Word: cuban
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Even Baltimore loyalists were struck by the way players like third baseman Omar Linares, who earns about $100 a month, evoked the grace of Joe DiMaggio and other major league greats of the past. The Cubans' joyful hustle offered quite a contrast to the surly indifference of millionaire Orioles like Albert Belle, who was fanned repeatedly by Cuban pitchers. Says Baltimore fan Paul Koehnlein, a 41-year-old electrical engineer: "The Cubans fill every inning with the heart and the attention to fundamentals that U.S. players don't show our kids anymore...
Even before last Monday's game, millions of U.S. fans wished their teams could land a Cuban like Livan or Orlando Hernandez, the brothers who helped pitch the Florida Marlins and New York Yankees to World Series crowns in 1997 and 1998. But that can happen only if players defect and leave their families behind, as the Hernandezes did: Livan through Mexico and Orlando by boat. None defected last week, even though U.S. sports agents were practically leaning over the rails waving contracts...
...Obviously, the question can't be answered by including everyone who lived for a time in the U.S. and influenced the art scene there, because that would make Max Ernst an American instead of a Franco-German surrealist and confer a sort of honorary American status on the Cuban Wilfredo Lam. It would also have made the show unmanageably large. Practically everyone in it, as it stands, was a U.S. citizen and resident, though expatriates like Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936), who left America early and came back only to commit suicide, are included...
Putting players under effective house arrest for the egregious offense of being born Cuban is not acceptable. Denying free speech in a publicly financed stadium 45 miles from the nation's capital is still less...
...Above all, I am Cuban...I just thought it was the right...