Star

Sports
42
Monday, March 21, 2016
The San Juan Daily Star
This Cuban Defector Changed
Baseball. Nobody Remembers.
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
The poster, the only prominent piece of memorabilia,
hangs in the back of the shed
next to the dusty old suitcase, a row of
unused candles and a pile of VHS tapes, a few
bearing the label “Cuba Baseball.”
Whenever Rene Arocha goes for the lawn
mower, he can see it, his younger self, No. 43 of
the St. Louis Cardinals circa 1993, caught in the
familiar hunched-over, leg-up pose of a pitcher
hurtling something toward the plate.
It is a tucked-away reminder of his fleeting
fame, a fame that he has sought to tuck away
himself after a career that began with a flash of
hope but ultimately fizzled in disappointments
and unfulfilled expectations.
“I am hidden here,” he said with a laugh,
at the nondescript peach bungalow-style house
here where he lives, with a beat-up 1990s sedan
on the lawn, a motorboat in the side yard,
squawking parrots on the back patio and a pregnant
cat making the rounds.
Yet, with one simple but rebellious move, he
changed baseball.
Major League Baseball and Cuba are discussing
ways for Cuban players to sign with teams
without having to defect, taking advantage of a
thaw between the countries that will culminate
in President Obama’s two-day trip there, set to
be done today. A new arrangement would formalize
the decades-long flow of Cuban players
showing up on American shores and major league
rosters — including star players like Yasiel
Puig, Yoenis Cespedes, Aroldis Chapman and
Orlando Hernandez, known as “El Duque.”
Before all of them, and hundreds of others,
there was Rene Arocha.
He never got a big-money contract or played
memorably enough to be a household name,
even among ardent fans. At best, he may be a
curious footnote.
But on July 10, 1991, he committed a simple
but utterly rebellious act that opened the way for
the modern surge of Cuban players: He walked
away from the Cuban national team during a layover
in Miami and sought asylum in the United
States.
Until then, no active player on the national
team, the best of the best in the country, had defected.
“He was the one who started the current
wave of players defecting and deciding to come
to the U.S. and staying here,” said Peter C. Bjarkman,
a longtime scholar of Cuban baseball, whose
book “Cuba’s Baseball Defectors” is scheduled
for publication in May. “He really was the pioneer.”
Now, the kind of defections that Arocha opened
the way to may be on the way out.
After Fidel Castro took power in 1959, he
abolished professional baseball and established
the National Series, a 16-team amateur league
run by a government department.
“This is the triumph of free baseball over slave
baseball,” Castro declared, showing his distaste
for the buying and selling of players in the
United States leagues.
Before Arocha defected, a few players managed
to make it to the United States, but none had
been active players on the high-profile national
team.
One player, Barbaro Garbey, who had been
imprisoned on a game-fixing charge and left
Cuba on the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration in
1980 of more than 120,000 Cuban refugees to the
United States, did make it to the major leagues.
But Garbey was not an active player when he left
Cuba, Bjarkman said, and his departure did not
cause nearly the stir that Arocha’s did.
Arocha, by contrast, was a star pitcher on
Cuba’s national team when he left, a right-hander
with a 92-mile-an-hour fastball. At 25, however,
he was already an overworked one. Cuba tended
not to use relievers, so pitchers often worked entire
games, sometimes several a week.
“I got injured when I was 17 but I still played,”
Arocha recalled. “We used terrible baseballs,
too. None of the equipment was good
then.”
Even as Major League Baseball has applied
to the Treasury Department to institute a new
system to draft Cuban players to teams directly
— a pathway that the league anticipates would
pre-empt the smuggling and the often chaotic
and dangerous journeys of Cuban players to the
United States — players continue to arrive.
Last month, two brothers, Yulieski Gourriel,
31, and Lourdes Gourriel Jr., 22, left the Cuban
national team while in the Dominican Republic,
one of the most high-profile defections in recent
years.
Their father, Lourdes Gourriel Sr., was one of
Cuba’s most celebrated players. Arocha played
with him on the Cuba teams that won the 1986
Amateur World Series and the 1988 Baseball
World Cup against the United States.
“I still remember Lourdes’s home run that
tied the score before we went on to win,” Arocha
said. “I gave up the runs that put the United States
ahead, but then he tied it. Pow!”
There is pride in that voice.
“Of course,” he said. “I am very proud. I am
Cuban, pure Cuban. I am just not a baseball player.
It is no longer part of my life.”
He paused for a moment.
“It is a little like when you were with a woman,
and now you are no longer with her.”
A Strange Freedom
If Jose Canseco, the Oakland Athletics’ All-
Star, had not decided to make a candy bar, Arocha
might not have ended up in the majors.
Cuba now closely guards the travels of its
players, driving many defecting players to risk
harrowing journeys in the hands of unscrupulous
smugglers. But Arocha’s defection was remarkably
simple.
The team was on a layover in Miami after
playing a series of exhibition games against the
United States. The players were staying at the
hotel in the middle of the airport, Arocha said,
and he just walked out.
He did have a plan. In fact, he said, he had
been plotting for a long time to make a break
from the team, considering and then dropping
the idea on at least two earlier occasions when
the team was traveling.
Miami, however, made a lot of sense because
he had relatives there.
When his father and aunt came to visit at the
airport hotel, he told them he was not going back
to Cuba and would stay with them.
“They didn’t know what I was going to do,”
he said. “I told them I was staying. They could
not believe it.”
He slipped out of the hotel and through an
exit door in the crowded terminal, apparently
not closely watched by Cuban officials, who had
not dealt with a defection before.
The next day, according to news accounts at
the time, the Cuban team waited on the plane
for Arocha. And waited, and waited, until after a
few hours it was clear he was not going to show
up.
Back in Cuba, he was denounced as a traitor
in official media.
In Cuba, he had left a wife and young
daughter but doubted they would suffer reprisals.
(His daughter eventually joined him.)
“It was not about them,” he said. “It was
about me.”
He had been playing baseball since he was
13, starting in his hometown, Regla, near Havana.
He had worked his way up through the equivalent
of the minor leagues to the Metropolitanos
and the Industriales, two of the country’s
best teams. In total, he is credited with 100 wins
Arocha on June 8, 1993. He missed the 1996
season after sustaining a serious elbow injury
and never started another game in the
majors. Credit Otto Greule Jr./Getty Images
and a .600 winning percentage, Bjarkman said,
and was talked up as the probable starter for
Cuba’s Olympic baseball team at the 1992 Barcelona
Games.
Over the years, a torn Achilles’ tendon set
him back and his throwing arm went cold and
hot, but he made it to the national team.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in
1989, Cuba entered what is known as the Special
Period, an era of food shortages and want among
the worst the country endured.
Baseball players were not spared.
“Sometimes on the road we slept right in the
stands, outside with the mosquitoes,” he said.
“Just like everybody else, we had to search for
food and figure out how to get by.”
“I didn’t have eggs in the refrigerator, either.”
There were other slights.
The authoritarian ways of the country trickled
down to athletics. Players, Arocha said,
were tightly controlled. Decisions on who would
start which games were never explained and the
players were forced to attend mandatory meetings
to hear political speeches.
“Nothing was ever explained, they just
made decisions and nobody would know why,”
he said.
Off the field, people were punished for
seemingly minor violations. He recalled the
time an uncle was jailed for simply possessing
American dollars.
It was all getting to him, he said.
“I wanted freedom,” he said. “Yes, I was playing
baseball and wondered if I could play in the
big leagues, but mainly I wanted to be free.”
Not even his wife at the time knew his plan,
he said. She went to the Havana airport to meet
him; they eventually split up, and he has since
remarried in the United States.