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There's a lot of very good Cuban players who came into America. Cespedes, Chapman, Puig, Morales, etc. But obviously Cuba doesn't let people out, which means they had to defect to come here. How do they have such a big success rate at defecting? It seems anytime a Cuban player gets noticed by MLB scouts, he manages to defect to DR or PR within a month. They make it seem so easy to defect, like "Bye friends and family, I'm just gonna defect to Dominican Republic real quick and see if any scouts are interested in my baseball skillz. Be back for dinner." From what I heard defecting from Cuba is quite difficult and could land you in prison...
Also how does the Cuban government not catch on? Many of their best players are defecting and they don't even heighten security or anything?
I suspect there is more to this than meets the eye, all Fidel needs is to get one of his operatives inside the White House as a member of the winning WS team and then...then, well we can only imagine, but I'm sure he's still PO'd about that plot to erradicate his beard among other grievances.
edit: Looks like they took it down; basically Cespedes had no intention of ever leaving Cuba until 2011, when he was demoted to third-string on the national team, despite stellar play. As (bad) luck would have it, he accidentally hit and killed a bicyclist (and was not found at fault) a few days before they had planned to leave, giving him an excuse to not attend training. They went to the Dominican, where he became a resident and then free agent. During his first season in 2012, the family got left behind in the DR, then were supposed to be shipped to the Turks & Cacos but were left on a deserted island by the boaters for several days before being rescued. They were taken to T&C but soon were arrested and imprisoned as illegals and potential smugglers. As soon as they were released, Cespedes arranged to have them brought to the US as Cuban refugees where they live now.
So no, it's not as easy as it looks to get out of Cuba and make it over here.
Last edited by Mike from back east; 07-16-2013 at 07:12 PM..
Reason: Found the right link and added it to the post.
There is a little more to the defecting than simply the international venue. I just read an article, a few minutes ago about Puig.
The OP is about "so many' players, not just Puig.
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