IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 8 ENGLISH | Page 23

Slavers in full count (three
balls, two strikes)
José Hugo Fernandez
Writer and journalist
Cuban resident in the United States

I

ronical smiles, mockery, and exclamations in all shades of rejection
have erupted among the Cuban
population after the release of a photo
that shows professional baseball player
Yasiel Puig shaking hands with Antonio
Castro, son of Fidel Castro currently in
charge of Cuban baseball. It was no
wonder. Until a few days before they
visited Cuba last December, Puig and
other Cuban MLB (Major League
Baseball) players were disqualified by
the regime as defectors and traitors.
Their names had been erased from the
social map and posting their images was
censored as if it were pornography. By a
miracle of devious dictatorial malice,
those compatriots reunited with their
families and were greeted and cheered
again by a crowd of their fans, after
having been condemned to political
exile, without being political animals,
like so many other Cubans in more than
half a century. In true bankruptcy,
plunged into irreversible crisis, with no
future in the long run, supported only by
some foreign accomplices, the Castro
dictatorship seems to have paid attention once again on black Cubans as a
bastion for aiding the regime both economically and politically. Thus, it didn’t
cost anything to stop rejecting profes-

sional baseball and to cast aside dogma
and inquisition in order to negotiate
with the MLB in the context of the
approaches to the imperialist enemy
seeking dollars. If there was any doubt
about the ideological inconsistency and
the essentially racist and anti-human
nature of the scheme, it was cleared up
by this grotesque vaudeville. If someone, either naive or an ally, did not
believe in the neo-slave system, the
evidence is at hand. The regime always
took advantage of the helplessness and
goodwill of our people, especially our
black people, giving back only crumbs
and more dependency. Now it is exploring the mechanisms to sell our players
to the enemy, like cigars or sugar cane,
provided it would be pocketing the
lion's share. In the same way, the regime took over all our land and our
industries to turn them into unproductive businesses and finally into ruins. Its
totalitarian power was used to devastate
our cultural and socioeconomic structures, and it included our national sport
and even its players, under the pretext
of releasing them from capitalist exploitation. After destroying everything, the
regime ended up by negotiating with the
demonized exploiters for its fixed
bennefit. These negotiations are the
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