Running the Other Way

The flags of 15 nations fluttered from the top of Kingston's new $3,000,000 sports stadium. The ninth Central American and Caribbean games were under way in Jamaica, newest of the hemisphere's nations. In the first week of competition, Mexico won 30 gold medals and Puerto Rico won five. But the headlines went to Fidel Castro's big Cuban contingent-though not for its physical prowess. Politics was the game, and at that the Cubans put on quite a show.

Seeking to demonstrate Cuba's "socialist superiority," Castro's team had been in training for six months. Twice-weekly lectures on Marx and Lenin were supposed to put everybody in the right frame of mind. Said Castro himself, in a final pep talk: Cuba's athletes were going to Jamaica "not as athletes, but soldiers fighting the cause of socialism. There will be people who will try to kidnap you." As protection, he sent 20 secret-service men to guard his warriors; even the bat boy on Cuba's baseball team was a cop.

On the opening day, Cuba's soccer team was dumped 2-1 by the tiny Dutch West Indies. The water polo team was humiliated 23-4 by Panama. Next, the Cuban baseball team lost 4-3 to Puerto Rico, but not before the game had been delayed 20 minutes by a bat-swinging riot that left seven fans and players hurt.

The high point was the weight lifting. Just as the match got under way one night, four of Castro's best weight lifters coolly walked off the stage of a Kingston theater where the competition was held and sprinted into a waiting getaway car driven by members of Jose Miro Cardona's anti-Castro Revolutionary Council. Several days later, the four and their coach, who had also slipped away, were flown to Miami, where they asked asylum. Said one: "We were just tired of being involved in the stupid struggle that has destroyed Cuba."

Enraged at the defections, Cuba's delegate to the games, Gonzalez Guerra, warned the teams that any more defectors would be hunted down, no matter how fast they ran, and brought back to Cuba.

Soon after, Cuba's basketball coach made his own sprint to freedom, followed by one of the players on his team and a Cuban photographer covering the games.

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