This story is part of a weeklong Yahoo series marking one year since the opening of relations between the United States and Cuba.

“I’d rather play for 11 million Cubans than $11 million.” – Omar Linares

Omar Linares, star third baseman for the Cuban national team More

At least 100 Cuban baseball players have defected this year. The actual number is unknown because more and more leave every day. They sneak out in the middle of the night, ferried along by men they’ve never met, into a boat they’ve never seen, onto a destination they’ve never known. They leave behind wives and children, mothers and fathers, house and homeland, because the blaring siren of what can be in America finally overwhelms the reality of what is in Cuba.

Against the starkness of that truth – the scent of capitalism wafting 200 miles from Miami to Havana and proving irresistible for so many – stands Omar Linares, the greatest baseball player you’ve never heard of. He is a son of the Cuban Revolution, born a generation after Fidel Castro first sought power, reared during the height of Castro’s reign, lionized not just because of his aptitude at third base but because of his loyalty. More than a million people have fleed Castro’s Cuba. Linares is not one of them.

As the one-year anniversary of the restoration of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States approaches, the success of modern Cuban players allows the baseball world to lament those like the 48-year-old Linares, whose greatness exists only in grainy YouTube videos and the minds of the scant few lucky enough to have seen him play in person. He stayed in Cuba, as did Victor Mesa and Orestes Kindelan and Antonio Munoz and Javier Mendez and almost all the heroes in the first 30 years of post-Castro Cuban baseball. They were propagandized, their success co-opted into an endorsement for the power of the Revolution. Championship after international championship, medal after Olympic medal, Cuba’s baseball team served as a beacon. Baseball wasn’t just Cuba’s sport; it was its weapon against those who doubted what the Revolution could achieve.

Publicly, players like Linares lauded Cuba’s commitment as the reason behind the team’s success, and the baseball world viewed him as an almost-mythical creature: the man so pure and incorruptible that the money running the modern game couldn’t divorce him from his country. And though in some respects this applies, the actuality – like everything with Cuba – is far more complicated.

Greatness in sport, if anything, increased the scrutiny and responsibility on baseball players, to the point where fear strangled the thought of leaving. The dread of harm being done to the family of the traitorous was palpable. The punishment for failed defections ranged from bad to worse. The sense of abandoning Cuba tortured consciences raised in a society built on systemic mistrust.

And yet it happened, starting on the Fourth of July in 1991, when a Cuban national team pitcher named Rene Arocha hatched a plan to defect during a tournament in Miami. Six days later, he did, leaving in Cuba a wife and a daughter and a sick grandfather. Rey Ordonez followed in 1993 and Livan Hernandez two years after that and his half-brother Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez two years later. It was a trickle, a fraction of the greatness on the island. It was also a reflection of the time that changed Cuba forever.

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