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Historic deal will allow Cuba talent to sign with MLB
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Major League Baseball has reached a historic agreement with the Cuban Baseball Federation allowing Cuban players to sign with US teams without needing to defect, seeking to end the practice of Cuban stars being smuggled off the island on speedboats.
MLB, the Cuban federation and the Major League Baseball Players Association, said they signed the deal on Wednesday after three years of negotiations, providing a ray of light during a period of fraught United States-Cuban relations.
MLB teams will pay the Cuban federation a release fee for each player to be signed from Cuba, providing a huge windfall for Cuban baseball which has suffered from dwindling budgets and the defection of its best players.
“Our primary objective in this agreement is to provide players from Cuba a path to the major leagues without having to endure the hardships many of our players have already experienced,” Dan Halem, MLB deputy commissioner for administration and chief legal officer, said.
The deal, which will have to be renewed after three years, puts the Cuban federation on a par with the terms that the MLB has with other professional baseball leagues around the world.
Cuban players older than age 25 and with six years of service in the Cuban league will be free to sign with MLB teams, Halem said. For those free agents, the teams will pay the Cuban federation between 15 percent and 25 percent of the total amount of guaranteed money on a player’s contract, he added.
The sum will not come out of the player’s remuneration, but be paid on top of that.
The percentage will depend on the size of the contract, Halem said, equaling 20 percent for the first US$25 million, 17.5 percent for the next US$25 million and 15 percent for any amount over US$50 million.
For the under-25 players, who will need Cuba’s permission to leave, MLB teams will pay a straight 25 percent of the player’s signing bonus to the Cuban federation, according to Halem.
Such international amateurs are paid small salaries and make most of their money on signing bonuses, which are limited under MLB’s collective bargaining agreement.
Such a deal would have been virtually impossible under the US-Cuban relations of the Cold War, when diplomatic relations were severed and the US imposed a strict economic embargo on the island country 145 kilometers from Florida.
In the past, many Cuban players seeking riches in the big leagues have made dangerous journeys via human traffickers to defect. Others abandoned the Cuban national team while traveling abroad.
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