Two Cuban women's players missing at tournament
Forward Yezenia Gallardo, 20, and midfielder Yisel Rodriguez, 22, were listed as absent from the team for Cuba's game Monday night against Haiti at BC Place.
Jesus Pereira, the head of the Cuban soccer delegation at the tournament, declined to stop to answer questions from reporters after the game. Pereira, the coaches and players headed directly to the team bus, again declining questions through a CONCACAF spokesman.
Cuban soccer players have a history of defecting during tournaments on the North American mainland. Seven members of the men's Under-23 team defected during a CONCACAF Olympic qualifying tournament in Tampa, Fla., in 2008, and men's national team player Yosniel Mesa defected last year after a game in Charlotte, N.C., during the CONCACAF Gold Cup.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/soccer/news/20120123/cuba-womens-soccer/#ixzz1kOSNC59R
I have never understood why the Cuban government avoided these types of embarrassments by simply letting their citizens work where ever they wished.
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use any means that they have to escape doesn't mean it's a bad place!
Not at all. It could use some improvements in many areas, unlike America which is picture perfect in every way. 
You should invite them to come visit you. Better yet, invite them to join DU to give us some perspective. 
Your comparison to China is probably apt.
Not. 
It's rather axiomatic. 
Odd how many Haitians there are in Haiti still. I wonder how that could be?
First, of course, because Haitians actually aren't you, and many simply would not want to leave their home.
But second, because there is nowhere for them to go if they wanted to.
Ditto Somalis, just for instance, and all the millions and millions of people living in similarly awful situations around the world. Many of them would like to live somewhere better -- and what concern are we hearing about their inability to do that? Why is no one at DU week in, week out, complaining that all the Somalis who want to are not being allowed to go to the country of their choice? Do you imagine it matters to a Somali that it is not their government keeping them in, but other governments keeping them out?
The average Cuban does have a better life, in terms of human security -- food, shelter, education, employment, healthcare -- than growing numbers of USAmericans. I'll bet the reason those USAmericans -- the hungry, the homeless, the uninsured sick -- aren't emigrating from the US is that they have so much freedom where they are.
Migration is a complex phenomenon and managing it is a task that has daunted humanity for our entire history, particularly since its roots more often than not lie in imperialism and other forms of exploitation.
I find it interesting that several of the names I see in this thread decrying this one tiny and actually barely operative factor in the phenomenon today are familiar to me from the Guns forum. The agenda in its various outcroppings, eh?
All of my trips were independent, no tours. Fly in, find a hotel (the first time, my friend and I just asked someone on the street, and we found the Deauville even though they spelled it Dobil, and other times I just went straight to the same hotel or to friends'), do my own thing. I sometimes took my bike.
One day, on a 35-km bicycle ride to a beach east of Havana, I stopped to take a picture of the Havana horizon back in the distance. Somehow, I managed not to notice that the foreground was a military encampment, some kind of training thing I guess, with tents. I got taken to see the one-armed colonel with the eyepatch. Duh. I'd also forgotten that photographing Havana Harbour itself wasn't permitted (military vessels in the harbour). So we had a chat in my very rudimentary Spanish, I presented my letter of introduction from my local equivalent of the National Lawyers Guild, he wrote up a form and gave it to me to sign -- and when I saw that my occupation was down as abogada socialista I figured I was cool. 
And off I went.
Ran into a spot of bother on the way back when I couldn't face the huge detour around the harbour back to Nuevo Vedado where I was staying, and decided to walk through the tunnel. (Bicyling through it would have been suicide; the drivers were bad enough on the roads.) The catwalk got narrower and narrower, I got covered in grime from the wall, my bike lost little bits from colliding with the railing, I had visions of the flash floods that had killed people in the tunnel, and I finally came out the other side to find two cops wagging fingers at me. No bicycles allowed. Did I ride my bicycle through tunnels in Canada?? I was in no mood. In Canada, I huffed, tenemos ... and here I attempted to make up a Spanish word for "bridges" based on the French word ponts ... and made a very bad faux pas. But they didn't seem to notice, and again, off I went. I don't think the socialist lawyer thing impressed them that time.
Never went to Varadero, but did bus it across the island to Santiago de Cuba once. I gather it's kind of touristy now, but the old hotel on the square where I stayed barely had running water then, and only cold when it did. The musicians in the park opposite at dusk and dawn ... the lighting guy I met and sat in the lighting booth with during a rock concert one evening ... and when he neglected his duties and the spotlight strayed from the musicians, they struck up "Alejandro's got a girlfriend" to the tune of Alexander's Ragtime Band. And the schoolkids who gave the stern guided tour of the Moncada Barracks and seemed to think I understood everything they said.
Then on the bus back to Havana, late at night (it's a looong ride), the bus stopped and we were all told to get out, and there were torches, and a couple of guys in military uniforms, maybe even with guns, and people were questioned, but I was ignored (very likely somebody else told them I was a norteamericana, even though they would have meant something other than Canadian by that). Very exciting. Back on the bus, my seatmate asked whether I wanted to know what it was about. There had been an outbreak of a pig disease in one province and people were being told no pork products could be carried across, and we had had to walk through a footbath to get back on the bus. They take their pigs very seriously in Cuba, with very good reason.
In DC in May 2003 I was required to produce identification before my local friend could park her car in the Ronald Reagan building. We'd left ours at her place. Fortunately, she had her CIA ID with her and the army guy with the gun let us in. And then we got chased after by security when my partner was videotaping the lighting art in the atrium ...
Nobody notices little things like that at home, do they?
my brother had told me I'd find the population were in general poor but contented. That was a fair assessessment. They really are lovely people : always smiling. As you mentioned elsewhere there's not even an undercurrent of racism - all live in harmony which is nice.
It was only on reflection that I realised that for the 3 weeks I was there I actually felt even safer than I do here inthe UK. Only another 10 weeks or so and I'll be back there.
Sweden and the other European social democracies take care of "their poor" infinitely better than the US, and also have higher levels of freedom (by any index you can find on the net).
So what's wrong with the US that it fails on both counts too?
Why is it an either-situation? Why can't they have real freedom?
And why is it a neither-nor situation in the US? If you don't already know that you are less free than virtually any comparable country, at least by some measure in each case, you need to educate yourself. Hopefully, you already know that in terms of human security, the US comes last in that list.
But to answer your question ... one wonders whether it might have something to do with Cuba having been, and the European social democracies never having been, operated as a colony-cum-casino-cum-brothel for rich foreigners until barely a half-century ago, after a few centuries of being operated as a slave-based agricultural economy ... You do know that it takes an actual GDP to provide the standard of living you speak of, right?
Why isn't your question (to refer to what has already been said): Why can't the various other Latin American countries one might name, over the last half century, just stop allowing the wholesale murder of the people in their countries, like workers and peasants seeking only basic human security, and maybe even provide them with some of the security people in European social democracies enjoy? And hell, even some of the freedom at the same time?
Exactly where are your priorities? Star athletes who see the prospect of a lucrative career, or people being gunned down by death squads or having the land they subsistance farm taken away from them?
Rhetorical question.
edit - I keep wandering off and coming back to the thread and not noticing that LL has already said much of the obvious.
Personally I can understand the need to prevent the absurdity of overcrowding in Havana which is to what that relates.