14ymedio, Havana, 28 December 2023 — Rarely has the regime licked its wounds with as much vigor as after the defeat of Team Asere in the semifinal of the World Baseball Classic. The propaganda had turned the match against the U.S. national team into a political crusade, and, as most sports specialists had predicted, the shot backfired on Havana.
The team’s problem was, above all, one of concept. What did Team Asere represent? The best players of a dictatorship? An example of national reconciliation? An idiotic scheme – as many called it – that tried to take the athletes who trained in the worn-out stadiums of the Island to the level in professional baseball that the emigrants had reached?
The Cuban-American community in Miami was categorical: Team Asere was a well-planned collection of “useful idiots,” puppets that – consciously or unconsciously – danced to the rhythm dictated in the dark propaganda offices of Havana. The exiles also made it clear in the LoanDepot Park stadium itself, with protests that the Cuban Foreign Ministry later described as “unfortunate and dangerous incidents.”
It was those “transgressive” groups, the regime argued, that caused Team Asere to become a cluster of nerves, unable to bat with quality and plan its plays we
