-- her son for his politics, her daughter for trying to go to church to
honor the dead. Days after she fled, three militia members with machine
guns broke into the house at 3 a.m. looking for my mother. Grandma is dead.

Our pain is not particularly unique in these parts. The city of Miami
has so many stories such as this. You'll find one in every barrio and
bodega. So you'll forgive us if we aren't much in the mood to play ball
with a dictator who still has the blood of our people on his hands, no
matter how much ESPN and Obama and Jeter dress it up.

Fidel Castro outlived my grandparents. His regime continues to haunt my
old-exile parents. My pain might be borrowed. But, damn, as that sting
returns to my eyes, I can assure you that it is real.

Source: 'Historic' game in Cuba ignores the pain so many people endured
-
http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/15032737/historic-game-cuba-ignores-pain-many-people-endured