Simple question. They could certainly support two teams, it would be a huge benefit to their economy (almost anything would be). They’re already building a new hub in Florida to handle the predicted increase in flights to Cuba. Castro’s been dead all day so what’s taking so long?
You still have Fidel Castro’s Younger Brother.
We’ll see an exhibition game in Havana within three years (it does take some amount of time to arrange this stuff.) But my guess is there will be an MLB team in Mexico City first.
OTOH, maybe they’ll just create a “Carribean Division” with teams in Mexico City, Havana, San Juan, Santo Domingo and one other city all at once. Stock the teams with local talent first and let them blend into full parity.
Wasn’t there already an exhibition game this year or last? Involved the Rays, I think.
Cuba’s economy is pretty awful. Lots of low income people, very few who are well off. Who will buy the tickets? Who will populate the luxury boxes. pay for the cable packages, build the MLB caliber stadiums, buy the souvenirs? Hard for me to see how the country gets a team till the economy improves.
As soon as it becomes profitable. In other words, no time soon. Baseball is very popular in the D.R. but there are pro teams there because it makes no sense economically. An instructional league is a different story.
On what sudden monopoly will Cuba’s economy rely whose goods and profits are to be transferred to America ? In the past they had slavery, and then sugar. Not a lot of untapped resources.
Cheap labour for their neighbour ? Tourism ? A mortgage/housing market that will evict most of them ? A Stock Market ? What simple thing are they missing ?
Putting a team in Puerto Rico involves basically zero political or customs issues. But we haven’t done that yet. Or if you want a country to be more pro baseball, the DR has been friendly for years. The issue is a mixture of distance and all the included costs, along with inertia and a reluctance to add teams.
they had minor league teams in cuba before …the sugar kings…among others thell make a Cuban league if they don’t go back to the international league where the PR and DR teams are
Never. Ever.
Latin America is simply too unstable economically and politically to support a full time major league team from any of the four major leagues.
Puerto Rico has the only shot if it becomes a US state but attendance at Expos games when they played a few there was not encouraging.
if you are a top flight major leaguer, all things being equal, why would you risk your life living in a third world shit hole like Havana, Mexico City or Caracas rather than than play in New York?
I doubt it for several decades, if then.
There was some talk back in the mid 1970s about Havana getting a team if relations were normalized (which seemed a possibility since Nixon went to China in 1972). But a team like the Yankees was worth about $10 million. Leaving them out of the picture (Forbes estimates their value at $3.4 billion), the least valuable team is is Tampa at about $600 million. How much revenue are you going to get in Cuba where an Edsel is a new car? Get players? Toronto has enough problems getting players and the only adjustment is spelling words like “color” and “centre” and people pronounce “schedule” with the “shhh” as the first syllable.
I've never hear any talk of Mexico City getting a team and that's better economy. Maybe they play some exhibition games, that's about it for Havana.I sense Big Brother’s long-standing annoyance with the disobedient little brothers is veering to pure contempt.
There’s pretty much zero chance for the foreseeable future. As has been said, the economy just won’t support it. The average official salary is $25 a month, and most Cubans earn less than $200 a month. There’s no way Cuba could afford to build a stadium, and fans could never buy tickets at prices that could support a major league team.
Absolutely not I love Mexico, Costa Rica, DR, been to all three but overall the standard of living there is simply not even close to American standards. NFL players were warned not to leave their hotels last week because of a big kidnapping problem in Mexico City. Who knows what Havanna will turn into? Just pointing out the facts
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I really love this whole mythos that has been created among some people, both in the US and in the Caribbean region, that once the Cuban economic/political system is finally really unleashed (which has not happened, mind you), the country will turn into Palm Beach County or Metro Tampa Bay within less than a decade. It’s going to take quite a long slog to even get back to where they were in 1959 insofar as economic level relative to the rest of the region.
Ya know** TriPolar**, for years I thought that Cuba would be the ideal place for a new MLB team. Think of the recruits they could muster! Thanks for raising this issue.
First, I don’t really think this will happen overnight.
I do believe the Cuban economy has more potential than some of the other Caribbean countries including Mexico. There will be a lot of investment there once the embargo is lifted, although there’s no guarantee the current government or anything replacing it will manage that well. Tourism alone can jump start their country in a way that hasn’t worked for their neighbors. I don’t know how long it will take but it wouldn’t surprise me if the economy is strong enough to support a team in 10 years. But there are a lot of “if’s” twixt now and then.
They might be able to afford a stadium. Yes, wages are low, but that also means that labor costs are low, and so a stadium would be much cheaper to build there than here. But for the players themselves, they’d be competing against stateside teams, and there’s no way they can manage that. If the players’ salaries were scaled down proportionately to the fans’, they’d be getting almost nothing compared to what they could from a stateside team, and have worse living conditions to boot.