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Cuban ballplayers wield
a bigger policy bat
By William M. Leogrande,
wleogrande@american.edu. Posted on Tue,
Mar. 07, 2006 in The
Miami Herald.
In January, President Bush personally reversed
the Treasury Department's decision to bar
the Cuban National Team from competing in
the World Baseball Classic next month in
Puerto Rico. In so doing, the president
made an exception to his Cuba travel policy
-- a policy so tight that it denies permission
to Cuban artists such as the legendary Ibrahim
Ferrer of the Buena Vista Social Club to
attend the Grammy Awards and Iraq war hero
Sgt. Carlos F. Lazo to visit his sons in
Cuba.
The president's decision was a good one.
Major League Baseball's World Classic would
not be the global tournament that it aspires
to be without the powerhouse Cuban team,
which won Olympic Gold in 1992, 1996 and
2004 and has won 12 of the last 13 World
Cup tournaments. The World Classic without
the Cubans would be like the Fall Classic
without the New York Yankees.
As it happens, while the World Baseball
Classic is under way in Puerto Rico, another
group will be meeting just across town.
The Latin American Studies Association is
the principal international scholarly organization
dedicated to the study of Latin America.
Cuban academics have been coming to LASA
conferences to present scholarly papers
and interact with colleagues from around
the globe since 1977. This year, 59 Cubans
-- a group just a little larger than the
Cuban baseball delegation -- applied for
visas to participate in LASA. None was approved.
The same thing happened at the previous
LASA meeting in October 2004, when all 61
Cuban scholars on the program were denied
visas.
The rationale for denying visas to Cuban
academics is that they are a threat to the
national security of the United States because
they are officials of the Cuban government.
This is just an excuse, of course. The Cuban
professors are government officials in the
same way that a professor at the University
of Florida is a government official -- their
paycheck comes from the government because
they teach at a state university. Since
there are no private universities in Cuba,
every Cuban academic is, by this perverse
definition, a government official.
So what's the difference between Cuban
baseball players and Cuban professors? Why
do we welcome the ball players but not the
scholars? The president knows the top people
in Major League Baseball. He listens when
they tell him that barring the Cuban team
will hurt the tournament, making the United
States look shallow and foolish to the rest
of the world. And of course, there's real
money at stake. The Classic is aimed at
opening global markets to baseball, especially
in Asia. Academics, on the other hand, don't
have the president's ear, and there's no
real money to be made from scholarly dialogue.
Politically, denying visas to Cuban professors
is unlikely to attract much notice beyond
the intellectual classes in Latin America.
That cost, however, ought not be blithely
dismissed. The United States is not very
popular in Latin America these days. In
recent polls, 53 percent of South Americans
had a negative opinion of President Bush,
as did 87 percent of Latin American opinion-leaders,
making him the most unpopular U.S. president
ever in the region. Since 2000, negative
opinion of the United States in Latin America
has more than doubled, rising to 31 percent
from 14 percent.
Presidential confidante Karen Hughes, in
charge of public diplomacy at the State
Department, is spending millions on an ''information
war'' to convince the Arab ''street'' that
the United States is not an arrogant, know-it-all
country that throws its weight around, trampling
the rights of others. Perhaps if we'd had
more interaction with Muslim intellectual
leaders over the years, Hughes would be
having an easier job of it.
Sports and cultural exchanges are a good
way for ordinary people in the United States
and Cuba to get to know one another. We
should have more of them, and the president
should be applauded for allowing Cubans
to play in the World Baseball Classic. But
surely scientific and intellectual exchanges
are just as important for building goodwill.
Among the young professors teaching in Cuba
today are people who will be the professional
and political leaders of tomorrow, regardless
of how Cuba evolves. Allowing them to visit
the United States to interact with their
professional colleagues here improves the
chances that U.S.-Cuban relations in the
future will be based on a mutual understanding
and respect.
And if Washington allows the Cubans scholars
to attend the LASA meeting in Puerto Rico,
after a long day of learned discourse, we
can all go to the ballgame and root for
our national teams.
William M. LeoGrande
is dean of the School of Public Affairs
at American University in Washington, D.C.,
and frequently writes about U.S. relations
with Latin America.
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