The 2026 World Baseball Classic is a year away, but Cuban players in Major League Baseball are being forced to confront a difficult choice well in advance of the tournament.
To play for Cuba, or to not play for Cuba? The answer, which naturally varies from player to player, depends upon myriad unique factors.
For some, like Yoan Moncada and Andy Ibanez, there is interest, as PelotaCubanaUSA’s Yusseff Diaz reported last week. Moncada and Ibanez both played for Cuba in 2023.
For Aroldis Chapman, however, there is none. None at all. And he didn’t mince words about it.
“I was a traitor. A worm and a traitor. And now they want us to go play,” Chapman told Swing Completo while he was a member of the Kansas City Royals. Swing Completo reported Chapman’s remarks this past week as Federacion Cubana de Beisbol officials announced they would ask players who had left the island nation, including those who had abandoned the national team while playing abroad, who had previously been barred from representing the island nation.
Chapman unsuccessfully attempted to defect from Cuba in 2008 and was ostracized. After returning from the 2009 World Baseball Classic, he decided to leave the island for good. When he succeeded in 2009, walking away from the Cuba national team in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, he left his family, including his girlfriend and newborn, behind.
“I think that all those people who are calling up the players who are [in the United States] and those who are going to the Classic, I think they are the first ones who should respect themselves and not be calling up all of us who are here,” Chapman, who signed with the Boston Red Sox as a free agent this past offseason, told Swing Completo. “After they have done everything they did to all of us, they now want us to go play? I have no resentment about anything. I am simply clear about things.”
Chapman is among numerous Cuban players who have left the island nation to seek their fortune playing in Major League Baseball or elsewhere since the start of the trade embargo with the United States. Over the years, economic conditions in Cuba have driven players to seek a better life abroad, creating a drain on baseball talent that has made the national team, a point of pride for the government and people, far less competitive than it could be on the world stage. Cuba advanced to the semifinals of the 2023 World Baseball Classic but lost to their archrival, the United States, 14-2 in Miami in a game played in a hostile atmosphere that was marred by field incursions by protestors. This past year, Cuba didn’t advance out of group play at the 2024 WBSC Premier12, going 1-4 in Group B in Taiwan
