MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In this paper, I examine the discrepancies between how Major League Baseball treats Cuban athletes who defect in hopes of pursuing a professional career in the U.S. and how the U.S. Government has dealt with Cuban nationals who have immigrated to the U.S. and compares these instances with how both institutions deal with other Latin American immigrants. For example, Cuban baseball players must establish residency in another country before coming to the U.S. in order to maximize the earnings potential of their initial free agent contract. This in turn has created a black market for those who facilitate the defection process as middlemen and extort the athletes in question for percentages of their future contracts. This reality stands in contrast to the privileged status of political refugee bestowed upon Cuban citizens who successfully reach U.S. soil since the 1995 revision of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. Alternatively, within the bylaws of Major League Baseball, international players from other Latin American countries who are not Cuba do not have these contractual limitations and this stands in stark contrast with how the U.S. Government classifies other Latin American immigrants who reach this country illegally as criminals slotted for deportation. By mapping out the irony of this contradiction, I argue that the commodification of sport within the capitalist framework of the U.S. perpetuates the myth of team unity through the fragmentation of individual identity and that the disproportionate salaries that professional athletes receive for “playing a game” distorts the complex politics of labor that parallel the ways in which the labor of illegal immigrants sustain the U.S. economic system.