You can question plenty about some of the choices Yoenis Cespedes has made, but never his love of baseball.
Many Cuban players who defect from the island have harrowing accounts of crossing the perilous Caribbean waters in rickety homemade wooden vessels known as "balsas," or seeing people starve to death or get arrested time and time again for trying to depart their homeland in search of a better life.
Céspedes is one of them.
He has stories of sneaking around the vindictive Cuban police force, being imprisoned and branded a traitor. His eyes still well up when he talks about not being able to see his family, or his young son, for years.