Pan Am tale of Cuban defection
INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT: Possibility of athletes taking a chance at a new life has added tension in the past
The large man in the sunglasses wearing the Cuban team track suit was following me. I’d take two steps, he’d take one. I’d look over my shoulder, there he was.
For the first time in my life, really the only time, I was being watched. The year was 1999. The place was Winnipeg. The event was the Pan American Games.
And suddenly I became a person of interest to the Cuban delegation at the Pan Ams and somehow to their government back home.
Strange how something like this can happen. Before the Games began, our sister paper, the Winnipeg Sun, made a decision that one page every day would be translated to Spanish, giving visitors and athletes from other countries the opportunity to read about the Games.
One of the first pages translated was a piece I had written about a young man once named Jorge Enrico Blanco. He won a gold medal for Cuba at the Pan Am Games in 1967 in Winnipeg, last time they had been held there. And then he disappeared.
He became Jesse Ravelo and at first he went from embassy to embassy, from Portland to Miami to California and eventually to Texas. He grew from boxer to boxing coach: And ironically, when Floyd Mayweather fought at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, one of those who worked his corner and coached for the U.S. Olympic team: Jesse Ravelo.
It took a while to find Ravelo for the piece I wrote, to get him to tell his story.
I looked at the story then with some pride and still do after all these years.
The Cubans looked at it completely differently.
They saw it, not as a human interest story of what happened the last time the Pan Ams were in Winnipeg. They saw it as a guide on how to defect, and saw me as someone who was advocating defection.
A person in a high position in Canadian government said to me: “If I were you, I wouldn’t consider vacationing in Cuba any time soon.”
And that wasn’t all. The head of the Cuban delegation registered a complaint to the Pan Am leaders in Winnipeg. The matter was then brought up in parliament in Cuba, where it made the news, and then discussed in and around the House of Commons in Ottawa, where it also made the national news here.
The man who followed me made it obvious that he was following me. He wanted me to see him. He wanted to make me nervous.
He did all of those things — until one day in Winnipeg, I looked over my shoulder and he was gone.
Over the years, the politics have changed even after there were 13 defections from the last time the Pan-Ams were held in Canada: Today, there are 24 Cubans on Major League rosters in baseball. Some of them, like Dodgers’ star Yasiel Puig, went through horrific personal journeys to escape to the United States.
And one last thing about Jesse Ravelo, who is still coaching boxing. At the ’96 Olympics, he was in Mayweather’s corner for an early draw fight against a Cuban. The bout turned out to be historic. For the first time in 20 years, an American beat a Cuban in boxing at the Olympics. The win was personal and especially sweet for the man who had defected almost 30 years earlier.