Guillen Pays The Price For Free Speech
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By DERON SNYDER
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can hurt you, too. We lie when we tell children otherwise.
Words don’t leave visible scars, but they can cut and sting like a lash. The latest case in a long line of examples was on full display Tuesday at Marlins Park, where Miami manager Ozzie Guillen apologized over and over again for comments about Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Guillen is known for making outrageous and controversial remarks. His barbs, sometimes laced with profanity, have been aimed at virtually every segment of baseball, including writers, umpires, opponents, broadcasters, fans and his own front office. But he has demonstrated an amazing, Teflon-like ability in keeping his utterances from sticking … until now.
He obviously didn’t realize the impact of his words — “I love Fidel Castro” — in a recent Time magazine article. Such sentiment is especially explosive in Miami, home to one of the nation’s largest, strongest and most politically active Cuban-American communities. Guillen spent about an hour Tuesday in apologizing and claiming that his comments were misinterpreted. He’ll have a hard time convincing passionate critics that his true feelings were lost in translation.
