The Clinton administration's top diplomats, who took a tepid step toward Cuba with baseball diplomacy last month, have turned Monday's exhibition matchup between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team into a fantasy-league replay of the Cold War, with Kennedy-style dirty tricks and the prospect of anti-Castro agitation in the stands.

Fans of baseball like to tout the game's seamless links to history, but this might be too much, even for nostalgia buffs. Bay of Pigs: Get over it.

Only days ago, with the State Department's blessing, the Miami Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue was threatening to boot the Cuban team's two jetliners when they landed, under authority of a court lien imposed after Cuban fighters downed a Brothers to the Rescue plane in 1996.

That plan was dodged when go-betweens persuaded Orioles owner Peter Angelos to charter his own planes for the Cubans, who hosted the Baltimore club in Havana last month.

The opponents of U.S.-Cuban detente in the State Department, however, haven't given up. So far they've managed to deny Cuban officials visas and a welcoming reception for their team, while approving hostile flyovers by Brothers to the Rescue during the game. They've also arranged for anti-Castro activists to get seats close enough to the Cuban dugout to cause problems. And they're greasing the way for Cuban players to defect, setting up a little receiving room right beneath the stands.

"For 40 years the State Department has said no to Fidel Castro's Cuba," Scott Armstrong, the Washington author and journalist who arranged the games, told Salon News. "Now it is finding it very difficult to say yes, even over something as straightforward and mundane as a baseball game."

The Orioles, who have the worst record in the majors despite having its second-highest payroll ($83 million), slipped by the Cubans, 3-2, in 11 innings in an exhibition game on March 28. It was the first major league game played on the island, 90 miles off Key West, since 1958, just before Fidel Castro's revolutionaries marched into Havana and took power. Relations have remained frozen since then, through abortive CIA invasions, clumsy attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Cuba's patron, a decade ago.

This year's games, gingerly supported by the White House, were supposed to help break the ice between Washington and one of the world's last communist dictatorships. But apparently the first contest went a little too smoothly for some U.S. diplomats, who just can't kick the old habits.

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