Major League Baseball just wanted to sell caps and T-shirts in South Africa and other relatively baseball-less countries when it agreed last July to hold an international baseball tournament featuring the world’s top baseball-playing countries. America would be there, as would Canada, Mexico, Japan, Panama, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, and Australia. So would Puerto Rico (even though the island is part of the United States) Venezuela, Taiwan, and Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba.

In all, 16 countries would gather to spread baseball’s growing popularity in Japan and Latin American to emerging hotbeds like the Netherlands, Italy, South Africa, and another communist country, China.

In a sense, MLB wanted to be just like the NHL, which embraced global competition back in 1972 with the eight-game Team Canada-Soviet Union series, or the NBA, which used the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics as the foundation for its remarkable global growth. MLB is looking for its own Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center whose popularity has opened up a marketplace of more than a billion people in China for the NBA. With an international baseball tournament featuring professionals, major league stars like Japan’s Ichiro Suzuki and Hollands’ Andruw Jones can finally become global ambassadors.

That’s what international competition is all about. Its great for a country to win a global event,but the goal of the organizers is to build a worldwide merchandise and TV empire that can ultimately bring more money into an American sport and maybe even an unearth the next global star.

But there’s a hitch. MLB has found that the Cold War didn’t exactly end with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Union. The Bush Administration has denied MLB’s request for a permit to allow Commissioner Bud Selig, his 29 owners (Washington still lacks an owner), and the Major League Players Association to conduct business with Castro and Cuba.

But MLB, which is organizing the event with the Players’ Association, has reapplied for permission to let Cuba play after Castro pledged to donate proceeds to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. So far, the federal government remains unswayed. Last week, baseball’s world governing body, the International Baseball Federation, threatened to withdraw its sanctioning of the World Baseball Classic unless the Bush administration allows Cuba to compete. It remains unclear whether the tournament,s cheduled for March 3-20, would go forward without the IBAF’s sanction.

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The trouble for MLB started in mid-December, when Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican of Florida, urged the Treasury Department to deny Cuba a permit to play because of the more than four-decade-old American embargo against Havana. The Treasury Department concurred and refused to grant the permit.

The decision effectively barred Cuba from the competition, and that is not sitting well with MLB, the Players’ Association, the International Olympic Committee, and the International Baseball Federation. In the weeks since, the IOC and delegate Richard Pound (who also serves as head of the World Anti-Doping Agency) have warned the White House that it will not award any future Olympics to the U.S. if Cuba is not allowed to participate in the World Baseball Classic. That, in turn, has prompted many in the American sports community to urge the government to reverse its decision.

“It is important to any future bid city from the United States that this be reversed,” Peter Ueberroth, former baseball commissioner and head of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, said. “It’s disappointing. This will impact IOC members negatively. This may be the only example of a country prohibiting competition on an international scale.”

When Ueberroth headed the 1984 Olympics, he worked with the Reagan administration to ensure that Cuba would be allowed to participate. Cuba ultimately chose to join a boycott of the Los Angeles Games, but did send athletes to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where it won nine gold medals and 25 medals in all.

Moreover, it’s rather difficult to take the IOC all that seriously when American television network dollars fund a great deal of its expenses. Meanwhile, the IBAF is threatening to withdraw its sanctioning of the event and punish those countries that participate in the competition if Cuba is barred.

Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chavez, who has aligned himself with Castro and is not a favorite of the Bush White House, suggested a solution that the scheduled games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, between March 12-15, involving Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, and the Netherlands, be shifted to Caracas, Venezuela, and that the tournament’s final round be shifted to Canada.

The IBAF has rejected Chavez’s solution and wants the tournament to take place as scheduled in Phoenix, Orlando, San Juan, Japan, Anaheim, and San Diego.

If MLB officials thought they were simply organizing a baseball tournament, they didn’t bother reading their history books. International competitions have a long history of being used as political currency.

At the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, Adolf Hitler was wonderfully upstaged by Jesse Owens, the black American who won four gold medals. In 1968, American track and field athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith used the medal podium in Mexico City as a platform for black power by throwing up their fists during the National Anthem after winning medals. African countries boycotted the 1976 Montreal Olympics. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter ordered a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The USSR returned the favor by skipping the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

But with communist power waning in the years since the Soviet collapse, the U.S. government has often taken a more sympathetic approach to Cuba’s involvement in American-hosted tournaments. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush allowed the Cubans to take part in the Goodwill Games in Seattle, where its baseball team took the gold medal. As the Clinton administration softened the economic embargo somewhat during the 1990s, Cuba sent its national teams to America more frequently, as in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics and in 1999, when the Cuban national team played the Baltimore Orioles in a home and home series.

Even the current Bush administration looked the other way last summer when it allowed Cuba’s national soccer team to come to America and compete for the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the championship of North and Central America and the Caribbean. No payments were made directly to the Cubans. One soccer official said a deal was worked out under which some money was given to Cuba by the Caribbean Football Union, which is based in Trinidad and Tobago.

The Bush administration seems to be playing politics here. Many Cuban exiles live in South Florida, and there is a U.S. Senate race in Florida in 2006.The Cuban exiles generally deliver votes to the party that enforces the economic embargo against Cuba. Earlier this month, a vocal branch of Cuban exiles in Florida pledged to withdraw their financial support of Governor Jeb Bush if Cuba was allowed to participate in the tournament.

The permit denial plays well with the Cuban exiles, who will deliver far more votes in a bloc than baseball fans.

Of course, there are other factors at play. America has spent the better part of 45 years trying to economically starve Castro, something that even Tommy Lasorda acknowledges.The former Dodgers skipper and World Baseball Classic ambassador told a Japanese audience yesterday, “I don’t think they are trying to ban the team but, in my opinion, I think they are trying to stop them from coming in here and making money.”

As MLB awaits its re-application with the Treasury Department, baseball fans around the world just want to see the planet’s best ballplayers take the field together. Cuba won the gold at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, so to omit it from the World Classic would be a terrible shame from a fan’s perspective.

For their part, MLB owners just wanted to sell Yankees caps, Red Sox jerseys, and other trinkets to new markets. Instead, everyone involved is getting a lesson in Cold War politics.