Cuban Athlete Defections Put Boric in a Bind

As the Pan American Games in Chile drew to a close on Nov. 5, eight Cuban athletes quietly eluded their government minders. The six women’s field hockey players, a men’s handball player, and the bronze medalist in the men’s 400-meter hurdles—plus four other Cuban athletes who remained behind from earlier tournaments in Chile—are now seeking refugee status in the country. Another 13 members of Cuba’s 400-strong delegation to the games did not return to Havana, and their whereabouts are unknown, according to Chile’s Interior Ministry.

Since the Cold War, Cuba’s state-sponsored athletes have defected during international sporting events to escape repression and poverty. More than 800 Cuban athletes did not return from overseas competitions over the last decade, according to Cuba’s state-run media. Many are baseball players aiming to secure lucrative spots in the U.S. major leagues. The 2023 Pan American Games, a mini-Olympics for the Western Hemisphere, offered another chance to slip away. But this time, the athletes are petitioning for refugee status from a leftist government that is sympathetic to Havana.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric is in an awkward spot. The former student activist took office in March 2022 under the banner of universal human rights, claiming that a government’s abuses should be condemned regardless of political ideology. It’s a virtuous agenda he often frames around historical allusions to Chile’s democratically elected former President Salvador Allende, a Marxist who was toppled in a violent U.S.-backed military coup 50 years ago. The 17-year dictatorship that followed committed systematic human rights violations.

Yet Boric can be selective. He has called out Russia for its assault on Ukraine but not China—Chile’s top trading partner—for its human rights abuses. In Latin America, Nicaragua and Venezuela have drawn his censure. But in a bow to the ideological affinity and sentimental attachment to Havana within his coalition, Boric tends to skirt criticism of Cuba, even though, for six decades, the island has had no free elections and dissidents are routinely locked up. By shining a light on this inconsistency, the Cuban athletes’ defections risk tarnishing Boric’s political brand.

Coincidentally, Cuba was top of mind for Boric at a Nov. 2 meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House, before the Chilean government confirmed the Cuban athletes’ breakaway. Boric called on the United States to lift sanctions on Cuba and remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. “It’s not the government that’s being sanctioned, but rather the people,” Boric said.

Boric was hardly the first to lambast the long-standing U.S. sanctions policy on Cuba, which has failed to bring about democratic change. Boric’s Washington visit coincided with an overwhelming United Nations General Assembly vote against the six-decade U.S. economic and trade embargo on the island, which was opposed only by the United States and Israel (Ukraine abstained). But Boric conspicuously neglected to balance his remarks by recognizing Cuba’s well-documented repression that would apparently propel some of the country’s athletes to seek refuge in Chile a few days later.

After Boric’s remarks in Washington, Rosa María Payá, the daughter of Cuban activist Oswaldo Payá—who died along with fellow activist Harold Cepero in a 2012 car crash that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights pinned on the Cuban state—accused Boric of parroting 1960s propaganda sown by Cuba’s late revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro. “He says he worries about the suffering of the Cuban people, but instead of condemning a murderous dictatorship, he delivers Castro’s messages to Biden.”

But it was the messages conveyed by the dissident athletes a few days later that shook Boric’s political narrative. “I left everything behind,” women’s field hockey captain Yunia Milanés told Chilean viewers in a Nov. 8 prime-time broadcast interview. “We made the right decision. Despite the fear, we feel free.” Her teammate Helec Carta said that, in Cuba, “we hardly had freedom of expression. You could speak, but in a limited way.”

Cuban athletes travel to overseas competitions on official passports, but minders confiscate these upon arrival to keep the athletes from escaping. For deserting the delegation, they could face up to eight years in prison in Cuba, according to Chile-based lawyers representing the 12 athletes seeking refuge, including four who escaped during tournaments in the country earlier this year. Although the details of the athletes’ formal petitions are private—and the athletes themselves are, for now, remaining mostly tight-lipped—refugee status in Chile is granted on grounds of persecution based on race, religion, social groups, nationality, or political opinions.

Boric’s posture toward Cuba mirrors the ideology of Chile’s century-old Communist Party, a pillar of his political coalition and a steadfast defender of Havana. The party—which, unlike its Cuban counterpart, is democratic—wields considerable sway over the presidential palace as well as a smattering of small parties, including Boric’s own Social Convergence, that populate Chile’s hard left. Communist Party rising star Camila Vallejo is Boric’s cabinet-level spokesperson. The labor and education ministries are in Communist Party hands, too.

Chile’s Communists played down the Cuban defections. Party President Lautaro Carmona blamed them on “the U.S. criminal economic blockade.” Even Interior Minister Carolina Tohá, the cabinet’s leading political moderate from the Party for Democracy, mused that some of the athletes might have remained in Chile for tourism, a remark critics blasted as callous.

After confirming that the government had granted the athletes eight-month provisional visas that allow them to work, Vallejo said it would adhere to standard procedures for evaluating their petitions for refugee status. She denied any discomfort inside the administration. “What we most want is for them not to be used politically,” she said. Boric himself has kept quiet.

Carolina Valdivia, a vice minister for foreign affairs under Chile’s former center-right Piñera administration, said the silence “undermines President Boric’s foreign-policy vision and narrative on human rights.” Political scientist Kenneth Bunker added, “If he was consistent, he would say something.” Boric missed “a great opportunity to take the side of democracy. But, of course, if he did, he would face too many political problems in his own coalition,” Bunker said.

Cuba unnerved Allende, too. For three weeks in late 1971, Castro traveled around Chile delivering incendiary speeches that nurtured fears—in both Santiago and Washington—that the country was poised to become the next Cuba. Historians and political contemporaries like Carlos Ominami said Allende recognized that Castro risked alienating middle-class Chileans but couldn’t muster the courage to tell him to leave. Two years later, Chile’s military laid siege to the presidential palace, and Allende died by suicide using a rifle Castro had gifted him.

Boric’s Cuba dilemma has far lower stakes, but it is likely to color his political legacy as well. If his administration grants the Cubans refugee status, “it means the state of Chile recognizes that Cuba politically persecutes these citizens or flagrantly violates their rights, which is complicated given the current administration’s ideological affinity with the Cuban regime,” said Álvaro Bellolio, former head of Chile’s migration agency. If the petitions are rejected, Boric would alienate moderate allies at home and abroad.

Chile’s sluggish bureaucracy lets Boric stay on the bench for now. The country’s migration agency is flooded with refugee applications, mostly from Venezuelans, and if the Cuban athletes are put at the back of the line, Bellolio said their petitions could take up to three years to resolve.

The government could give them priority consideration, as it did with Afghan refugees in 2021, but is more likely to slow-walk the petitions, renewing their visas while kicking the can to Boric’s successor, Bellolio said. This may be the only realistic path for an unpopular president who is seeking to preserve the integrity of his human rights agenda without antagonizing his political base.

Lifting weights at a municipal gym in Santiago last week, Milanés recalled how in Cuba, the women’s field hockey team lacked basic equipment and the players were only allowed to see their families twice a year. “Over there, I don’t have freedom of expression or freedom to develop my career, and here I can do that. If we get our papers, we all want to play on Chile’s national team.”