It seems untrue, but it is the crude reality. The organizers of the Caribbean Baseball Series denied Cuba’s request to participate as “guest league” and by the way radically cut off its possible return to the traditional regional championship.
The request made by the largest of the Antilles consisted in participating as guest instead of becoming a permanent member due to its impossibility to pay the membership fee.
Cuba today has an austere economic policy in all spheres, including sports; therefore it would have been paradoxical to pay the sum of money – over one million dollars – required to join he Caribbean Series.
The possibility will remain open to Cuba and other applicants, but the Hermosillo-2013 Mexican edition will only include the traditional teams – the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Mexico.
This decision deprives Caribbean baseball fans of the possibility of watching the Cuban champion team compete with the other regional monarchs, all of whose players are excellent professional players and even U.S. Big Leaguers who use this championship to start training for the Big Top season.
Cuban baseball prestige is worldwide known, and therefore it may always be used to insist on the future membership in the League. Hopefully this strike-out will help trace new strategies. Hopefully that moral credit will never expire and hopefully Cuba will return to the Caribbean Series, a championship it mastered throughout the decade of 1950.
Cuba won seven of the 12 editions of that prestigious competition in which it participated: two with the Almendares Scorpions (1949, 1959), two with the Cienfuegos Elephants (1956,1960), two with the Marianao Tigers (1957, 1958) and one with the Havana Lions (1952).
Author
Yasiel Cancio Vilar
