The Lost Prospects of Cuba
Hundreds of baseball players have fled Cuba in the past three years, only to find themselves trapped by a dream.
ESPN THE MAGAZINE / JUNE 2017
On the afternoon of April 28, 2014, Lerys Aguilera stepped out of his house in Holguín, a provincial capital in Cuba's rustic eastern half. He hadn't gone far when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and faced a young man, a stranger, who looked to be in his early 30s. In Holguín, Lerys Aguilera was famous. For the prior 11 seasons he'd played first base and hit cleanup for the Holguín Sabuesos, one of 16 teams in the National Series, Cuba's grandes ligas. He was 6-foot-1 and almost 300 pounds; he was a slugger, a reliable home run hitter, with a career batting average of .270. The man who tapped him on the shoulder knew all this and said so. He also knew other parts of Aguilera's biography -- namely, that the ballplayer had fallen in love with a Dominican woman who'd come to Cuba to study medicine, that the two had married and that not long ago his wife's visa had expired, forcing her back to her home country.
The man's pitch was succinct: Let us take you to the Dominican Republic for free. You reunite with your wife, and we'll help you pursue a baseball career in America. Aguilera had already researched ways to get to the Dominican Republic legally on his own. But the expense of a Dominican visa plus a plane ticket was far beyond his means, exponentially more than his annual governmental stipend as a Cuban baseball player. If Aguilera wished to take this opportunity, the man told him, he should walk outside his door at exactly 3 p.m. two days from now. The man would be waiting.
For two nights, Aguilera did not sleep. For two nights, he prayed. At the appointed hour, he stood up from his kitchen table and, saying nothing to his family -- not his father, mother, brother or grandmother -- he walked out of the house and into a van. He had no idea where they were taking him; he had no idea who they were. His guides dispensed almost no information. It occurred to him then, his throat tightening, that he was no longer in control of anything at all. He had put himself totally at the mercy of smugglers..….