CUBA'S ERODING GRIP : TEMPTATION TO DEFECT INCREASES FOR BASEBALL PLAYERS.

Byline: Joe Strauss Atlanta Journal-Constitution

As the silver-haired manager of the world's most powerful amateur baseball team, Jorge Fuentes says he is not worried. He says Cuba will emerge with another gold medal in Atlanta.

Only a short time ago, Fuentes' prediction would have had a ring of infallibility. Yet just days after the defection of pitcher Rolando Arrojo and little more than a week before the opening of Olympic play, Fuentes has his doubters.

An uncommon mix of political and economic turmoil have widened cracks in the Cuban baseball machine. What once was considered Cuba's unstoppable stroll to the Olympic gold has become complicated by rumors of further defections and the country's fiscal realities.

As Arrojo's departure vividly illustrated, if baseball is in fact a Cuban natural resource, the government has entered the exporting business, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

To help fund its sports federation, coaches are dispatched throughout the world as advisers, and former Olympic players like Lourdes Gurriel have been sold to teams in Japan and other countries.

Funding athletics has become more difficult since the Soviet Union's collapse shredded a major portion of the country's social safety net. Brownouts are now commonplace and the gap between those with dollars and those without has become a chasm. While recent defectors such as Livan Hernandez and Osvaldo Fernandez receive multiyear major-league contracts, their former teammates play for less than $10 a month.

Control by the government, though, appears to be ebbing.

The world's most talented amateur players once appeared to be placated by ideology, their status as national heroes, their personal relationships with Fidel Castro and the uncommon way in which their needs were met. As third baseman Omar Linares once said, ``I'd rather play for 11 million people than 11 million dollars.''

Now the temptation of American baseball - and American riches - has become reality for handfuls of their countrymen, several of whom were considered lesser talents back home. An entire starting rotation - Arrojo, Hernandez, Fernandez and Arocha - has left the country since the '92 Olympics in Barcelona.

Several younger players in line to replace members of the national team also jumped, threatening the national pipeline.

Until recently, doubting the communist cause was unthinkable to most. Now, unrest has begun to bubble to the surface, given rampant shortages of necessities.

Home run champion and Turner Broadcasting vice president Hank Aaron has traveled to Cuba twice in the last two years. As part of a documentary produced for CNN, he surveyed the nation's talent pool, observed the hardscrabble economic conditions and met the Cuban president. The topic of defections inevitably arose.

``Castro said there is nothing he can do about it,'' recalls Aaron. ``He only said that for an 18- or 19-year-old kid, it's hard to leave his father and mother back on the island.''

Aaron also says he found the Cubans open about virtually every topic except their nation's political situation. About that there was uncomfortable silence. ``That tells me most of them are dissatisfied with what's going on,'' he said.

Players contend they are here to play baseball. Their unprecedented success, however, elevates them as the most visible representatives of a system four-square contrary to its capitalist neighbor.

Baseball's significance to the national psyche is reflected in the team's dubious record-keeping. The Cubans maintain they have won 134 consecutive games in international tournaments. But the number is bloated by continental and regional games and even dismisses a loss to Nicaragua in the 1991 Intercontinental Cup. The Cubans say their best players were in the U.S. for an exhibition series at the time, making the loss irrelevant.

More subtle signs of erosion are not up for debate. The Cubans struggled during their Olympic qualifier last August. Accustomed to pummeling opponents, they later trailed in four games at the Intercontinental Cup, twice going into extra innings.

No longer does Team USA's roster of collegians shrink at the challenge of toppling their red-clad adversary. The Americans have won six of nine exhibitions against Cuba dating to last summer, most recently capturing two of five games against the roster the defending gold-medalists will bring to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. While rationalizations were made last July that inactivity had left the Cubans vulnerable, there were no such excuses this time.

The Americans aren't the only ones who perceive weakness. The Cubans recently had three losses and were tied a fourth time during a nine-game tour in Japan.

U.S. coach Skip Bertman publicly concedes superiority to the older Cubans. He has been less deferential when speaking to his team, however.

``They want to win. They think we can win,'' he says of his players. ``In '92 (during the pre-Olympic tour), they blew out the Olympic team four out of five times. Here, they never blew us out. We beat them twice and we could have beaten them a third time.''

Turnover among the Cuban national team is unprecedented. Barring further defections, only nine holdovers from the '92 Olympic team will play in Atlanta. Age is a factor. But so is the omnipresent fear of defection and the embarrassment it would bring. Hernandez's brother Carlos, a right-handed pitcher, was left home, as were shortstop German Mesa and veteran pitchers Ernesto Guevara and Lazaro Valle. Linares' brother Carlos also was excluded from the Olympic roster.

``Nobody in this world is irreplaceable,'' says Evaristo Ruiz, vice president for the Cuban Institute of Sports. ``Everyone can be substituted and replaced.''

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Photo

Photo: (color) Cuban pitcher Rolando Arrojo (44) left the t eam Monday night to defect. He is expected to hold a press conference in Miami today.

Associated Press