With a baseball player’s defection in Miami, the score is: Democracy 1; Cuba 0 | Opinion

Chalk one up for Miami’s Cuban exiles.

Overnight we learned that Iván Prieto González, a catcher with Cuba’s national team, defected to the United States after his team’s embarrassing 14-2 loss to Team USA at the World Baseball Classic, which just happened to have been played in Little Havana, the heart of the exile community.

It was an egg-on-the-face day for Cuba, but exiles couldn’t have planned it better if they tried. They had hoped to embarrass the Cuban government on a world stage during the televised world classic and as the teams advanced and moved from city to city for the games.

The final stop for the event, baseball’s version of soccer’s World Cup, was the Miami Marlins’ loanDepot park.

The exiles, as always, didn’t want to squander an opportunity to call out the regime’s decades of human-rights abuses, which spur thousands of people to flee annually.

At Sunday night’s international broadcast of the game, Cuban Americans ran onto the field on three different occasions during different innings with protest signs they briefly unfurled.

Unfortunately, viewers did not see them tackled and carried off the field. The FOX Network decided to keep us all in the dark, cutting away from that political action. FOX needs to explain why it decided to take such a stand.

And Major League Baseball, too, should explain why it apparently made paying spectators carrying anti-Cuba signs or wearing “Patria y Vida” T-shirts turn their shirts inside out or fold up posters. MLB rules prevent all political placards in stadiums, but the Miami Marlins chose to be lenient and allowed “Patria y Vida” signage into the stadium, after initially preventing it.

Did the Cuban government request the signs be removed?

After the game, several Cuban Americans said they were discouraged at being muzzled by the broadcast of the game.

But Monday morning, they learned of the defection — a true condemnation of the Cuban government by its own homegrown star player.

Cuban athletes have defected in the past. In July 2022, three athletes in Cuba’s delegation at the World Championships in the United States defected. Two, former discus world champion Yaimé Pérez and javelin thrower Yiselena Ballar were believed to have fled during a stopover in Miami.

Few details are known about Prieto’s defection but, coupled with his team’s resounding defeat on Sunday, it’s the second blow in a double whammy of losses for the regime.

It’s an unexpected gift for everyone who values our democracy.

This story was originally published March 20, 2023 at 6:00 PM.