Cuba, US resume baseball series after 16 years

[Judi Lynn]

Cuba, US resume baseball series after 16 years
By PETER ORSI
Associated Press
Posted: Friday, Jul. 06, 2012



HAVANA A team of college stars representing the United States faced off with a veteran Cuban national squad in Havana, reviving a series between two baseball-crazy nations 16 years after it was called off at a nadir in relations.

Players and fans stood respectfully in the city's storied Latin American Stadium on Thursday night as the Cuban and then the U.S. national anthems played on loudspeakers - the latter a rarity in the Communist-run island nation.

"This is awesome. I've never been out of the country before, so this is my first time," said USA outfielder Johnny Field, a 20-year-old sophomore who won a College World Series title less than two weeks ago with the University of Arizona. "We've heard all the hype about how great the stadium is, and Cuba is at baseball, and it's already shown since we got here. ... We're fired up to be here."

The last time Cuba and the U.S. played a series like this outside of tournament play was 1996, which even among 53 years of bad blood stood out as a particularly bad year for U.S.-Cuban relations: That February, Cuba shot down two small planes piloted by an anti-Castro exile group that Havana accused of entering its airspace to drop leaflets. Later, President Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act, which dramatically hardened the U.S. trade embargo.

More:
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/07/06/3366358/cuba-us-resume-baseball-series.html#storylink=cpy

[joshcryer]

1. This is wonderful news. I await the day Cuba is in the World Series.

It'll happen one day...

[villager]

2. It's amazing all the chickenshit things Democratic Presidents sign into law.

Do vetoes really terrify them that much?

[Judi Lynn]

3. Lot of political aspects to that smooth move. Clinton had taken large donations from Cuban "exiles"

in Florida in his Presidential campaigns, just like the Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush I, and Hillary's brother, Hugh Rodham is married to a Cuban "exile" immigration attorney, Maria Victoria Arias, who organized a lot of campaign details for them in Florida, worked for them, etc., etc., etc.

Had he gone against their demands for absurd additional punishment against Cuba, increasing the reach of the embargo, he would have had war with these creeps in Florida who control Florida politics, and the large electoral vote there, which they unfortunately control over many recent years, needed to win elections.

Had he ignored their demands, they would have whipped up their Republican allies to a total frenzy and played it for all it was worth politically, naming him a superfan of Fidel Castro, regardless of the actual facts of the matter. They would have gotten a lot of mileage from it, as the corporate media still never treated the story honestly, and it would be easy to manipulate it for the idiot anti-"commie" Cold War holdovers who never woke up.

He was handed heavy pressure from the right wing and the Cuban right-wing reactionaries who've always served the interests of the right-wing. Remember their service as assassins in the C.I.A., and their usefulness to Richard Nixon in Watergate, etc.

It's a wretched mess.

The embargo should have been retired so very, VERY long ago. It was always a filthy idea.