The decision to set up Peloteros Por La Paz (Baseball Players for Peace) came after Angel and Arnold Trujillo, two community activists from New Mexico, went to Cuba last year. They took two duffel bags full of bats, balls, mitts, hats, and uniforms with them to give to the children of Viñales, a small town on the western part of the island.

"A little three-year-old boy grabbed a bat and started hitting line drives all over the place," Angel said. "You could see why the Cubans are so good at the game."

"In January, we invited José Luis Noa from the Cuban Interests Section in Washington to come to Las Vegas to assess the situation," Angel continued. Noa, who is the director of sports, religion, and sister city issues for the Interests Section, spoke to a meeting of 60 at the Plaza Hotel in downtown Las Vegas.

"Las Vegas is a small town of 18,000 with a lot of history," Angel explained. "Sixty is a very good turnout for us. The mayor and a couple of city council members came. We have been discussing having Las Vegas become a sister city with a similar sized town in Cuba and they wanted to find out more.

Students from World College, established by industrialist Armand Hammer, from Highlands University, and the local junior college attended the meeting.

"A number of Chicanos came from Mora, New Mexico," Angel said, "a very poor town north of Las Vegas with few medical services and no resident physicians. They wanted to get information about Cuba's offer to provide scholarships for 500 doctors to people from oppressed communities in the United States.

"In New Mexico, 33 percent of the Chicano children have no medical care. Similar conditions exist on the Indian reservations where there is a 45 percent unemployment rate and very few social services," Angel explained.

"Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America," Angel continued. "There are more Cuban doctors serving in the underdeveloped world than those from the entire United Nations put together."

"Cuba represents no threat to anybody, much less the United States, the richest, most militarily powerful nation in the world," Angel said. "Cuba is surrounded by water and has never done anything to any of its neighbors.

"We have already collected 200 mitts, eight or nine complete sets of uniforms in red pin stripes, and 100 baseballs in addition to other related equipment," Angel explained. "We began the campaign in earnest on February 1. We are going to contact all of the major league clubs and a number of the big league ball players who we think will be sympathetic to this issue."

Peloteros Por La Paz intends to coordinate the project with its proposed sister city, which is expected to be in the province of Holquin, Cuba.

"If there were normalized relations between our two countries we believe scores of Cubans would be playing in the major leagues in the United States," Angel stated.

"We think we will fill a semi-truck and then we plan to drive it to Vera Cruz, Mexico, where we will load everything on a Cuban freighter," Angel concluded. He put in a pitch for anyone wishing to help and urged them to call 505-454-6771 or 505-454-8928.  
 
 
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