Copyright Los Angeles Times
Just 90 miles of open ocean separate Andy Pages’ boyhood home in Mantua, Cuba, from the southern tip of the Florida Keys. Yet the short distance between those two points is unbridgeable. Politics has separated Cuba and the U.S. for most of the last 65 years, the last vestiges of a Cold War policy that has divided families and hurt people on both sides of the Straits of Florida far more than it has punished the Cuban government. So when the Dodgers open the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays on Friday, Pages’ parents and his sister won’t be sitting in the stands with the other players’ families. They’ll be searching for the game on Cuban TV or on a spotty internet link. “Or radio,” Pages adds. Pages, 24, already has one World Series ring and is playing in the postseason for a second straight year. During the regular season, his 27 homers trailed only Shohei Ohtani among Dodgers and he ranked in the top four on the team in several other offensive categories including RBIs (86), batting (.272), stolen bases (14) and total bases (268). It was an outstanding sophomore season, one that saw him become the first Dodgers center fielder in 13 years to hit better than .250 with at least 23 homers. Yet aside from his wife, Alondra, no one in his family has seen Pages in a Dodgers uniform other than in pictures or on a fuzzy TV screen while contact with his family is limited to two or three phone calls a week — and even that schedule is heavily reliant on Cuba’s unreliable electrical infrastructure. “There are times we can’t because the power is out or something,” Pages said in Spanish. “Obviously it’s hard. But we’ve learned to live with it because we’ve been like this for a long time.” The road Pages has traveled, after all, is one of his own choosing. Going up in the western Cuban province of Pinar del Rio, where poverty was widespread, he played with bats his father Liban, a carpenter, fashioned from scrap lumber. And he played so well, by the time he turned 15 he was one of the island’s top prospects. So he arranged to be spirited off the island alongside Jairo Pomares, another young Cuban star. The pair traveled through Guyana, Curacao and Haiti before crossing into the Dominican Republic where Pages waited eight months before signing with the Dodgers in March 2018. The contract paid him a $300,000 bonus, more than 1,500 times the average annual wage in Cuba, according to CiberCuba. But it also came at a great cost because Pages didn’t know when he’d see his parents again. Because of politics, Cuban citizens face significant restrictions in traveling to the U.S. and defectors such as Pages face limitations in trying to return home. (Pages was able to make a visit home in the winter of 2023, briefly reuniting with his family for the first time in seven years.) And Cubans aren’t the only ones who have seen their families divided by politicians. Last June President Trump signed a proclamation severely restricting U.S. travel for many Venezuelans, among other foreign nationals. “It’s pretty tough,” said Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas, a 12-year big league veteran from Venezuela. “My father is in Venezuela. I can’t really see my sister that many times. “But we signed up for this. We are professional baseball players. We want to kind of follow our dream and I’m pretty sure his family’s dream was for [Pages] to play in the big leagues. He’s accomplishing something that is really cool, not just for him but for his family.” Rojas may have signed up for it but that doesn’t make it any easier. As he finished talking about the pain of separation — both his and Pages’ — his eyes began to water as he held back tears. After each of the Dodgers’ champagne celebrations this fall, as players have split off to be with their families, Pages often lingered alone in the center of the room, once quietly offering a toast to the people who were with him only in spirit. “There are those days when you feel like crying, yes. Because you miss them,” Pages said. “But what you simply think afterward is that this is what it is. We have to keep going and we’re going to make them proud, right?”
