The Cuban Baseball Federation Suffers From Historical Amnesia

Kiele Alessandra Cabrera during her intrusion on the field of the Palm Beach stadium during the game between Cuba and Venezuela. (Screen capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, Generation Y, Havana, 1 June 2021 — The writer Eliseo Alberto Diego, known as Lichi, used to say that “history is a cat who always falls on her feet.” The Cuban Baseball Federation should be warned about this ability of the past to stand up, a way of avoiding silence and manipulation.

The official entity has protested the events that occurred in this Monday’s pre-Olympic baseball game between the teams from Cuba and Venezuela. In an exalted note, it describes as “unacceptable that characters contrary to the spirit of a sporting event attempt against the team’s concentration.”

The tantrum is in response to the posters with the phrases “Homeland and Life,” “Free Cuba,” and criticisms of Miguel Díaz-Canel, that were displayed in the stands of the West Palm Beach stadium during the live broadcast of the game, displays that Cuban State television was unable to prevent from sneaking into the Tele Rebelde channel. But it turns out that what happened yesterday is part of a civic tradition of baseball field protests that the regime itself praised when they occurred in Republican era Cuba.

On December 4, 1955, a group of young people threw themselves onto the field of the Cerro stadium while a game was being played between teams from Havana and Almendares. They carried a banner with demands against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, with the moment captured by the television cameras broadcasting the ballgame, allowing the images to reach the screens of thousands of spectators throughout the island.

According to the official Cuban discourse, that action was more than justified, and they constantly recall it as a revolutionary feat. But with regards to what happened this Monday, they reproach the Florida stadium guards for not having acted “as established by the security protocols”…

The story is nothing other than a feline with a penetrating gaze that flips in the air and ends up landing with its nails on the susceptible skin of those who want to hide and distort it.

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