Team USA defeats Cuba in World Baseball Classic semifinal, scores victory for exile community

Team USA scored a knockout victory over Cuba’s national baseball team Sunday evening after the stars and stripes scored 14 runs over its communist rival, which was kept at bay with only two runs throughout the game.

The American 14-2 victory marked a definitive moment both for world sports and the Cuban exile community as the win sends the USA to face the winner of Monday night’s Japan vs. Mexico game, and also handed Miami’s Cuban community a decades long awaited victory.

The win also marks Team USA as the third team to appear in back-to-back World Baseball Classic championship games, the first being Japan, which won in 2006 and 2009, and the second being U.S. protectorate, Puerto Rico, which won in 2013 and 2017.

Sunday evening’s game was the first time the Cuban national team played in Miami since Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Miami is home to the largest Cuban exile population in the United States, a fact that drew cries for freedom from pro-democracy dissidents who attended the game inside and outside the Florida Marlin’s baseball park.

During the game, three different fans ran onto the field with signs and flags to cheer the cause of liberty, among them, well known Cuban dissident graffiti artist, El Sexto, who interrupted the sixth inning by jumping onto left field from with a cloth in his hands while asking for freedom for Cuba.