Cuba Rents Baseball Players

A student pointed out this story to me by Anne-Marie Garcia and Peter Orsi. There is a long history of Cuban baseball players defecting to the United States. (In fact, Yasiel Puig or José Fernandez will certainly get the NL Rookie of the Year instead of the Padres' Jedd Goyrko. But that's another story). Now Raul Castro says Cuban players can essentially be rented to U.S. teams as long as they fulfill certain professional responsibilities at home. And, of course, pay taxes on their lucrative contracts.

I'll be curious to see whether the Obama administration opens the doors to this initiative, which requires waivers of some sort because the Cubans will not become permanent residents. They will simply be Cubans making money in the United States and sending a large amount of dollars back to Cuba.

Of course, this also higlights the authoritarian nature of Cuban immigration policy. You can leave the country only under certain specific conditions that benefit the government, and in this case presumably there are plenty of strings the governments can pull.

At the very least, it seems less like indentured servitude as the Cuban doctors in Venezuela (and, interestingly, my student's cousin, a Cuban dentist, was sent to Venezuela and then defected).