Obama, MLB Play Ball in Havana-On the Scene

(ATR) A baseball game on an uncharacteristically fresh and breezy spring day in Havana brought sport into the mix of President Barack Obama’s diplomatic onslaught with Cuba this week.

The Major League Baseball exhibition game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team came in the final hours of Mr. Obama’s 2 ½ day visit to Havana. The trip has attracted worldwide interest, with hundreds of international media from all points of the globe in addition to the gaggle who follow the White House. The first visit of a US president since 1928 could not go unnoticed.

The baseball game was the first chance for Obama to go casual during this trip. Arriving at Estadio Latinoamerica about a half hour before the first pitch, the president had shed his necktie and jacket, the collar of his white shirt unbuttoned, sunglasses in place. He was accompanied by his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro, the two of them nearly inseparable throughout the visit.

There had been speculation that Obama might not go to the game following the suicide bomb attacks in Belgium earlier in the day. But in an interview prior to the game on ESPN, the president said the "whole premise of terrorism is to disrupt people’s lives."

"That’s the resilience and strength we need to show in the face of the terrorists. They cannot defeat America. They don’t produce anything. They do not have a message that appeals to a majority of Muslims and people around the world. What they can do is strike fear and disrupt our daily lives and divide us," Obama told the cable sports channel.

Obama stood with Castro and more than 50,000 spectators for a minute of silence for the Belgian attack victims.

The crowd at the game began arriving hours before the first pitch, all of them carrying invitation only tickets. The stadium, Cuba’s premier baseball venue, had been given a lightning fast renovation in advance of the March 22 game.

Perhaps not as poignant as the ping-pong diplomacy of Richard Nixon that led to restoration of diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China, baseball is one of a myriad of broken links between the US and Cuba that Obama hopes to repair. The two nations share baseball as a national sport but some say the lure of money as professional players in the US is encouraging the best Cubans to defect. The one way flow of sports talent is blamed for gutting Cuban baseball, once nearly invincible in international play.

Now the US government may consider changes that allow Cuban baseball players to send their earnings home. The economic blockade prevents most financial transactions big and small between the US and Cuba. Defectors who once were shunned and even barred from returning to Cuba are now welcomed back as attitudes shift in the communist nation. Once allowed by the U.S. to send their salaries home to Cuba, players may no longer feel the need to defect to protect their economic interests.

"I have come here to bury the last remnants of the Cold War in the Americas," the president proclaimed in aspeech broadcast live across Cuba a few hours before the baseball game. That Cold War has certainly had its effect on this form of elite sport in Cuba.

Major League Baseball has done its part to show what it might mean for trade to flow more freely between the two countries. The league has indicated the exhibition match this week could signal a resumption of regular spring training play between U.S. teams and Cuba’s best squads. Prior to the Tampa Bay visit, 1999 was the last year a U.S. MLB team played an inning in Cuba.The game with Tampa Bay was already on the calendar in Cuba this month, the date moved up a week when the White House announced the Obama visit.

MLB did more than bring a team to the island. The league also brought the heritage of the sport by inviting greats Dave Winfield, Derek Jeter, Joe Torre, Luis Tiant and Jose Cardenal to help lead youth clinics the day before the exhibition. President Obama gave a symbolic nod to baseball history by inviting as his guests to Cuba Rachel Robinson, the 93-year-old widow of Jackie Robinson who played exhibition games as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers 60 years ago. The Dodgers came to Cuba to escape racism faced in their U.S. training camp over Robinson, the first black player in Major League Baseball.

While Obama had been mentioned as the possibility to throw out the first pitch of the game, the honor was shared by two Cubans. Tiant, now 75, a right-handed pitcher, was joined by a righty from another generation Pedro Lazo. Now 42, Lazo won gold at the 1996 and 2004 Olympics with silver medals in 2000 and 2008, perhaps the most decorated baseball Olympian.

The baseball solidarity extended to the umpiring crew which included four officials from Cuba and two from MLB.

The game? No home field advantage for the Cubans who had to wait until the final inning to score a single run, unable to erase the four-run lead of the visitors. Obama left early, in between the second and third innings with Tampa Bay already in the lead. The president would leave it to the athletes to finish off an afternoon of sport diplomacy in Havana.

Written in Havana by Ed Hulawith reporting from Miguel Hernandez.

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