NO BALLS

The great Jesus Christ once asked the question: What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? According to his teaching, not even the whole world is a good price for a man’s soul.

Yet our Caribbean cricketers and their supporters have sold their souls to Stanford for the dubious opportunity to earn money playing cricket for his entertainment.

I emphasise his entertainment, for there can be no spontaneous joy among the Caribbean people, the sensible ones, I mean, who watch their athletic young men prostrate their black selves before the throne of White man Stanford and his fellow Americans.

I am of course referring to the decision by Stanford to exclude a Cuban cricket team from participating in a cricket competition among Caribbean cricketers.

Last year, when I learned that Cuba was interested in entering the cricket arena, I was excited Cubans playing cricket with their Caribbean brothers? That would be, I thought, a great event.

The more I thought of it the more exciting the prospect became. I looked back into History. Cuba, settled by Spaniards in the early days of Spanish colonization of the Western Hemisphere, was one of the few islands in the Caribbean which the British colonizers failed to capture.

All the way back in 1655, Oliver Cromwell, ruler of England, set up a grand western design which was a plan to capture Hispaniola and Cuba from Spain. The plan failed and his military leaders were only able to capture Jamaica which was very poorly defended and really ill-considered.

If Cromwell had succeeded in his designs on Cuba, this large island would have become England’s best outpost for English values and its life-styles in the Caribbean. Its vast expanse of flat land would have lent itself to those British countryside pleasures such as cricket and horse racing and Cuba would have been one of the major cricketing countries of the world.

This was not to be but, as the centuries passed, Cuba fell under the influence of the United States and baseball became one of its sporting passions.

Yet cricket filtered into pockets of the Cuban population, mainly from the British Caribbean immigrants who went to work there in the 1920s. Cricket sprang up in some of Cuba’s Sugar areas where Jamaicans played with other British Caribbean people and some British expatriates.

Around the 1950s and again in the 1990s, various serious attempts were made to popularize the game of cricket which the expatriate community played with much enthusiasm.

The game has been kept alive in Guantanamo and other parts of Cuba by the combined interest of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Britain Recently, the Cuban government itself, in an effort to fraternize with its English-speaking Caribbean partners, have taken positive steps to promote the game of cricket among Cubans.

And now this! Cubans have reached that stage in the game when they would like to take part in competitive cricket with other Caribbean countries. They wanted to enter the 20/20 organized by Stanford. But Stanford rebuffed them trying to make the United States responsible for the decision to exclude our large northern neighbour from our game.

So what if the United States want to deny the Cuban people of everything down to the game of cricket? That’s United States policy. Everybody in the Caribbean has known this since 1960 when Fidel Castro chased the corrupt American puppet from power and launched a complete Cuban Revolution.

Since then the United States has tried to deny Cubans of bread and water, medicines and luxuries and it has been only by the dint of determination that Cuba has survived its revolution for over 40 years. Such has been the relentless but futile efforts by successive U.S. presidents to destabilize and ruin Cuba, that the Cuban people have earned the admiration of many people in the Caribbean and has garnered acceptance, though grudgingly, from the English-speaking Caribbean leaders.

Having survived its glorious revolution Cuba has become the benefactor of the rest of the Caribbean, not with money which corrupt politicians can steal but with the more sustainable gifts of education professional training and technical support.

Should the governments of the Caribbean allow the dictates of the United States to decide whether their citizens should play a game with Cubans? How ridiculous!

If this is how it goes, the islands should take a new look at Stanford to see if they find the wooden horse of Troy, to see if Stanford is really a U.S agent in disguise using his millions as a tool to subdue and subjugate our scattered island governments.

True, in denying Cuba its rightful place among its Caribbean family of nations, rich man Stanford, or US agent Stanford has appropriately shed his crocodile tears because Cuba could not play and has also expressed his hypocritical desire to see Cuba in the Caribbean games of the future.

And this is where I am let down by the Caribbean cricketers who closed their eyes to discrimination against Cubans and demeaned themselves to betray their Cuban brothers for the entertainment of Stanford.

Perhaps the young cricketers do not know any better. They are uneducated and probably don’t their own know history. Perhaps their middle class administrators, though better educated, are too concerned about other matters to safeguard the dignity of their players.

Perhaps, and most importantly, their Caribbean leaders have no sense. No sense of what they ought to be as leaders of a region which was cursed by slavery and white imperialism. No sense of dignity no pride, not enough pride to tell Stanford to go packing with his money if he is going to promote American divisive policies in the Caribbean.

These Caribbean leaders have no balls and do their region no credit!