OK for Selig to go to game with Castro, but not for Guillen to spew ignorant support

Phil Mushnick

EQUAL TIME

People such as Ozzie Guillen are more easily explained than excused: a toxic combination of social and historical ignorance, self-importance and a mouth with no safety mechanism. Ready, fire, aim!

There’s an Ozzie Guillen at every family wedding, picnic, funeral. It’s unlikely, though, that those in the sports media would describe such relatives of theirs merely as “outspoken” or “fiery.”

Despite such charms — in Chicago he denounced a columnist as a “faggot” — the Marlins couldn’t wait to hire him away from the White Sox. Yep, he’s the man to lead our team!

Fidel Castro at an exhibition in Cuba in 1999." title="BFFS: Baseball commissioner Bud Selig sits with Fidel Castro at an exhibition in Cuba in 1999." width="300" height="300" src="/rw/nypost/2012/04/13/sports/web_photos/13.1s078.Mush.main.1.TA--300x300.jpg" />

AP

BFFS: Baseball commissioner Bud Selig sits with Fidel Castro at an exhibition in Cuba in 1999.

But what about Bud Selig? He hardly can plead ignorance. In 1999 he accompanied the Orioles to Cuba to play the Cuban National Team. At the game, the Commissioner of Baseball sat beside Fidel Castro, who wore his military fatigues (Get it, America?).

You could see the worth-a-million-words video of the mostly forgotten episode on ESPN on Tuesday. Yep, Fidel and Bud, a couple of Presidents-For-Life, together, takin’ in a ballgame.

Selig, now 77, was very much an adult when Castro militarily installed himself as dictator (1959), stole the goods, livelihoods, homes and properties of both supporters and non-supporters, had the most stubborn and/or suspect executed or tossed, penniless, from their country.

Selig was an adult during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) and the Soviet-Cuban missile crisis (1962), when for two weeks American school children daily practiced nuclear explosion safety drills — as if crawling under desks would save them — and sought answers from adults as to why Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro want to blow up the U.S.

So before we ask the Marlins and then Ozzie Guillen how they can be so insensitive to Cuban-Americans — all Americans who value democracy — and how they can be so ignorant, perhaps Selig should be given the first shot to answer those questions.

The Marlins unilaterally suspended Guillen for five games, for whatever that’s worth. Good thing for MLB. If it had been left to Selig what would or could he do? After all, as Commissioner, he went out of his way — way out of his way — to sit beside Fidel Castro at an Orioles road game.

Still, Selig publicly and officially characterized Guillen’s spoken great regard for Castro as inexcusably “offensive” — especially “to the Miami community.” Why does that sound more like “bad for business” than “offensive”?

Regardless, if Miami’s such a bad place in the U.S. to express such a sentiment, where would be a good place?

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Ozzie Guillen, Ozzie Guillen, Fidel Castro, Bud Selig, Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, Cuban National Team, Marlins, Nikita Khrushchev, Commissioner of Baseball, Cuba

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