It has been nearly two weeks since the World Baseball Classic ended unsuccessfully for the Cuban team, but that is no reason for our proud nation to be disappointed. There was no shame in losing this championship game – with our best players choosing to remain in Cuba, we were able to best many nations playing their best players. Those critics that found time to besmirch the name of Cuban baseball are now eating those words, while Cuba’s finest return to their humble home as victors, regardless of how the tournament’s events unfolded. If there is any shame to be had, it is to be found in the purported birthplace of baseball, the United States of America.

It is only fitting that a nation as historically disrespectful as the United States, a nation that has the temerity to call their professional league championship the World Series, fails to succeed in a true world competition. Their political shortcomings are well known (as noted by my colleagues at Granma), and it was only time before their shortcomings in baseball came to bear as well. Their overpaid, pampered pseudo-celebrities did not, as they say, bring their A game. Instead, they brought to bear the hallmarks of their bourgeois society – sloth, gluttony, anger, and, of course, greed. Their displays of athletic ineptitude more resembled acts of terror than acts of sport, and mirrored the actions of one of their own leaders, shotgun afficionado Vice President Dick Cheney. Just as Cheney filled his supposed friend’s face with buckshot, USA Manager Buck Martinez and his charges shot themselves mulitple times in various fleshy body parts with their dispirited play.

For the United States, success in the WBC was supposed to be a given. After all, the United States is always victorious, are they not? Let us not forget the many proud victorious moments American history offers the world. The Japanese internment camps during World War II. The Vietnam War. And, of course, who can forget that proud moment of recent vintage where President George Walker Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” The one-sided war in Iraq was success, the war against a verb was being won, and the political placebo that is democracy would now reign in these godless Middle Eastern lands. In this spirit, the US baseball team entered and left the WBC the way the US entered and left the Bay of Pigs fiasco. What began as an assumed victory quickly became a national embarrasment.

And as the US crumbled, so crumbled the foundation of the Fourth Estate. In the nascent days of the World Baseball Classic, braying jackasses like Dan Le Batard would waste newsprint ink with their hollow prouncements:

“Fidel Castro is our Hitler, our Saddam, our bin Laden. Before quibbling over the analogies or getting into a comparison of atrocities, please absorb that. Viscerally, immediately, how would you feel about playing games today with them? Would they just be exhibitions then?”

Only a nation so deluded and self-satisfied would compare a great man like Our President with tyrants and terrorists. The hubris of the United States must blind their eyes to their appearance to the rest of the world. To many countries, America is the tyrant. To themselves, however, they are savoirs and policemen, doing what is right for the international community. That is, until the evils become too great to ignore. Then the backscratching turns violent and bloody, and the journalistic reprisal is swift and merciless.

Of course, befitting the fair-weather ways of their newsmedia, the poised performance of Cuba made many pundits change their position. And, of course, America proves to be as poor at accepting defeat as they are at fielding grounders – while Boston Globe writer Dan Shaugnessy attempts to address his myopia and rightfully pay tribute to Cuba’s greatness, some anonymous weblogger attempts to paint this honorable apology as the ramblings of an idiot. That Shaugnessy – a man associated with a cursed baseball franchise – offered his praise of Cuba just before their defeat at the hands of Japan is mere coincidence, though I would not be surprised if his enemies saw things otherwise. Websites like Dan Shaugnessy Watch, replete with inaccuracies and petulant rage, are exemplary of the oblivious idiocy that runs rampant through the minds and hearts of all Americans.

Breads and circuses can only disguise so much malignance, especially when the circus itself is infected with various cancers. America is a superpower in the waning days of its potency, a desecrated temple wracked with numerous ailments of the soul beyond cure, thrashing about while the rest of the world patiently waits for the final tremors to come. It is only a matter of time before the patient finally falls victim to its own sins and is pronounced dead. As Sodom and Gommorah fell, so shall fall America, and American baseball.

Rogelio Polanco Fuentes is the director of the Juventud Rebelde newspaper.