Throwing Cuban players a lifeline

Sporting News, The, August 10, 1998 by Kevin Baxter

Seamans says Cubas not only knew when the most recent batch of players was coming out, but also had prior knowledge of Orlando Hernandez's escape by raft last December. Still, Seamans says, he believes Cubas when he denies smuggling. "If Joe is involved with that," Seamans says, "Joe's going to go to jail because those are serious offenses."

In Cuba, a country he has never visited, Cubas has been called "a vulture," "a degenerate" and worse by sports-ministry officials and others, comments that have helped make him a cult figure in south Florida, even among people who couldn't tell the cutoff man from the beer man.

The American-born son of Cuban immigrants who fled the island and their privileged lifestyle 13 months after the late-1950s revolution, Cubas worked in his father-in-law's construction business before taking a second job beside Iglesias in a sports-marketing venture, where he quickly proved adept at negotiating lucrative deals for Spanish-speaking players to appear at memorabilia shows.

So when pitcher Rene Arocha walked off the Cuban national team in the summer of 1991--the first defection by a Cuban baseball player in 32 years--Cubas saw it as a harbinger. He immediately turned to Rudy Santin, a boyhood friend and scout at the time with the Yankees. Santin was prohibited by Major League Baseball from doing anything more than talking to members of the Cuban national team, but he had grown friendly with a number of players and promised to introduce Cubas. In the meantime, he introduced Cubas to Munoz (born in Puerto Rico but a Florida high school graduate) and Karp (a Californian), and later to the Riveras, contacts that established Cubas as an agent.

Last: year, Santin persuaded the Devil Rays to pay $7 million for Arrojo, and Tampa Bay also has signed three other Cubas Cubans.

But those deals came only after Cubas spent years trailing the Cuban national team nearly every time it left the island. He followed it to Canada, Japan, Colombia, Argentina, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, Mexico and around the United States without signing a player. His luck changed in the summer of 1995 when Fernandez walked out of the team's motel in Millington, Tenn., and across the street to the Wal-Mart parking lot where Cubas waited in a rented van. Within moments they were on the interstate, streaking toward Miami.

Two months later, Cubas was waiting in another parking lot--this one in front of a restaurant outside Monterrey, Mexico--when Livan Hernandez appeared at about 1 a.m. Carrying only a small duffel bag and blinded by tears, Hernandez, 20, stepped off the curb and into the path of a car that swerved to avoid an accident. Safe in Cubas' rental car, Hernandez was driven to an airport 45 minutes away and then flown to safety in Venezuela.

"Joe is out there in the middle of the night picking these guys up in a land where he could get shot," Santin says. "I don't (agent) Scott Boras is going to go out and get shot by anybody."

But Cubas didn't spend tens of thousands of dollars chasing the Cuban national team around the world because he loved baseball. He intended to recoup that money, and now, after three years of failure, he found himself with unimagined success.