Only 90 miles wide separate Andy Pages’ childhood home in Mantua, Cuba, from the southern tip of the Florida Keys. However, the short distance between these two points is insurmountable.
Politics has kept Cuba and the United States apart for most of the past 65 years, the last vestiges of a Cold War policy that divided families and hurt people on both sides of the Florida Straits far more than it punished the Cuban government.
So when the Dodgers open the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays on Friday, Pages’ parents and his sister probably won’t be sitting in the stands with the other players’ families. They will probably look for the game on Cuban television or on a spotty internet link.
“Or the radio,” Pages adds.
Pages, 24, already has a World Series ring and is in the playoffs for a second straight year. During the regular season, his 27 home runs were second only to Shohei Ohtani among the Dodgers and he ranked among the team’s top four in several other offensive categories, including RBIs (86), batting (.272), stolen bases (14), and total bases (268).
It was an exceptional sophomore season, which saw him become the first Dodgers center fielder in 13 years to hit better than .250 with at least 23 home runs. Yet aside from his wife, Alondra, no one in his family has seen Pages in a Dodgers uniform other than in photos or on a blurry television screen, while contact with his family is limited to two or three phone calls a week — and even that schedule depends heavily on Cuba’s unreliable electrical infrastructure.
“There are times when we can’t do it because there’s a power outage or something,” Pages said in Spanish.
“It’s obviously hard. But we’ve learned to live with it because we’ve been like this for a long time.”
After all, the path Pages takes is one of his choosing. Moving up to the western Cuban province of Pinar del Rio, where poverty was widespread, he played with the bats that his father, Lebanon, a carpenter, made from scrap wood. And he played so well that by the time he was 15, he was one of the island’s top prospects.
So he arranged to leave the island alongside Jairo Pomares, another young Cuban star. The two traveled through Guyana, Curacao and Haiti before traveling to the Dominican Republic where Pages waited eight months before signing with the Dodgers in March 2018.
The contract paid him a bonus of $300,000, more than 1,500 times the average annual salary in Cuba, according to CiberCuba. But it also came at a high cost, as Pages didn’t know when he would see his parents again. For political reasons, Cuban citizens face significant restrictions when traveling to the United States and defectors such as Pages face restrictions when trying to return home.
(Pages was able to visit his 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 travel to the United States for many Venezuelans, among other foreign nationals.
“It’s pretty tough,” said Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas, a veteran of 12 seasons in Venezuela’s major leagues. “My father is in Venezuela. I can’t see my sister very often.
“But we signed up for this. We’re professional baseball players. We kind of want to chase our dream and I’m pretty sure his family’s dream was to [Pages] playing in the big leagues. He’s accomplishing something really cool, not just for himself but for his family.
Rojas may have signed up, but that doesn’t make things any easier. As he finished speaking about the pain of separation – his and Pages’ – his eyes began to water as he held back tears.
After each of the Dodgers’ champagne celebrations this fall, as players separated to join their families, Pages often lingered alone in the center of the room, quietly toasting the people who were with him only in spirit.
“There are those days when you want to cry, yes. Because you miss them,” Pages said. “But what you just think afterwards is that it is what it is. We have to keep going and we’re going to make them proud, right?”
