The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s Sports Column
At the end of last year, the Florida Marlins baseball team underwent and extreme makeover. An odd franchise with a short history, they were best known for winning a couple of World Series (1997, 2003) and after each instance, dismissing their best players to maximize profits by slashing payroll. Indeed, they hadn’t been competitive for a while.
But this year they unveiled a new stadium. After threatening to move to San Antonio, they eventually got taxpayers to help fund the enterprise. And to celebrate moving into their new digs, they have made efforts to improve their local image.
The team changed its name from the Florida Marlins to the Miami Marlins. They introduced fancy new uniforms with pastel colors that reflected the local style. And they hired a big time manager, former Chicago White Sox skipper Ozzie Guillen.
Guillen was attractive to the Marlins’ ownership for several reasons. First, he’s a proven winner, having led Chicago to the title in 2005. Second, he’s a celebrity manager, famous for 
speaking his mind and popping off in all manners controversial, entertaining, and occasionally just bizarre. And third, he’s Latino, hailing from Venezuela, and Marlins’ ownership hoped this would promote among Miami’s own large Latino community.
The first of these factors may yet prove to be Guillen’s legacy in Miami. But today, the second and the third collided in a way the Marlin’s ownership did not predict and does not like.
In his own inimitable fashion, Guillen let it fly the other day. Time Magazine published an interview in which he said he loved Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and and admired him for staying in power so long. He also recently said he gets drunk after every game, win or lose, and has been doing so for about a quarter of a century, but that’s not making nearly the waves.
Castro, of course, is the third rail of south Florida politics. The region has a large Cuban-American population, many of whom are refugees or descended from refugees of the 1959 revolution, and the reaction has been swift. Guillen apologized, but it wasn’t enough. Today, the Marlins suspended him for five games without pay.
As a labor issue, I don’t have a problem with this. Guillen may have put a dent in Marlins’ revenues, so if they want to punish or even fire him, that’s fine. But as a social issue, this is something that needs to be addressed.
I have no love for Fidel Castro. He has been, my most any standard, a brutal, totalitarian dictator. But life isn’t black and white, and the nuances are important.
First, Castro’s revolution was in fact a good thing for many Cuban people. The nominally democratic administration of Juan Bautista that preceded him, was in fact a shamefully corrupt regime in the pocket of the U.S. The government favored the
mostly white elites at the expense of the largely black and mestizo peasantry.
Second, the ongoing American embargo of Cuba is a laughting stock to everyone in the world, aside from Americans and Cubans. Begun in 1960, it became a nearly full embargo exactly fifty years ago. No other country in the world, not even our staunchest allies Great Britain and Canad, participates, and haven’t for many years. But here we are, more than two decades after the end of the Cold War, punishing a little island nation just 90 miles from our borders. And there’s only one reason. The same Cuban-American community now calling for Guillen’s head is absolutely rabid about Castro.
And why does anyone outside of Florida care what they think? Again, there’s one reason and one reason only. Presidential politics. Every election is tight, Florida’s one of the few important states up for grabs, and every presidential candidate wants to win the Sunshine State’s handsome bounty of electoral votes.
Enough is enough. Even many of the younger Cuban-Americans in Florida don’t support the travel ban and embargo anymore. Give Guillen to the mob as sacrifice to their ravenous bloodlust if you must. That millionaire will be fine. But it’s time we had a serious conversation about why this nation’s foreign policy is partially held hostage by an aging special interest group driven by revenge for the crimes that took place during the John Kennedy administration.
It’s time to move on.