On cooperation: baseball and science

U.S. Science Group Seeks Cooperation with Cuba

(From Reuters) A group led by the head of the United States’ biggest science organization is in Cuba this week to discuss ways to rekindle scientific cooperation as U.S.-Cuba relations slowly improve under U.S. President Barack Obama. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Agre, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told Reuters on Wednesday the group had met with government officials and Cuban scientists, all of them enthusiastic about doing science together.

The best opportunities for cooperative research appear to lie in medicine, where Cuba’s emphasis on public health and vaccine development could prove valuable to the United States, and the environment, particularly shared resources such as the Gulf of Mexico and migratory wildlife, he and delegation members said.

Can baseball help bring US and Cuba together?

(From Associated Press) “Pingpong diplomacy” thawed relations between the United States and China in 1971. Can “baseball diplomacy” help do the same for the U.S. and Cuba? Americans ranging from 12-year-old ballplayers to softballing senior citizens are visiting the communist island to engage in their own kind of field work, and there’s talk of another trip by a major league team.

Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos, who staged exhibition games with the Cuban national team in Havana and Baltimore a decade ago, told The Associated Press that he hopes to so again next spring. Two groups of baseball youngsters from Florida are planning to visit next year as well.

This weekend, four teams from a Massachusetts slow-pitch softball senior league will travel to Cuba for a series of games. “It’s got to help diplomacy. Sports does that,” said Stu Gray, commissioner of the Eastern Massachusetts Senior Softball Association and head of this weekend’s delegation.

The association has designed a logo for the trip featuring U.S. and Cuban flags crossing over a softball.