A good-will tour of Cuba next week by Major League Baseball and its players’ union will include a prominent Cuban player who defected in 2013, a rare concession by a Cuban government that typically denounces such individuals as traitors and bars them from its national team.
The player, Jose Abreu, has established himself as one of baseball’s premier sluggers in his two seasons as the first baseman of the Chicago White Sox. He will be joined on the good-will tour by at least two other Cuban major leaguers — shortstop Alexei Ramirez, who left Cuba in 2007 but has stated that he did not defect, and the journeyman catcher and first baseman Brayan Pena, who left Cuba as a teenager with his father in 1999.