Cuban soccer player Yosniel Mesa is starting to tell the tale of his defection following the national team’s Gold Cup loss to Mexico in Charlotte on June 9.
According to The Charlotte Observer, Mesa gestured to his Uncle Julio in the stands during halftime that he was going to try to defect that night. But the plan nearly hit its first snag when the uncle lost sight of the team bus in traffic as it was taking the team back to its hotel from Bank of America Stadium.
After two hours, Julio (a defector himself, he refused to share his last name with the Observer) spotted a Cuban coach in a hotel lobby and waited on Mesa. Mesa took the elevator from his eighth-floor hotel room to the second floor, took the stairs to the first floor and headed out of the hotel, got into his uncle’s car and the pair drove to Miami, where Julio lives.
"The escape was a little difficult, because the trainers were in the lobby at the hotel," Mesa told the Observer. "I had a glass in my hand. If they saw me, I could say I was going to look for a drink."
Mesa will be leaving his mother and five-year-old daughter behind in Cuba. But he couldn’t even tell them his plans out of fear that someone would catch word.
Mesa said he made the decision because he wants to play soccer professionally. He said he will seek citizenship and a team to play for in the States.
"Players can't reach a certain level of stardom in Cuba. The income for professional sports in Cuba isn't really what it is in America," Daniel Lafuente, spokesman for the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami, told the Observer.
Although defections by Cuban athletes are more associated with baseball players, Mesa isn’t the first soccer player to seek professional work in the U.S. According to ESPN, seven players defected during Olympic qualifers in Tampa in 2008. Maykel Galindo, now with FC Dallas, defected during the 2005 Gold Cup in Seattle.
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