7-16-05, 11:55 am

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has dropped baseball, which Americans, myself included, have considered our 'past-time' since the early 20th century, for the 2012 Olympics and beyond. Americans should be angry at this and their leaders should be protesting. After all, large numbers of us watch the games, follow the pennant races, and know much more about the merits of the teams and the players than we know about those who make policy in government and business. Mass media sometimes spends as much time covering sports as general news and provides much fairer and more accurate reporting and analysis.

Actually, a little historical background to the Olympics from a Marxist perspective that is widely influential globally but largely invisible in the U.S. might help put these events in historical perspective. The modern Olympics were put together by aristocrats and not so subtle champions of imperialism at the end of the 19th century to serve as a show case for the superiority of white Europeans in various 'manly competitions.' These competitions mimicked often European conquests abroad and celebrated an aristocratic view of 'classical Greek civilization' in a world where those who later won wars got, as the British imperialists were wont to say, their first training on the 'playing fields of Eaton.'

However, the peoples of the world after World War II came to see the Olympic Games as open to everyone and everything, a place where competition can be both free and friendly and both new and old nations can gain recognition.

From the 1956 to the 1980s, the Soviet Union was the greatest winner in total medals at every Olympics save 1984, which the Soviet boycotted in retaliation for the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. For supporters of socialism, this was used as evidence that the socialist system, with its commitment to planning and teamwork, could win over even the most powerful capitalist nation, the United States, which had an enormous number of truly outstanding athletes and many of the greatest athletic training facilities on earth.

But American athletes were limited by businessmen who with the help of government emphasized a hierarchical capitalist approach to sports which concentrated on a few popular professional sports, baseball, American football, and basketball, to the exclusion of track and field, and a wide variety of team sports. Yet, Americans were told that the Soviets victories had nothing to do with the achievements of the socialist approach or the limitations of commercial capitalist sports
Since the Olympics from its inception emphasized 'amateurism,' (those aristocrats believed in 'gentleman athletes' as they believed in 'gentlemen' settling and 'civilizing colonies'), U.S. cold warriors usually answered that the Soviets and athletes from other socialist countries (particularly the German Democratic Republic) were secret professionals and that the female athletes from socialist countries, rather than showing the greater gender equality in those countries, were filled with male hormones and who knows what else.

The Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic are gone, and amateurism in the Olympics is on the way out. Professionals now play regularly in the various team and other sports. Although U.S. major league baseball has many players who are citizens of Latin American countries and a much smaller number from East Asian countries.

Cuba, which initially began to develop baseball in the late 19th century when it was still a Spanish colony and many Cubans saw the United States as a potential friend and ally in their anti-colonial struggle, has been for years the great winner in both Olympic and non-Olympic international baseball competition, although there are larger Latin American countries, Mexico for example, where the game is widely played.

Cuban baseball since the revolution has been non-commercial, open to the people who enjoy watching the games (no luxury boxes and class differences in seating resolved by price and no problem with ticket prices). Cuban baseball has also been organized on a basis which permits the best players to rise at the various levels of the sport without a U.S. style minor league system of poorly paid players striving to reach the majors to become rich and famous.

Cuba is a relatively poor developed socialist country with a very high level of social equality as evidenced in its, full employment, education and health care system. Cuba’s relative poverty is due largely to the economic war and blockade that the U.S. and those governments the U.S. influences have fought against it since 1960 and the overthrow of its fraternal socialist friends after 1989.

While Cuba has seen a number of its best players defect to the United States in order to make millions of dollars, which propagandists for capitalism hail as proof of the superiority of American 'democracy' over Cuban 'totalitarianism,' baseball in Cuba is a sport produced for the use value and enjoyment of both players and spectators. As such, it is an excellent example of the superiority of socialism over capitalism when it is compared to baseball in the United State, with new stadiums built with taxpayer money that cater to the corporations and the rich and are a financial burden for working families who want to see the games live.

Cuba though is fighting back for baseball in the Olympics while the Bush administration, whose leader made millions through the Texas Rangers, a team that his family connections enabled him to be part owner of, appears uninterested. According to press reports, Humberto Rodriquez, Cuba’s Minister of Sport has declared his country’s commitment to fight for re-instatement saying, 'we cannot give up the battle for lost.'

Rodriguez denounced U.S. Major League Baseball, which is organizing a baseball equivalent of the Soccer World Cup on a private commercial basis for next March. 'They have never cared about the Olympic program or the development of the discipline in other countries. They are only interested in increasing their profits with their show. If the competitive system of international baseball has to be improved, let those of us who represent the discipline do it among ourselves.'

So far baseball has been in four Olympics and Cuba has won three of them. The Major League owners bar players from their rosters from competing although minor leaguers and former major leaguers can.

Baseball, which both the American and Cuban people love, can and should be a basis for both co-existence and cooperation between the two peoples and governments. Advocates of baseball will be permitted in 2009 to apply for re-instatement of the games for the 2016 Olympics. We who support socialism or simply want to see a baseball game in the U.S. for under $30 per person (counting refreshments and that is a conservative estimate) a person might call for U.S.-Cuban cooperation in making the case for the re-instituting of baseball in the Olympics.

Of course, such a campaign would be much more effective if the next U.S. administration, which will take office in 2009, lifted the blockade and established full normal relations with Cuba, which an administration committed to undoing the damage of Bush and his predecessors would do.

Cuban-American cooperation could be a springboard for many wonderful things for both countries and for the people of Latin America—for joint action on improving Latin American health care systems, where Cubans have a lot to contribute, to agricultural programs, to cultural exchanges. Of course, a U.S. government that would recognize and work with Cuba on many issues might also learn from success of Cuban baseball to institute price controls and other regulatory reforms that would benefit American fans and even the majority of the players. Today now victims of a star system where a few players make multi-million dollar long-term salaries and many others either never see or bounce up and down from the major leagues until they are bounced out of the system with little to show for their efforts. Until the 1970s, owners were permitted to hold players to indefinite contracts, trade them to anyone they wished, and in effect blacklist them if they tried to go to another team on their own. In a wonderful expression of capitalist ideology, owners were given the power to place 'reserve clauses' in baseball players’ contracts by a conservative Republican congress at the beginning of the 1920s, a congress which declared in its legislation that baseball was a sport, not a business!

Of course, for the U.S. and Cuba to start to cooperate generally and work to put baseball back into the Olympics, the U.S. will finally have to stop being Bush League in its policies at home and abroad, a bad but instructive pun.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.