This may read like an odd post for many of our readers, but I hope it will both be interesting for them and also encouraging them to think.  Let me start with some biographical background.  I have been a Dodger fan since the age of seven, in the summer of 1951 in the tenements of the East Bronx, surrounded by Yankee fans 

My support of the Dodgers has never wavered and it has been a positive force in my overall development.  I learned to be an anti-racist, defending Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, from the racist attacks hurled on them by Yankee fans in my neighborhood when the Yankees along with the Boston Red Sox and a few other teams were still Jim Crow.

 I continued to be a Dodger fan after the team left New York, although I detested Walter O’Malley, the team’s owner who took the team away from Branch Rickey and later moved it to California.  Decades later, when I learned of the role that Los Angeles politicians played in the red baiting of Frank Wilkinson, a longtime CPUSA member and Los Angeles Housing official, whose campaign to develop a large public housing  project in the poor Mexican-American Chavez Ravine district stood as a major road block to the building of Dodger stadium.  Wilkinson was the last person to be sent to prison in the U.S. for a contempt citation.  After his release, he immediately organized the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But I never confused the team with its owners, just as I have never confused the American people and the American nation, its distinct and vibrant multi-ethnic culture with the actions of its capitalist state apparatus at home and abroad.

 This too is a valuable lesson, even though the O’Malleys, the McCourts (and even Rupe Murdoch, who owned the team briefly and undermined it to expand his transnational media conglomerate) were far less destructive then the Nixons, Reagans, and Bush, Jrs whose policies harmed the American people at home and disgraced the American nation abroad.

After this long biographical introduction, let me get to the point.  The point is Yasiel Puig, the Cuban defector who has been a colorful albeit erratic star for the Dodgers.  The U.S. has maintained a blockade of Cuba since 1960, and in the past used CIA directed sabotage to subvert its economy and CIA documented organized assassination attempts against Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 1970s.  Also the economic warfare got worse, not better, after the overthrow of Socialist Cuba’s main ally, the Soviet Union. 

Cubans have been playing baseball for a long time and the revolution both improved the quality of the game and also the  whole peoples access to it.  But Cuba since the Revolution has not been a “baseball colony” of the U.S. major leagues, the way  Puerto Rico was, and the Dominican Republic became.  For many years now, U.S. teams have “invested” in teen-age prospects in the Dominican Republic and other Latin American  baseball colonies because these prospects are much cheaper than their counterparts   in the U.S.

 Some analysts have even suggested that this has led to a relative decline in the number of African-Americans in Major League Baseball, using as an example Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, famous for producing African American baseball and football players.  Major league U.S. teams can acquire a prospect in the Dominican Republic for a fraction of the cost of a prospect from Crenshaw High School, when athletes with major  league sports professional potential already have agents.

But that is not true in Cuba.  In Cuba, there are agents in the U.S. and various smugglers in Mexico and other countries involved in the human trafficking of outstanding Cuban baseball players.  Puig was one of these players, who was given political asylum in the U.S. and made his way into the major leagues, where millions of dollars await for players of his stature.  In Puig’s case though, it is alleged that the Mexican based criminal gang which orchestrated his “flight to freedom” has sought to extort more money from him and has made death threats against him.

                All of this of course would not be happening were it not for the blockade, the ongoing economic war against Cuba which will be fifty-four years old today.  In effect, major league baseball and the U.S government in this small area are encouraging, if not indirectly subsidizing vicious criminal activities.

                Let me make a modest proposal to the owners and business managers of Major League baseball, for whom scandals like this are of course very bad news.  While finally ending the embargo, which is  still in place twenty three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, is of course the only rational and honorable policy in Cuban-American relations, I know that the chance  f that happening in the very near future are as good as the Dodgers returning to Brooklyn, even if their present owners sell them to a new Russian oligarchs (New Russian Robber Barons from the former Soviet Union are currently amusing themselves by buying sports teams abroad, like the former New Jersey Nets)

                But major league baseball could begin to negotiate with Cuban baseball and work out a deal comparable to the arrangements that they currently have with Japanese baseball players who have established themselves with corporate owned Japanese teams. 

In order to get rights to the player, they must pay the team owners a multi-million dollar fee and then bid for the player.  In that system,  public Cuban baseball and the Cuban people would receive millions in compensation for the players who excelled in their system and the players who chose to leave Cuba for the big money would still be able to do so, without the aid of criminals and without risking their lives and the lives of others.

                One final point.  Puig and the other Cuban players, but especially Puig, have given the lie to one old bogey of anti-Communist propaganda.  “Communist athletes” like Communist anything, were supposed to be robot like figures, like the Soviet boxer in that old unlamented Rocky movie, methodical in everything they did.

  Puig is a wild, always exciting  often  out of control player, making great players and following them with idiotic ones, a sort of anarchist of the diamond.   One might think from his and other Cuban players that there is much more “freedom” in Cuban baseball than in U.S. Little Leagues

                I will continue to root for the Dodgers and all of their players and am generally happy that their present owners are finally spending the money to build a pennant winning team.  As in all areas of life, capital while not sufficient to success is necessary.

One can only wonder what a very capital poor country like Cuba might have

accomplished had it had the capital to develop its socialist society. 

 One can respect the achievements of Cuba since its revolution, even though the “fans”

of capitalism are no more likely to recognize those achievements than the Yankee fans

were ready to recognize the achievements o f the Dodgers over sixty years ago in my

old neighborhood, the former East Bronx, known since the early 1960s as the South

Bronx