| Opening doors to Cuba in a baseball
game
By PATRICIA LEFEVERE
Special to the National Catholic Reporter
St. Paul,
Minn.
Fr. Dennis Dease never forgot that a ping-pong ball opened the
door to China. The 1972 rapprochement between Beijing and Washington began with
a 1971 Chinese invitation to the U.S. table-tennis team to visit China.
What worked for one communist country might hold the key to
diplomatic ties with another, thought Dease, who hopes that a baseball game
might be the key in the case of Cuba. In December, Dease, the president of the
University of St. Thomas here, returned from his fourth trip to Cuba in nine
years. It was during an earlier trip to the University of Havana that St.
Thomas faculty heard that the Havana school wanted to host the St. Thomas
team.
During Dease’s latest stay in Havana, he met with Cuban
Minister of Higher Education Dr. Fernando Vecino Alegret to request permission
for the “Tommies” to play the University of Havana in Havana. Dease
received the official invitation by phone from the University of Havana
president, Dr. Juan Vela Valdez, Jan. 3rd. Thirty members of the St. Thomas
baseball team, including coaches, and 10 university faculty and staff members,
will be in Havana Jan. 22 through Jan. 29. The two teams will match up for one
or more games Jan. 26 and/or Jan. 27.
St. Thomas has already received two licenses from the U.S.
Treasury Department to participate in educational and baseball activities. When
the Cubans say, “Play ball!” the game will be the first played by a
Catholic school and only the second ever played by an American collegiate team
in Cuba since the communist take-over of the island in 1959. In 1986 a
Johns-Hopkins University team played in Cuba.
A second game is envisioned this spring between the two teams in
St. Paul. “Maybe they can even play the Minnesota Twins while they’re
in town,” Dease told NCR.
But the effort is about more than sports, said Dease, a priest of
the Minneapolis-St. Paul archdiocese who has long held a special interest in
Cuba. He has learned Spanish since making his first humanitarian visit in 1991
and has many contacts at the University of Havana and at the Polytechnic
Institute José Antonio Echeverría. Besides Dease, some 42 other
St. Thomas faculty, staff, trustees and students have visited Cuba in recent
years. Four Cuban faculty and staff and a graduate student from the University
of Havana have visited and lectured at St. Thomas during the 1999 spring and
fall semesters, and more are expected in 2000.
The groundwork for such academic ties was laid last January during
a weeklong St. Thomas-sponsored faculty development trip to Cuba. Dr. Miriam
Williams, St. Thomas’ associate vice president for academic affairs,
compared the experience to “a match-making trip, sort of like a dating
service.” She said all 17 St. Thomas participants had found a match with
Cuban staff and faculty holding similar interests.
Besides the baseball game, a dozen other projects have been
finalized or proposed as part of a three-year academic and cultural exchange
between St. Thomas and Cuba. They include technology seminars in Havana taught
by St. Thomas software professors and a course on modern Cuba to be presented
in St. Paul by historians from St. Thomas and from St. John’s University
in Collegeville, Minn., and by three visiting Cuban scholars. St. Thomas’
English department is planning literature and writing workshops in Havana. One
of the St. Thomas language professors, Dr. Sonia Feigenbaum, will make her
third trip to Cuba this month as part of her project of translating the poetry
of three contemporary Cuban women poets.
Even St. Thomas’ Justice and Peace Studies faculty plan to
develop a service-learning course in Cuba, most likely with the nongovernmental
Martin Luther King Center in Havana.
How did a Catholic university in the Midwest that prepares about
half of its 10,000 students for careers in the business of capitalism come to
engage the Cubans? “The Cuban people have a lot to teach us,” Dease
said, noting Cuba’s highly trained medical and educational corps.
“The Twin Cities are 2,000 miles from Havana, and there’s not as much
opposition to trade with Cuba here as you find in Miami or New Jersey,” he
said.
While the U.S. government has banned tourist and business travel
to the island as part of its trade embargo, it has made exceptions for
humanitarian aid and visits designed to encourage democratic exchange.
Just as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald delivered jazz to a
closed-door Soviet Union in the 1950s, Dease hopes that Coach Dennis Denning
and his 20 “Tommies,” who were NCAA Division III runners-up in 1999,
will inaugurate a round of academic and economic opportunity for the
universities involved.
The trip, and a possible return visit to Minnesota by the Cuban
team, is being funded by a $100,000 grant from the Carl and Eloise Pohlad
Family Foundation.
National Catholic Reporter, January 14,
2000
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