Lost amid the joy of spring training and baseball’s return is a criminal trial currently ongoing in Miami. In that courtroom, the federal government is prosecuting agent Bartolo Hernandez and trainer Julio Estrada for human smuggling and conspiracy. The trial and the case will unwind the messy, ugly ways in which Cuban baseball players are brought over from their homeland to the United States for the sake of big, fat contracts.
Already, several major leaguers have testified in the case. Jose Abreu, who received a $68 million deal from the White Sox when he came over in 2013, took the stand Wednesday and detailed some of things he did to get to the states. Leonys Martin and Adeiny Hechavarria have also testified.
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After leaving Cuba on a speedboat bound for Haiti, Abreu came to the United States on an Air France flight, which he boarded with a fake passport. During the flight to Miami, Abreu ate a chunk of the passport, with a beer back; Abreu ordered a Heineken and used it to help him consume the page.
“Little by little I swallowed that first page of the passport,” Abreu said on the stand. “I could not arrive in the United States with a false passport.”
Abreu said the idea to use a fake passport to get onto the flight was his own, but that Amin Latouff, his fixer, got him the document and told him he needed to get rid of it before landing. Abreu needed to be in Chicago immediately or risk losing out on his contract.
“If I had not been there on that particular day, the deadline, then the contract would not be executed and would no longer be valid,” he said.
In the context of this trial, and the broader economy in Cuban baseball players, Abreu eating his passport is a colorful but comparatively tame detail. It’s illegal, yes—Abreu received limited immunity to testify—but it’s not one of the horror stories we’ve heard elsewhere. Martin, for instance, said he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without any documentation after he was smuggled to Cancun from Cuba by speedboat. Martin said he lied to a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent to get in the country, desperate to avoid what he thought was a credible danger to him if he had stayed in Mexico.
“I was afraid and I was prepared to say what I had to say,” Martin said. “We were afraid that I would be kidnapped, and that’s why we decided to cross the border.”
The trial against Hernandez, who negotiated Abreu’s contract, and Estrada, who trained him, is expected to continue through the end of March. They were paid well for their services and for getting Abreu into the country. Hernandez received five percent of the contract as a fee; Estrada’s company got 20 percent.
