The Twin State Peregrines, a little league baseball team from Vermont and New Hampshire, is currently playing ball in Cuba with Cuban teams their own age, the first little league tour of Cuba by an American team since 2000 and the first since more stringent travel regulations went into place in 2002. Obtaining approval from OFAC for the privately-funded trip took the team twenty months and three rejections until the travel license was obtained in March of this year. Ironically it’s easier to export cows from Vermont to Cuba than a bunch of pint-sized little leaguers.

News of the baseball tour to the island, not surprisingly, generated an alarmed reaction from some of the predictable corners of support for the Cuba embargo on the Hill. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart called the OFAC action granting the license to the kids “very troubling.”

”Sporting events may be interpreted as diplomatic gestures even when they are not meant to be,” Diaz-Balart said. “And a sporting event is not an appropriate way to respond to the ongoing torture of political prisoners Yuselin Ferrera, Nelson Aguiar and many others.”

Vermont’s Senator Patrick Leahy took Diaz-Balart’s pitch and knocked it out of the park:

”He should pick on someone his own size,” [Leahy] said.

The latest report on the series has the Peregrines 1-1 in the series, losing 16-5 to the Santos and beating the Mangos 19-8.

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