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My main point in this regard was to compete for my country and my people and to receive the support of the entire Cuban society, to carry my flag in whatever competition I was in, the Olympic Games, Pan-American Games.

Anyone can see why an elite athlete would want to leave a small, impoverished country where their skills were effectively uncashed winning lottery tickets. All they had to do was wash ashore almost anywhere else in the world and cash in. Yet the vast majority of Cuban boxers - and Cuban athletes in general - despite that incentive, stayed.

Despite the situation in Cuba, I had a chance to play on the national team; and compared to other baseball players and other people in Cuba, I had the opportunity to live at a level that was not very high class but in the middle.

The Cuban people have an amazingly strong and unbroken spirit.

Cuban athletes represent the most expensive human cargo on earth. They are sitting on over a billion dollars of human capital if these boxers and baseball players would come over to any other field or ring in the world and begin to ply their trade.

Castro was always using his athletes as a way of symbolically defeating the United States in the ring, and after these Cubans defeated Americans in the ring, they were turning down exorbitant sums to leave the island.

For centuries, Cuba's greatest resource has been its people.

I had a chance to play for the Cuban national team during the 2009 World Baseball Classic, but at the time I never thought about leaving Cuba.

When we decided to go to Cuba to perform, we did it because we just wanted to build a bridge, you know, between Cuba and the rest of the community. And we just wanted to prove that music and art need to be over all ideology or way to think life, and we just wanted to go in there and play just because of love.