Havana. Two players have left the Cuban team that is playing in Mexico for the U-23 Pan American Baseball Championship, including the star of the team, catcher Alfredo Fadraga, the Federation of that sport on the Caribbean island reported Thursday.
“With the decision to abandon us, they turn their backs on the commitment assumed with the people that accompanies us in the desire to achieve the best possible result in this fair and incur in reprehensible acts that we condemn,” said the Cuban Baseball Federation (FCB) in a statement published in the digital newspaper Jit, of the Cuban Institute of Sports.
Fadraga, 23, and pitcher Yosvani Ávalos (21), left the team’s lodging place during the rest day on Wednesday, after the Cubans qualified for the semifinals of the championship, which is being held in the city of Aguascalientes and qualifies for the World Cup of the category next October, in Taiwan.
As it did last September, after the escape of half of the Cuban baseball team during the U-23 World Cup, also played in Mexico, the FCB blamed the United States for the dropouts.
“In the midst of the sustained aggression against Cuban sports, the disqualification of the agreement aimed at normalizing the arrival of our players in Major League Baseball (MLB) continues to constitute a stimulus for the orchestrators of these athlete trafficking actions,” said the federation.
In December 2018, the FCB and the Major Leagues signed a historic pact, which would allow baseball players from the island to play in the MLB without having to leave their country, but the government of Republican Donald Trump (2017-2022) blocked it just four months later. The deal is still frozen.
This escape by Fadraga and Ávalos occurs at a time when Cuba is experiencing massive migration, in the midst of its worst economic crisis in three decades, due to the effects of the covid-19 pandemic and the tightening of Washington sanctions.
Earlier this week, four athletes left the Cuban delegation of nine karate fighters who were serving a training base in Guatemala.
Among the sports figures who have escaped in recent months are the wrestler Ismael Borrero, Olympic champion in Rio-2016, and the canoeist Fernando Dayán Jorge, Olympic champion in Tokyo-2020.
