This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 19th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President has ended a deal that made it easier for Cuban athletes to play Major League Baseball.

Why?

Dara Lind is a senior correspondent at Vox.

We discuss the change and why she believes the President has some difficulty separating governments from the people who must live under them.

A lot of great baseball players have come from Cuba.

And just to just name a couple here who are current players,

Jose Abreu, Janus Cespidus,

Aroldus Chapman, Led Miss Diaz, former Cardinal, Yaseel Puyg, and several others that many of these have represented

Cuba on their national baseball team. Why has a Trump administration wanted to make it more difficult for these guys to come to the United States?

Well, it's that they've stopped, they've blocked an agreement that Major League Baseball

made with the Cuban Baseball Federation that would have made it easier.

So in December of last year, MLB announced that they had made this deal where instead of

requiring Cuban baseball players to sneak out of Cuba before they would be able to get signed by a

Major League team, which under the terms of the current

embargo is required that they would there would be a way that they could be recruited and

signed while still on the island the Cuban Baseball Federation would get a signing fee.

That's the way that the US deals with Japanese baseball players.

That was supposed to go into effect that actually already cleared the first list of players

who'd be eligible

earlier in the month and the Trump administration under the terms of the

...