cover image Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story

Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story

Peter C. Bjarkman. Rowman & Littlefield, $36 (368p) ISBN 978-1-4422-4798-7

Bjarkman, the senior writer of the Baseball de Cuba website, engagingly probes the sensational influx of Cuban baseball defectors who brave everything to get those mega-buck paydays in American major-league baseball, causing a talent drain on the island. The real-life stories behind Cuban refugees’ stellar appearances in American ballparks often involve greedy big-league scouts, speedy cigarette boats, and illegal smuggling and kidnapping financed by Miami crime syndicates and operated by deadly Mexican drug cartels. Stories of baseball dynamos Aroldis Chapman, Leonys Martin, Yasiel Puig, and others are cautionary tales of betrayal, peril, desperation, and corruption as racketeers and agents shake down the naive, talented, poor youths for a share of their multimillion-dollar salaries. The writer moves the reader through a summary of Cuba’s baseball history from the first game in 1874 to the excellence in the Cuban League under Castro’s regime, a prime distraction from El Jefe’s grand social experiment. Bjarkman writes expertly of the raiding of local talent and the rapid thawing of political wills of America and Cuba, and he proclaims that the proud island “will steadfastly remain the jealous owner of its domestic baseball destiny.” (May)