Defector Prospector Agent Believes Cuba Will Lose Many Ballplayers During The Olympics

Cuba’s Olympic baseball team was here at Five-County Stadium on Saturday, which means Joe Cubas was in town, too. Lurking around the bleachers, conferring with his assistants and laying the groundwork for defections. Lots of them.

Cuban ballplayers are known for being fierce competitors - a point they drove home Saturday night when they halted the U.S. Olympic team’s 39-game winning streak, 5-1, in the first of a five-game exhibition series. But if Cuban baseball means great athletes, it also means potential defectors. And no one has capitalized on that like Cubas.

The Miami-based agent, born to Cuban-American parents, engineered the past four of the roughly dozen defections of the Communist nation’s baseball players. They came one after another last year - Osvaldo Fernandez in July; Livan Hernandez in September; then Vladimir Nunez and Larry Rodriguez in October.

And he added a lucrative twist to their defections. They went first to the Dominican Republic, thereby skirting the major-League draft. That made them free agents, and the bidding war was on.

The grand slam gave Cubas close to $1 million, because he took home 5 percent of the players’ contracts, and it raised the stakes for the Cuban players and for team security.

Defections “are going to happen,” Cubas said in an interview before Saturday night’s game. “I’m afraid to tell you the number that I have confirmed are going to defect… . There’s more than four.”

Cubas agreed to discuss his plans only after he had word that the team had left Cuba. Arriving by Mercedes and sporting a gold bracelet and sunglasses, the negotiator predicted a tidal wave of defections from the Cuban Olympic team as a whole. He mentioned the 1993 Central American and Caribbean Games in Puerto Rico, where about 50 members of the Cuban delegation waved a permanent hasta luego to their home.

“I believe you’re going to see a lot more defections here,” he said.

Cuban team officials say they are not concerned about possible defections. But Cubas asserts that if defections were a medal event, Cuba would get the gold.

Three of Cuba’s better players stayed in Cuba during this trip and are not scheduled to play in the Olympics. Officials traveling with the team said Orlando Hernandez, German Mesa and Luis Toca weren’t up to snuff, and that was that.

Cubas and others say there was reason to believe each man was a high risk for defection: Hernandez is defector Livan Hernandez’s brother; Mesa is best friends with Hernandez; and Toca unwittingly approached Fernandez last summer moments before his getaway van left the hotel.

The Cuban players and coaches were low-key on the topic. “No one’s going to defect,” pitcher Omar Luis said before Saturday night’s game. “No one wants to.”

“If they want to leave, they can go,” coach Jorge Fuentes said during warm-ups, and he waved a hand toward the parking lot, just beyond the fence. Fuentes and the players said security is standard, or less stringent, on this trip, and they brushed off questions about whether there would be lots of empty seats on the plane home.

“It’s a very personal decision,” Fuentes said. “How can I respond? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Which is more or less what Cuban President Fidel Castro told baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron when the two had a dinner meeting last February. Aaron was part of a CNN team that spent a week in Cuba to report on the nation’s favorite sport.

“I asked the president himself,” Aaron said. “I said, ‘Fidel, are you planning on having more security this trip?’ … And he said they’re not going to have any added security… . He said there’s nothing he can do about (defections).”

Cubas and some of his clients believe otherwise, citing passport, telephone and harassment problems.

Passports are taken from the players once they get through customs, Cubas said. He knows because the issue caused a logistical nightmare for the past two defectors. Nunez and Rodriguez were spirited away during the night last fall, only to return to their hotel later with one of Cubas’ assistants. They conned their way into the hotel room where the passports were kept, and took the two they needed.

“I wanted to take them all,” Cubas said with a smile.

Cuban players cannot use their hotel phones, according to U.S. coach Skip Bertman, who is the coach at Louisiana State. He said he called the switchboard of the team’s hotel here to ask that his players’ telephones be turned on, and learned the Cuban players’ phones were to be left disconnected.

Osvaldo Fernandez, who now plays for the San Francisco Giants, told Cubas his wife was threatened by Cuban police after his defection.

“It was a little difficult for me” to leave Cuba, Fernandez said during a telephone interview last week. In addition to his wife, he left behind a 1-year-old daughter. But he believes it was the right thing to do.

“It’s a change that’s worth it,” he said. “To improve your life a little bit, economically.”

Cuban players earn about 200 pesos a month, which is roughly equivalent to five dollars. The better players are given modest homes and old Russian cars. Their lives are better than that of the average Cuban, they say, but still wanting.

Whatever each player’s reason for being here, Cuba is “the best amateur team in the world,” Bertman said. “They’re much better than we are. They’re older and stronger.”

Bertman’s players have two more chances to prove their coach wrong. They play the Cuban again today and on Thursday. Then it’s on to Atlanta, where the Cubans will try to defend their gold medal.

And then maybe, Cuba’s finest will board a plane back to Havana.

But not if Joe Cubas has his way.

“I would love to see an empty plane go home,” he said.

A.J. Hinch had four hits Monday and scored the go-ahead run on a seventh-inning balk, leading the U.S. to an 11-10 victory over Cuba at Chattanooga, Tenn.