the cautious life.

There’s a great article in the July Vanity Fair (sadly lost in the Bill Clinton “hatchet job” freakout) that uses a federal immingration case to look at the larger phenomenon of the relatively untapped well of Cuban baseball awesomeness. It’s by Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball,” which you should read for no other reason than it will make you feel smart even if at the end of the day you’re a dumb schlub who still believes in The Art of Being Clutch and that batting average matters. The thesis:

“The U.S. government needed the jury to believe that the American best informed about Cuban ballplayers didn’t know which ones were worth stealing; that he’d refinance his house to smuggle the wrong guys; that Cuba was a mysterious black hole, about which this sort of ignorance was plausible. And it did! After listening for seven days the jury quickly reached its verdict: guilty.”

This is fascinating mainly because it gives a semi-sad, semi-amusing look at the sport Americans love so much as it’s played in a country past generations were taught to fear for so long but which people my age (who only distantly recall the first Gulf War) mostly look at with bemusement. (You were serioulsy afraid of Cuba? Cuba the island? That Cuba?) Cuba is so interesting — to me at least — because it is so unknown at a time when there seem to be so few mysteries and blanks spots left on the map. But even the mystery of Cuba is uniquely American, since it’s self-imposed. We’re the ones who have told ourselves we can’t go there.  Terrorist’s can, however. (Lewis hitches a ride with a Canadian baseball fanatic…perhaps the only one .)

And maybe what’s so striking about the connection to baseball is that it paints such a very different image of the institution we think we know so well – a place where the games are played in open spaces at insane asylums, the balls are rationed, beat writers don’t attend games or interview players and the players are paid so little they ride bicycles to the stadium and sell their uniforms to make extra money. And yet they’re consistently the best in the world.

Then there’s what this all reveals about the direction of the U.S. government – and it’s preoccupation with homeland security – post-Sept. 11. If Gus Dominguez, who Lewis describes as small-potatoes sports agent who stumbled only grudgingly into the business, was smuggling Cubans, you could argue his case should be looked at no differently than those of people accused of smuggling immigrants into the U.S. from Mexico, Pakistan, France or Paraguay.That’s what federal prosecutors did, arguing that he was an opportunist looking to make a buck (or several-hundred-thousand) off immigrants who didn’t know their own value in a free market.

But Cuba and baseball complicate things — if only for what they both represent. They both have baggage. It seems incongruous that the same goverment that so vilified Fidel Castro’s leadership of the island nation (and, generally, vowed to help fight all things Communist) would now prosecute a man it claims was aiding young Cuban men to freedom, giving them political asylum where some of them stood to make millions in the free market at America’s Pastime. Not to mention weaken the Cuban baseball team and infuriate the country’s leaders in the bargain.

Lewis’s somewhat depressing conclusion:

“It’s hard for a man in a prison uniform to seem innocent, but Gus Dominguez seems innocent. Did he do what the U.S. government says he did? I doubt it. Does it matter? No. He picked the wrong time to be caught between the United States and the strangers who saw it as a place where they might create better lives. He’d been a bridge between cultures, at a time when such bridges were being blown up.”