The police boat turned out to be a fishing boat, and so no one was forced to jump into the ocean. But four hours later, as they approached the Florida coast, they hit a reef, and one of the engines failed. They slowed to a creep. The sun rose, and they became visible. “That’s when a plane came over, and they saw us,” recalls Osbek. The boat was achingly close to the shore. “The water wasn’t dark but light blue. And we could see the beach.” Out of nowhere came a pair of U.S. Coast Guard cutters. Everyone in the boat knew that if they got to the beach they were free—they’d be granted asylum. But no one thought to swim for it, mainly because the cutters had big guns trained on them. “The Coast Guard shot bullets into the engine that turned it off.”

Osbek was taken off one boat and put onto another, where, for the next six days, he was questioned by various Americans in uniforms. He begged them to take him to Guantánamo, but they handed him back to the Cuban authorities instead. “The first Cuban police guy I talked to asked, ‘What are you going to do now that you can never play baseball again?’ ” What he was going to do was try to get out again. In Cuba, not only was he banned from baseball, but his former teammates didn’t want to be seen with him or even talk to him on their cell phones. He was at risk of being jailed. He didn’t know who Javier was, but prayed that he’d call again. He was the only hope of getting out of Cuba.

Getting into Cuba, it turns out, is also a problem, especially if you have anything to do with baseball. It may still be possible to sneak in, but you’d be insane to try. The governments of the United States and Cuba now agree on at least one thing: Americans with a commercial interest in springing Cuban ballplayers should be jailed for pursuing it. Gus Dominguez is now serving a five-year sentence in a California prison. In 1996 another American sports agent, Juan Ignacio Hernandez, was sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban jail for traveling to Cuba and trying to persuade ballplayers to leave. “When you roll into Havana and they figure out you’re from Major League Baseball,” says the Braves’ McMichael, “right away they shut you down. I’ve seen guys try it. I’ve seen guys try to get a radar gun in [to clock pitches]. And they get put right back on the plane going out. To know what a Cuban player is is now just this side of impossible. You can’t legally lay your eyes on them.” The Florida jury that convicted Dominguez was onto something: the flow of information and of baseball players out of Cuba is slower now than it has been in a long time. “What’s strange about Cuba,” says agent Joe Kehoskie, “is that the money given to Cuban defectors is increasing. But the number of Cuban defectors is decreasing.”

You aren’t even likely to be allowed to enter Cuba as an American baseball journalist—at least not without an extraordinary amount of hassling from the Cuban government, which, since Fidel took ill, has become much more vigilant in preventing foreign reporters from going where they want to go and seeing who they want to see. But there remains a path from the outside into Cuban baseball. It runs through Canada—specifically through a 59-year-old retired high-school history teacher named Kit Krieger.

Krieger lives in Vancouver, where for 17 years he taught in the public schools. In 1997, by what he describes as a series of accidents, he was elected head of British Columbia’s 41,000-member teachers’ union. He began a tradition of sending teachers and school supplies to Cuba twice a year. “Because of Cuba’s isolation they have very few friends,” says Krieger, “and my union quickly became Cuba’s best friend.” Much as he loved teaching, Krieger loved baseball more. He isn’t an ordinary fan. He is the sort who when asked for the date Babe Ruth made his debut not only will give it to you off the top of his head, but will also list the lineups of both teams, along with their batting averages for that year. He is also the sort of fan who from a shockingly young age hounded professional baseball players for autographs. When he was 13 he leaned over the outfield wall and asked Joe DiMaggio what it was like to be married to Marilyn Monroe. (DiMaggio ignored him.) “Mickey Mantle told me to fuck off once,” he says with a hint of pride.