Success Brings Tough Choices for Cuban Baseball Team

SAN DIEGO, March 20, 2006 — -- "Baseball is not judged by the price of the athletes but by the heart of the people."

That's how Frederich Cepeda, the left fielder for the Cuban national baseball team, summed up what his team's remarkable run to the finals of the first World Baseball Classic has meant to him, his team, his country -- and maybe to the game of baseball itself.

Cuba has dominated international baseball competitions for years, but its victories were all in tournaments without major league players. The United States arrived at the WBC armed with the likes of Derek Jeter, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez. The powerful Dominicans had superstars Miguel Tejada and David Ortiz. The Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Japanese, Mexicans and even South Koreans all had at least a few major leaguers sprinkled in their rosters.

But the Cubans? They came in a complete mystery to fans and their opponents, and not by accident.

While major league teams have set up baseball academies in the Dominican Republic and hired scouts to scour talent in the Far East, the only Cuban route to the "Las Grandes Ligas" has been the same one that so many countrymen have taken to American shores: defection.

Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez -- Cuba's biggest star in the 1980s -- was found in 1997 by the U.S. Coast Guard with his wife and six others on a deserted island in the Bahamas. The story goes that they had been eating conch to survive and, not yet on U.S. soil, thought they would surely be returned to Cuba.

But the Coast Guard officer in charge was a baseball fan and knew of Orlando's brother Livan, who had defected a year earlier. Orlando Hernandez had been banned from Cuban baseball for helping his brother get out of the communist country. Instead of a return ticket to Havana, Hernandez received a multimillion-dollar contract and a set of Yankee pinstripes.

The Cubans lost their next great pitcher, Jose Contreras, when he defected during a 2002 tournament in Mexico. He soon signed a $32 million contract, leaving family behind in Cuba. Castro labeled him a traitor, and his wife has had frequent run-ins with the government.