Cuban officials have a term for any baseball player they suspect of wanting to flee Cuba and play ball for the capitalists who operate the U.S. major leagues: cabeza sucia, “dirty head.” It is, of course, an ideological term, used to describe how a player’s fealty to the Revolution has troublingly deteriorated, has grown impure. But there are remedies. Official Cuba has another phrase: limpiarse, “to clean oneself.”
Domestic espionage in Cuba is as institutionalized as any country in the world, webbed inextricably into the everyday life of the island. It is both centralized and grassroots. Posted in every village, town, neighborhood, and sometimes city block is, for example, a branch office of something called the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, or CDR. Its membership—a figure reckoned to be in the hundreds of thousands—is tasked with keeping watch on its neighbors and reporting back suspicious behavior to the Cuban state security apparatus. Every Cuban in Miami seems to have a story of local betrayal. A man fed up by rolling blackouts shouts from his window a profanity-laced invective directed at the Castros, and he winds up the next day in an interrogation room. A black-market purchase of a pound of beef, thought to be transacted discreetly, results in jail time. In aggregate, these sorts of Iron Curtain experiences have grown less frequent in Cuba over the years, but they still occur.
It doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine that this highly evolved intelligence apparatus takes a special interest in the country’s baseball talent and that some portion of its expertise is directed toward keeping that talent on the island. In the course of reporting this story, I spoke to four former Cuban government officials—three of whom worked for domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, and the fourth as the director for INDER, the governing body of sports in Cuba. All themselves defected to the U.S. by various means (some of which are still classified) between 1987 and 2007; their views are therefore dated. But their claims depict a culture of chivato—old Cuban slang for a snitch, a rat—that appears to have existed within Cuban baseball for decades. “Do Cuban athletes sometimes have to do things for counterintelligence? Yes, they do. Yes, from the very beginning,” said Juan Antonio Rodriguez Menier, one of the highest-ranking Cuban spies ever to defect, in 1987. Multiple counterintelligence agents were, at any given time, assigned to spy on the national baseball team and cultivate collaborators within it, says Gregorio Miguel Calleiro, a high-ranking officer at INDER in the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s. A former major in Cuba’s intelligence division named Roberto Hernandez Del Llano, who once trained for two years in Moscow with the KGB, defected from Cuba in 2007. In a signed statement to Avelino Gonzalez, he made an explosive claim: “Most members of the national baseball team that travel abroad are informants for the government.” Several Cuban defectors now playing in major league farm systems affirmed to me that state security makes an active effort to turn players. “Some accept, and some don’t,” said Henry Urrutia of the Baltimore Orioles, who defected in 2010.
The list of those who declined to be interviewed for this article is both unsurprising and yet illuminating. Through the Dodgers, Yasiel Puig turned down requests to be interviewed for this article. The Dodgers front office also declined to comment. Jaime Torres, when contacted in late February, told me: “I have no interest whatsoever in talking to you.” (In early March, Puig fired Torres as his agent and took up with Wasserman Media Group.) El Rubio could not be located. According to one source in January, word on the street in Miami was that he’d been kidnapped, probably by representatives of Tomasito. He told me El Rubio had been held for ransom and released after making some large payment to his captors. Perhaps coincidentally, the house El Rubio bought for $1 million in North Miami in 2013 was put on the market; it sold in January. Officials at Major League Baseball declined to comment, other than to issue a statement that stated that the league and its clubs “have individuals and resources in place to provide appropriate security” and “cannot comment on such measures that have been taken without potentially compromising those efforts.” The Cincinnati Reds apparently chose not to bring an interview request to Aroldis Chapman’s attention at all. “That won’t be necessary,” said Rob Butcher, a Reds spokesman, in an email. “He is not available to speak to you.” The Cuban government did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
7. Stories Within Stories
Around Thanksgiving last year, Yunior Despaigne received a call from his mother in Cuba. She had bad news. Despaigne’s brother, Eduardo Soriano, was in jail. He stood accused of human trafficking.
Naturally, it was a complicated story; it couldn’t be other than a complicated story. When I asked Despaigne for some kind of proof that his brother had in fact been arrested and charged, he first gave me the phone number of Soriano’s lawyer in Cuba. Later, through a Miami Cuban friend who’d traveled to the island and back, Despaigne was able to obtain the Cuban government’s indictment, dated February 11, 2014, which laid out the charges against his brother. In its legalistic Spanish, it read, in part, “. . . the individuals not present, Yasiel Puig Valdes and Raul Pacheco Hernandez, who are living abroad . . . conceived of a plot to extract from Cuba . . . Cuban ballplayers, taking advantage of the relationships that Puig Valdes, when he was a player in Cuba, had established and maintained with some of his teammates, whom he would convince to leave the country . . .” The Cuban government, in other words, has accused Yasiel Puig of human trafficking. (The Magazine has not found evidence supporting the Cuban government’s accusations; it is possible that the Cuban government might be lashing out at a high-profile defector.)
The Despaigne affidavit given in the Corbacho suit makes a more pointed accusation against Puig. Having become aware of Despaigne’s involvement in the suit, Puig is stated to have deliberately “targeted” Despaigne’s family, allegedly sending money to Soriano for delivery to a baseball player in Cienfuegos named Noelvis Entenza. The affidavit makes no mention of what, if anything, Soriano knew about the purposes of the money. Unaware of the “trap” that was being laid, Soriano took the money to Entenza, upon Puig’s urging. Several days later, the Cuban police pounded on the door of Soriano’s house.
Complexity upon complexity. Stories within stories. Despaigne also states in the affidavit that his brother was being charged with inducing a second player to defect: the starting shortstop on the Cuban national team, Erisbel Arruebarrena. (Curiously, when the February indictment was later released, Soriano was accused of recruiting only Entenza, not Arruebarrena.)
In his motion to dismiss the Corbacho suit, Puig characterizes the allegations in it as “incendiary and false.”
As of this writing, Eduardo Soriano remains in prison, awaiting trial. Cuba’s prosecutors are seeking eight years. Soriano is 20 years old. Erisbel Arruebarrena, meanwhile—who was smuggled by lancheros to Haiti, who became a Haitian permanent resident within weeks, who was described in one U.S. media report shortly after he surfaced in Haiti as having a “quick transfer and a plus-plus arm with accuracy,” whose agent Bart Hernandez negotiated with at least three competing major league franchises—signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers in late February. His contract is worth $25 million.
DAN WETZEL
Peyton Manning Leaves Crushing Super Bowl Loss with Reputation Intact
FROM YAHOO! SPORTS
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J.—This was after Peyton Manning approached his offensive line on the opening snap of the Super Bowl, trying to scream a change in cadence only to have the din of MetLife Stadium make his voice mute. “No one could hear me,” he said. Soon, the unexpectedly snapped ball was zipping by his ear en route to a safety for Seattle, the quickest score in Super Bowl history.
This was after Manning threw two interceptions, including a crushing 69-yard pick-six, after he missed reads and overthrew open receivers, after he’d been pushed out of his comfort zone by a brilliant, brutish Seahawks defense. “An excellent defense,” he said.
This was after he trudged off the field, the scoreboard above reading “Seatt
le 43, Denver 8,” one of the worst and certainly most painful losses of his long career. “It’s not an easy pill to swallow,” he said.
This was after Manning dressed quickly in a silent, emotionless, beaten-down Broncos locker room, after his dad Archie and brother Cooper waited outside. “That’s football. It’s why I hate football,” Archie said with gallows humor.
This was after Peyton received a compassionate pat on the back from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, after he huddled with his wife Ashley and a couple friends, after he received a couple of supportive words from John Elway.
This was after he walked slowly, hands in the pockets of his blue suit, headed down toward the interview area, escorted by police. After a reporter from a Mexican TV station tripped over his luggage—pulled by a Broncos employee tailing the quarterback—and wiped out on the floor in a failed, ill-advised interview chase.
This was after he arrived to find a throng of cameras and microphones 15 deep around podium number two, after he gave praise to the Seahawks, took blame himself—and even handled, without losing his cool, a question about whether he’d been “embarrassed” out there.
“It’s not embarrassing at all,” Manning said. “I would not use that word. There’s a bunch of professional football players in that Denver locker room who put in a lot of hard work to play in that game.”
This was after all of that, after the developments and aftermath of a night Peyton Manning—the great Peyton Manning—had been so profoundly ordinary and the Denver offense with its 37.9 points per game in the regular season, the 55 touchdown passes, was nearly shut out. After the Broncos’ dream season, the one Manning came back from neck surgery to engineer, collapsed in spectacular fashion.
It was then that Manning, walking down a hallway back toward the locker room, still surrounded by cops, still followed by a guy dragging his bag, still trying to just find some peace and quiet and to begin the mourning process that comes from losing the big game in a big way.
It was then that Peyton Manning heard the very respectful voice of Steve Lopez, a beer vendor from the Bronx.
“Mr. Manning, could I please get an autograph?” the 25-year-old asked.
Manning’s head turned and looked Lopez in the eye. These were the opposite ends of the NFL food chain—megastar multimillionaire and a guy hawking Bud Lights in the stands. The wave of the crowd was pushing Manning forward, but he locked in on Lopez.
“Not now,” Manning said, “but when I come back this way I will.”
Look, everyone has heard the stories of Peyton Manning being a good guy, a regular guy, or at least as good and regular as you can be when you are this rich and famous and successful. Everyone’s read and heard the saccharine tributes to him, so much so that it’s become trendy to root against him in a way, to celebrate his comeuppance, to laugh at the way his face contorts in certain ways when he’s frustrated.
Someone asked that “embarrassed” question with a hint of enjoyment, after all.
Everyone understands, or should understand, that so many NFL players are humble and appreciative and respectful as Manning is—that he is one of many.
At some point, though, at some level, what really matters about a man is how he treats people who hold no leverage over him, let alone how he treats those people in moments of tumult when it would be quite understandable if he just ignored the request.
How many times through the years had Peyton Manning signed for people, stopped for photos for people, been gracious to people. Now? Here? In the harried moments after this painful and thorough loss, after a chance at a championship was lost and might never come again, in the cramped walkways of a football stadium—not some charity meet-and-greet—isn’t he allowed to be, well, selfishly human?
Manning didn’t think so. He didn’t ignore Steve Lopez. He didn’t ignore, later after he did return from that locker room, others who made the same request. Here was Cheyenne Wiseman, asking if he could sign a T-shirt. Here was Michael Weisman of Philadelphia, looking for an autograph for his 10-year-old son, Alex.
After everything that happened, Peyton Manning kept stopping in the MetLife hallway and honoring requests for his time, no matter how fresh the wound, no matter how pronounced the pressure, no matter how desperately he just wanted to get on the bus, assume his customary place up front, and get the hell out of Jersey.
“The respect he always has for the fans, that’s why I like him,” Lopez said. “That’s why I asked, that’s his reputation. I like the way he keeps his emotions out of the public.”
No, he isn’t the only player who would’ve told Steve Lopez to wait. He isn’t the only player who would sign. He isn’t the only one who knows how great he has it, even when things aren’t so great.
Yet after this game of all games, Peyton Manning was somehow no different than before.
“You know, he’s got the reputation for being a class act,” Weisman said. “That’s him. On a night like this [to sign], I mean, I appreciate it. I know. I understand. That’s Peyton Manning.”
That was Peyton Manning, even on the worst of nights.
Contributors’ Notes
JOEL ANDERSON is a senior national reporter with BuzzFeed News. He covers race, sports, and American culture. Previously, Anderson worked for the Tampa Bay Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Associated Press, the Shreveport Times, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He graduated from Texas Christian University, where he was a member of the football team for three years and editor of the campus newspaper. He now lives in Washington, D.C.
KATIE BAKER, a Seattle native, is a graduate of Columbia University (BA ’02) and the Columbia Journalism School (MS ’05, MA ’06). She started her career as “Periscope” editor for Newsweek International and is currently the managing editor of The Daily Beast, a national online news site.
CHRIS BALLARD is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he has worked since 2000. He is the author of four books, including The Art of a Beautiful Game and One Shot at Forever. A graduate of Pomona College and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two daughters. This is his fourth appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
RICK BASS is the author of 31 books of fiction and nonfiction. In January 2016, Little, Brown will publish For a Little While: New and Selected Stories. His work has also been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Spiritual Writing, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He lives in northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley, where he is a board member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council.
CHRISTOPHER BEAM is a writer living in Beijing. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, GQ, Bloomberg Businessweek, ESPN The Magazine, and New York. Previously, he was a political reporter for Slate in Washington, D.C.
BURKHARD BILGER is a staff writer for The New Yorker. In 2000, his book of essays, Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and Other Southern Comforts, was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award.
FLINDER BOYD is a California native and freelance writer. As a professional basketball player, he lived in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, and Greece during a 10-year career. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College and Queen Mary, University of London, and now resides in New York and London.
JEREMY COLLINS’s essays have appeared in the Georgia Review, the Sycamore Review, the Chattahoochee Review, and SB Nation, among other periodicals. His work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Wabash Award for Nonfiction (selected by Mary Karr), and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and has taught writing at the University of Tennessee, the University of Louisville, and Indiana University Southeast. Collins lives in Colorado with his wife, the artist Alice Stone Collins, and their two daughters, Rose and Grace, and teaches at the Early College of Arvada, outside of Denver.
SCOTT EDEN is a contributing writer for E
SPN The Magazine and the author of Touchdown Jesus. “No One Walks Off the Island” was a finalist for a 2015 National Magazine Award in reporting. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg, Popular Mechanics, the Wall Street Journal, and The Believer magazine. Eden lives in New York City.
TIM GRAHAM covered the NHL for seven seasons with the Buffalo News before switching to NFL reporting for the Palm Beach Post in 2007 and ESPN in 2008. He returned to the News five years ago. The Baldwin-Wallace College alum is a two-time president of the Boxing Writers Association of America.
GREG HANLON’s work has appeared in SB Nation, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, Slate, the New York Observer, and Capital New York. His story for SB Nation Longform, “The Many Crimes of Mel Hall,” was a finalist for the 2014 Livingston Award for national reporting for journalists under 35. He lives in New Jersey.
CHRIS JONES is a writer-at-large for Esquire and a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. He has won two National Magazine Awards for his feature writing and two National Headliner Awards for his columns. This is his fifth appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
ARIEL LEVY joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. Levy received the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for her piece “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” She is currently expanding the essay into a book. Levy teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, every summer and was a Visiting Critic at the American Academy in Rome in 2012. She is the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs.
ELIZABETH MERRILL is a senior writer for ESPN.com. She previously wrote for the Kansas City Star and the Omaha World-Herald.
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