The Cuban national baseball team is playing the Baltimore Orioles on Monday, and it looks like the real controversy will stay off the field. According to the Associated Press, fans will be unable to display banners during play, and "political and commercial messages will be banned." This is in response to an expected thousand protesters urging either a harsher Cuba policy or an end to sanctions, the number suggested by Rep. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who opposes the game. The Orioles have reasonably announced that the protestors will be kept out of the stadium. But in attempting to keep political statements out of the parking lots and the mouths of the fans, the team has also taken away any meaning the game might have as a symbol of Cuba's new openness.

If fans' commercial messages have to go, what about commercial advertisements in the ballpark? I worry that Budweiser, the Gap, Coke and Pepsi might be booted so that their bourgeois materialism does not reach the Cuban team's virgin ears--as the celebrated billboards that read "Hit this sign, win political asylum" will be. The rituals of the game would still be there but not the spirit.

The Orioles have also sought to asphyxiate the spirit of the game by preventing fans from chanting. The team has announced that "strict guidelines for fan conduct will be enforced, and fans may be asked to leave, even for chanting, if it disturbs other fans." No "hey, batter, batter"? No chants of "U.S.A., U.S.A.?" What's an international baseball game without a little jingoism? (One wonders whether chants impugning the virtue of the umpire's female relatives--in a completely apolitical manner, of course--would fall under the guideline.)

Although we may want to keep sports and politics separate, there's no escaping the symbolism of an obviously political game, and it's only natural that the fans might want to proclaim the superiority of their nation's social organization as well as its baseball.

Perhaps one solution would be to make sure that the political statements go both ways--the Orioles could hire sign-holders to make sure that every mention of human rights violations is countered by a diatribe against Yankee imperialism. Maybe we could have two competing waves, one in the shape of a hammer and sickle and the other resembling the face of Alan Greenspan. That way, at least the fans wouldn't have to put on a gag when they walk into Camden Yards. As it is, the Orioles and the Cuban government seem to want to promote "contact" and "dialogue" between the two nations without the citizens of either actually speaking to one another.

The real problem here is that the Cuban government isn't willing to accept the consequences of playing an away game. When they're the home team, you play on their home turf. Any baseball team that crumples under fan heckling isn't strong enough to play the game. If Castro thinks his baseball team is tough enough to beat the Orioles, maybe they're tough enough to hear what the fans have to say.