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Leaving Cuba: Why Pirates bullpen coach Euclides Rojas risked everything for freedom

HAVANA, Cuba — In the shadow of the Plaza de la Revolucion, where fallen heroes are kept alive in murals on government ministries and a star-shaped marble memorial stretches boldly toward the sky, a middle-aged man can be found mowing the outfield grass at a long-ignored ballpark.

You wouldn’t know it, watching him sweat through his blue shirt and white baseball pants in the afternoon heat, but Lazaro de la Torre was once an idol in Cuba, too.

During the 1980s and 1990s, nobody pitched more often than de la Torre, and he will be the first to tell you about it.