ESPN featured an anti-Castro regime article prominently on its website Monday afternoon, just one day after its social media feed came under fire for posting a note that many took as praise for communist dictator in semi-retirement Fidel Castro.
President Obama is in Cuba this week to meet with Fidel’s brother Raul Castro, and to discuss efforts to normalize relations between the United States and the small communist-run country. The Tampa Bay Rays are also scheduled to play the Cuban national baseball team Tuesday, and ESPN won the rights to broadcast the game.
Though many have hailed the upcoming ballgame as “historic,” a few, including Miami Herald columnist Dan Le Batard, are reminded of the oppression that Cubans have suffered at the hands of the Castro regime.
“Another loss. That’s what this already feels like to so much of Miami — before the ‘historic’ baseball game has even been played. As if the Cubans who fled to this country haven’t already felt enough of those losses over the decades,” read the op-ed, titled “‘Historic’ game in Cuba ignores the pain so many people endured.”
“Lost childhoods. Lost roots. Lost families. Lost land. Lost freedoms. Lost lives in the ocean that divides Cuba and America like the million miles of distance between desperation and hope,” it added.
The article appeared originally at the Miami Herald, and was picked up later by ESPN, where Batard is a regular contributor.
“So much happy coverage on the television this week. Historic visit! America and baseball celebrating themselves. President Barack Obama, Derek Jeter and ESPN head toward communism like it is another cruise port, so many symbols of Americana descending on a rotting island stuck in the 1950s, and it doesn’t feel quite right back in Miami, like watching a funeral morph into a party,” he wrote.
“The history of my own people feels like it is being either ignored or trampled, and I’m not quite sure which of those feels worse,” the columnist added.
The article, which appeared as the featured story on ESPN’s webpage Monday afternoon, comes after the sports news group posted — and then deleted — a tweet Sunday regarding Castro’s love of sports.
“Savior and scourge, Fidel Castro was many things to many people,” the now-deleted tweet read. “One thing all can agree on: He loved his sports.”
Prior to the tweet’s deletion, the reaction online was not kind:
Then why did so many Cuban athletes risk their lives to defect to freedom? Love of sports persecution for athletes? https://t.co/8DcLCJ80cD
— Glenn Ordway (@GlennDOrdway) March 20, 2016
I’ll take ‘Stupid Tweets’ for $1000, Alex. https://t.co/9wR0crp0Ku
— Victor Rojas (@VictorRojas) March 20, 2016
Dumbest tweet of the day or of all time? https://t.co/RonXSGNhNv
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) March 20, 2016
Batard added in his column, “I’ve never known anything but freedom. My grandparents and parents made sure that was so. Now my grandparents are dead, and my parents are old, and the Cuban regime that strangled them somehow lives on … lives on to play a baseball game with our country this week.”
“America extends its hand toward a dictator who has the blood of my people on his own hands. And now my parents, old exiles, have to watch Obama and Jeter and ESPN throw a happy party on land that was stolen from my family — as the rest of America celebrates it, no less. That’s going to hurt, no matter how you feel about the politics,” he added.
