Cuban Baseball starts waits embargo's end (Juliana Cortez Pd.3)

A new member of the New York Yankees team has recently talked about how it is a dream come true to finally play in his favorite major league team. However, baseball player Yulieski Gourriel has said that he refuses to play for the U.S until they lift the embargo on Cuba and gets the "Okay" from the Cuban government to play. Gourriel’s comments in an exclusive interview says how it is in fact a dream for anyone to play in the U.S. major league. “This is the dream of all players — to play at the maximum level of baseball in all the world,”Along with Gourriel, other cuban players have already mentioned that they have gotten permission to play and how they are all for lifting the blockade. Gourriel is on the short list of Cuban players that are kept by major-league scouts, who have been actively evaluating the Cuban talent pool since the announcement of last December by President Obama and President Raul Castro that the two countries will work to improve relations. Gourriel is a consistent power hitter who has racked up impressive numbers, both in Japan and Cuba. Cuban players who have come to the United States have followed tortured paths, for example: defecting from Cuba, establishing residency in the United States and then getting “unblocked”, receiving a license from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces the embargo on Cuba banning direct financial dealings between the two countries. But as the deal goes forward, there are still considerable money issues to work out, even if Congress were to lift the embargo on Cuba. For now, that’s unlikely to pass a Republican-controlled Congress.

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