Saturday night I sat in RFK Stadium and watched the U.S.-Cuba soccer game. Unlike the tight game in Havana in early September, this one was a runaway with the U.S. team scoring six goals to Cuba's one. But as Clint Dempsey, the only scorer in the Havana game said of that game, it was "a hard-fought, good game."
More than 20,000 fans watched, with a sprinkling of Cuban flags demonstrating there were a few Cuban fans in attendance—one group so high up in the "nose-bleed" section that only the constant beat of their drum could be heard. Chants of "USA, USA", however, drowned out what small contributions the Cuban fans were able to make, though they labored on valiantly. The group of about eight directly in front of my wife and me could not even seem to get the Cuban team members on the field to acknowledge that they were holding a Cuban flag overhead, waving it wildly to attract their attention. And by the fourth U.S. goal, it was clear the Cuban team was demoralized, perhaps having started that let-down process when two of their players apparently defected before the game even got underway.
My wife remarked early on when the game seemed to be a bit tighter and the Cubans had just answered the second U.S. goal with one of their own, making the score two to one, "I hope the Cubans win." My wife is a soccer fan but did not realize that the FIFA schedule was at stake and, so, felt only sadness for the Cubans who, she said—and perhaps quite correctly—probably had not even eaten properly in the last few weeks since hurricanes Gustav and Ike savaged their island ruining much of the food and fruit crops.
When my wife spoke that sentiment, however, what I thought immediately was quite different. What I thought was "better magnanimous in victory than ugly in defeat….". I was considering what I had recently seen in Wisconsin and Minnesota as Sarah Palin and her gang worked up the vitriol and hatred of the Republican "base" in the ongoing presidential campaign. Suppose, I worried, such ugliness were unleashed here, in RFK Stadium, if the U.S. team lost to Cuba?
I quickly put that thought behind me though as I recognized the obvious: this was a U.S. soccer crowd. Most of the people in this stadium could probably think and, even better, think fast, accompanied by fancy footwork and inexhaustible energy. Similarly, I realized that I was looking at almost every ethnic and racial possibility in the world as I glanced around the seats nearby—Latino, African, Arab, Indian, Asian, Muslim women with head scarves, and others. This was not a lily-white pocket of Minnesota or Wisconsin, Alabama or Mississippi. This was America.
I also realized that none of the people in the stadium likely cared a whit for the U.S. embargo against the tiny little country whose team members struggled valiantly on the field before them, under the klieg lights of the world's greatest power. Were it in these Americans' collective power, they would eradicate in a nanosecond such a barrier to friendship. Indeed, some of the most belly-deep, stadium-filling cheering had erupted when the two teams had initially taken the field, side by side, each player led out by a small soccer-attired child who walked hand-in-hand with his or her much taller team member.
So, friends everywhere in the fight to change U.S.-Cuba policy, it is America to whom we should appeal—to all the people across this great land, some 270 million I'm convinced (all but the "base" of the Republican Party and a few connected Democrats, all of whose numbers shrink further every day), who truly believe in freedom and democracy, who do not use such ideas to hide their tyrannies behind, and who are ultimately going to sound the death knell of "the stupidest policy on earth."
-Lawrence Wilkerson