COMMENTARY Venezuela's first World Baseball Classic title win, against the U.S. in Miami, inevitably packed political symbolism — but it radiated a more important reminder of the country's character.
When Venezuela defeated the U.S. in a thriller of a World Baseball Classic final here in Miami Tuesday night, the political symbolism could have filled an arepa more amply than my mother-in-law’s reina pepiada.
For one, the victory affirmed a feeling that Venezuelans, after 27 years of repressive and disastrous left-wing rule, are rising again now that the U.S. military has nabbed dictator Nicolás Maduro and hauled his butt to a New York jail cell to face drug-trafficking charges.
Then again, a more accurate perspective might be that the victory encouraged Venezuelans to keep hoping that Maduro’s ouster will lead to the actual re-democratization of their country — and not just the U.S.’s all-you-can-extract takeover of Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest, while Maduro’s mafioso regime lieutenants remain in power indefinitely.
Which brings us to a third reading of Venezuela’s first-ever WBC championship: it may have felt to a lot of folks like a robust vete al carajo — screw you — to a Trump administration that’s cruelly trying to deport more than 700,000 Venezuelan migrants back to what is still a South American dystopia.
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But as a gringo who’s had close ties to Venezuela for four decades, I took a more important meaning than politics from the baseball.
What mattered most to me in terms of Venezuela’s future was, in fact, just that:
The baseball.
We yanquis like to think baseball is the pastime that defines us. But, especially in the age of the Super Bowl, the game doesn’t reflect our spirit as palpably as it captures Venezuela’s.
Watching guys like Ozzie Guillen play baseball in Venezuela, you got a sense they were more like astronauts — an inspiration for national advancement.
You can dredge up all the saccharine, baby-boomer baseball nostalgia you want — Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, The Natural and on and on — but it doesn’t decode the American character the way I saw baseball reveal the best of Venezuela when I was younger.
Keep in mind baseball had once been for Venezuelans what soccer was to their neighbors in Brazil: a chance to show their former First World overlords — in Brazil’s case, Europe; in Venezuela’s, the U.S. companies that once owned and operated its oil fields — that they could play those sports as well if not better than the empires that invented them.
And, what’s more, play them with a distinctly Latin style.
Tambores booming
When I attended my first Venezuelan winter league game at the Estadio Universitario de Caracas in 1985, the raw exuberance of both the playing and spectating — the fast and improvised pace on the field, the tambores booming in the stands — made baseball back in America feel like a visit to my grandmother’s senior center.
Like the Negro Leagues before Major League integration, Venezuela made baseball come alive in ways it seems the U.S. game is only now starting to adopt with reforms like the pitch clock.
But just as striking as the salsa-and-merengue energy was the self-affirming purposefulness it radiated.
That year, the Chicago White Sox’s Venezuelan shortstop, Ozzie Guillen, had been named the American League’s rookie of the year. Watching Guillen then take the field for Los Tiburones de La Guaira in Venezuela’s winter league elicited an unmistakable sense that he and his compañeros were more than jocks.
They were more like Venezuela’s astronauts, an inspiration for national advancement.
Baseball seemed to reflect if not galvanize the side of Venezuelans that combined festive bonche and focused business — the Venezuela that built the Caracas Metro, at that time one of the world’s best subway systems.
Meaning: not the epic corruption of the ruling elite, los cogollos, and not the vile criminality of the socialist chavistas who supplanted them in 1999.
So when Venezuelan third baseman Eugenio Suárez (who hit a Homeric grand slam in last year’s American League championship series) drove his game-winning double into center field in the ninth inning Tuesday night at LoanDepot Park, it evoked not so much a feel-good politics story but rather a patria gut check.
It was a reminder of the Venezuela that stunned the world two years ago by organizing, with the zest and precision of a perfectly turned double play, nationwide poll-watcher cells that proved Maduro lost the presidential election (which he stole anyway) by a landslide.
That’s the uplifting baseball symbolism Venezuelans can and should reach for.
That, and one hell of a bonche.
