US allows Cuban MLB players for Baseball Classic

Cuba on Saturday said the US had granted permission for some of its top ballplayers to participate in next year’s World Baseball Classic on the national team.

Cuban Baseball Federation president Juan Reinaldo Perez Pardo said in a statement that organizers of the event had received a license allowing Cubans playing in the MLB or residing in the US to join the Cuban team, who are to play their first game of the tournament on March 8 in Taichung.

“This is a positive step, but it needs to be said it was the only just solution,” Perez Pardo said.

The team roster would be announced when details of the US license were available, he added.

The team would be the first since Fidel Castro’s 1959 Revolution to include Cuban players from both countries.

Cuban Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Fernandez de Cossio earlier this month said that the US was blocking some of Cuba’s top players from participating in the Classic.

Cuba has asked several players who in the past few years had defected from the Caribbean island — long famous for its baseball talent — to represent their home country in the event.

A US embargo and more recent sanctions prohibit or complicate business and financial transactions with Cuba. The rules make it impossible for a Cuban ballplayer to sign with a US team without defecting from Cuba.

As a result, Cuban baseball talent has fled the country in unprecedented numbers in the past decade, denting national pride.

More than 650 Cuban ballplayers have defected to the US and elsewhere over the past six years alone, according to reports in state-run media.

Cuba’s talented ballplayers led the country to gold medals in the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992, Atlanta in 1996 and Athens in 2004, but in Tokyo last year, the country for the first time failed to qualify for the Games.