BROTHERS IN ARMS

El Duque was determined to share Livan's dream- or die trying

How to die? That's what he was wondering as he stood on that island's shore, about to leave family and country behind. Do you continue dying slowly, a drop at a time, letting the frustration eat at you so literally that you keep biting and biting and biting the skin off your hands, even after your palms have begun to bleed? Or do you die more quickly, by defying death instead of succumbing to it, by boarding that creaking 20-foot boat, hoisting that raggedy sail and throwing what's left of your life to the wind? Cuban pitcher Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez had his answer. Baseball had been taken away from him. He would die to get it back. c They were awful, the 40 miles from communism to freedom. Using a compass made of household magnets, Hernandez and seven friends bobbed in the Atlantic Ocean for 10 nauseating hours, vomiting again and again, unsure if they were closer to land or death. They brought four cans of Spam, some stale bread, three pounds of brown sugar and a tank of fresh water. So when they finally landed on a deserted Bahamian island, they endured four days there, eating seaweed and whatever conch crawled up on shore, trying to cook the latter with wood from other beached boats. The appalling stink their bodies gave off when huddled for warmth in the rain? The fact they were defecating green? Hernandez tried to take his mind off those things an inning at a time, using branches as bats, buoys as balls and playing the sport he prayed would save him.

Orlando's little brother Livan? He was doing a different kind of floating then, bouncing between parades. The World Series MVP was busy as Disney World's grand marshal and the Orange Bowl's, too. He was dating Hispanic soap stars, fielding endorsement offers and partaking in every promise America makes its athletes. Orlando, Cuba's winningest pitcher, had watched Livan's October from afar, talking to that television, telling his kid brother to keep throwing fastballs at Jim Thome's knuckles. Livan had grown up imitating his brother's high leg kick, as so many kids on the island had, and he was even nicknamed El Duquecito, or Little Duke. But now their country had banned Orlando from baseball for life for allegedly aiding defections, including Livan's, so when he saw his little brother holding that MVP trophy aloft on the stage near second base, when he heard his little brother shouting, "I love you, Miami!" in accented English into the NBC microphone, he bowed his head and wept.

"Crying cleans the soul," Orlando says. "I was pitching with him in the World Series. He let me play. It was me out there. My blood. His victory was my victory."

Orlando had lost just about everything else. He was once one of Cuba's biggest celebrities, but his friends vanished after the ban and police began harassing him on the streets: You used to be El Duque. Who are you now? You're nobody. Let us see some identification. Orlando split with his wife, who destroyed his awards and trophies. He started chain-smoking. Sores developed on his arms and hands, blisters around his mouth. He worked as a physical therapist at a mental hospital for $8.75 a month, living in a tiny cinder-block home, two blocks from an airport but not allowed to leave. After five aborted escape attempts, after wrestling with leaving two daughters (ages 7 and 2), Orlando says he decided to go for good on Dec. 15, after government officials, having heard whispers about a boat being built, interrogated him for 12 hours, threatening to put him under so much surveillance that his "Havana would be reduced to the size of a black penny."
"My nerves got sick," Orlando says. "I suffered, brother. I suffered more than you can imagine. I was in depression. I wanted to cry and laugh and scream. I didn't sleep well. Horrible! And then I had to go to work with crazy people. For a little while, I was one of them."

So later, after a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter finally spotted him and his waving friends and took them to safety, Orlando boarded a Lear jet chartered by a sports agent and began a flight toward free agency. In Cuba, he had celebrated triumphs with drinks of sugar and water because of alcohol's scarcity, but on that plane, he popped open bottle after bottle of champagne, toasting freedom, getting drunk on possibility.

Funny, isn't it, how life can be as circular as that stitched white ball sometimes? Because the little brother always aspired to be like the big brother. And because now it is the other way around.

The February sun is breathing hot as Livan Hernandez pulls his black Porsche in front of Lario's, a Cuban restaurant on Miami Beach, flipping the keys to the bow-tied valet. In Cuba, Orlando drove a 24-year-old Russian-built Lada that stalled at all stops, but Livan has owned this Porsche, and a bright-yellow Ferrari, and a silver Mercedes and & well, since defecting in 1995, Livan, 23 and single, says he has purchased "ten cars, I think." He bought his mother a BMW for her birthday, even though at the time she didn't have a license or, for that matter, know how to drive. He once went to buy a roof rack and returned with a Range Rover. And now, as he emerges from the Porsche on this strange, sexy strip of street, wearing expensive sunglasses and a $200 shirt, a cellular phone tucked under his tilted head, he looks like the very picture of the American athlete. The tattooed guy with the iguana on his shoulder, the kid with the thick snake around his neck, the pretty women on rollerblades, they all try to get close to him, and dozens of people at the beachside bar hold up their frozen drinks and shout congratulations in English and Spanish. People gather around in a cluster, begging autographs and pictures, and old women demand kisses on their cheeks, and Hernandez obliges. Cars are left running in the street, fans spilling out of them like clowns at a circus. A man on the sidewalk steadies his hands and videotapes Hernandez eating lunch. It has been four months since Livan Hernandez won a game for the Florida Marlins.

He has all of nine regular-season victories in his career (fewer than someone named Dan Karchner), but this frenzied scene follows him later, too, on Calle Ocho in Miami's Little Havana, when a public bus driver spots Hernandez walking, screeches to a traffic-halting stop, throws open the door with an airy hiss and shouts Hernandez's oft-repeated "I love you, Miami!" Kids in a slowly-passing school bus hang out the windows on Calle Ocho and yell, "Me happy! Everybody happy!" mimicking the choppy English a joyous Hernandez used after being named MVP of the National League Championship Series. I love you, Miami! and Me happy! Everybody happy! have become a sweet song, following Hernandez around South Florida, following him into night clubs and gas stations and bathrooms, giving his every step a soundtrack.

"I love you, Miami!" a smiling Hernandez shouts back on Ocean Drive, arms spread wide, letting all this wash over him again and again. Then, after walking into a store and being told to take anything he wants for free-jackets, sweaters, food, anything at all-Hernandez adds: "Isn't this enchanting? The people are divine. They give me so much warmth. Miami is on fire."

Juan Iglesias, Hernandez's agent, fans those flames. Iglesias, who says his client has earned more than $500,000 this whirlwind off-season, has two thick files bursting with endorsement offers on his desk. Letterman's people called after the World Series, but Hernandez declined because he didn't want to go all the way to New York for an interview and, besides, he didn't know who Letterman was. Talk-show host Cristina, the Hispanic Oprah, invited Livan to a birthday party at her house, but Hernandez couldn't attend. "Busy," he said. That was also his answer when declining Gloria Estefan's invitation to tour Spain. Livan did go to Estefan's mansion for her daughter's birthday party and went to Disney World with the Estefans, too, as a VIP, boarding all rides through a back entrance, never once waiting in line.

"Did I mention the $100,000 offer to endorse a bracelet?" Iglesias asks. Livan turned that down. It was a bracelet that supposedly measures your aura.

The kid has plenty of presence, no matter how you measure it. You see it in restaurants, when he laughs with valets and busboys. You see it at a park, when an elderly woman holds his hand and says, "Thank you for sharing with the old people." And you see it on the street, when a stranger hands Hernandez a cell phone and begs him to say hello to his mother, which Hernandez does at length.

"I like to talk to people," Hernandez explains later. "I was so alone when I got here. Now I'm never alone. And I love that." But what is it about him that made Millie Mir, a 54-year-old woman who doesn't even like baseball, write a salsa song about him? What is it that makes Emilio Estefan, Gloria's husband, all but adopt the kid, even though Emilio has zero interest in sports?

"The immigrant generation, we identify with him," Estefan says. "We were drawn to his triumph. To see a kid his age-it leaves me with a sadness, thinking of all the Cuban youth strangled because they don't have the chance to show their talents in freedom. Livan is like a ray of sunshine. His story is our story."

There are nearly two million Latinos in South Florida, and about 700,000 Cuban exiles in Greater Miami. Many of them started here like Estefan, who came broke and alone at age 14 and spent three years sleeping on his aunt's floor in what he calls "horrible fear." So here was Livan, a kid of 20 who left everything he loved in Cuba-his mother, his brother, his safety. Here was a kid who spent his first American Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's Eve alone in front of a television because he didn't have a real friend in the country. Here was a kid who knew so little about this new culture and new language that, despite having a contract worth $4.5 million, he didn't understand ATM machines or credit cards or checks, or even how to ask about them.

So every Cuban exile who knew this story, every Cuban who had heard parents talk about arriving in the U.S. to dishwashing and shoe-shining jobs, every Cuban who had ever heard grandparents rail against Fidel Castro, every Cuban who had ever felt Cuban, could see the patriotism in Livan's 143rd pitch against Atlanta, when, with Cuban flags waving in the crowd of 67,204, he struck out his 15th and final Brave and then staggered wearily into the embrace of his catcher. Livan Hernandez went to the mound that day a pitcher, but he stepped off it a hero.

Livan decided to defect in Mexico, when he noticed that none of the other international players, none of the players the Cubans kept crushing, had to sneak down to the laundry room to steal hotel detergent for their mothers. Livan can still feel that shame now, can still see himself nervously stuffing stolen soap into a nylon bag, can still smell that damn detergent even as he stands on the balcony of his $300,000 Miami apartment, 22 floors up, nothing less than the beach as his backyard. Around midnight in that Mexican hotel, Livan asked his big brother to defect with him. Orlando said no. Not with a one-month-old baby back home. So Livan cried as he sprinted across the street alone to the car waiting outside.
It isn't an easy thing, leaving, even though food in Cuba is rationed and the poverty is suffocating and the splintering national baseball team is bleeding communist red. You hear stories about millionaires being made-you hear about defector Ariel Prieto of the Oakland A's walking around America for a week with his $1.3 million signing bonus in his only pair of jeans-but there is always another side when you flip over the dollar. After defecting, San Francisco pitcher Osvaldo Fernandez would step off the mound in mid-windup, thinking about the daughter he left behind. Former St. Louis pitcher Rene Arocha would be about to throw a 2-0 pitch to Barry Bonds and his mind would wander to the skinny girl in the stands who looked too much like his 8-year-old. And when he decided to cross that water, this is what Livan left in his wake:
"I lost 35 pounds," Livan's mother, Miriam Carreras, says. "I got lesions on my skin, boils in my mouth. I had no balance. I fainted. I didn't eat. I didn't live. I would sit down, close my eyes and see my son wandering through the streets of Miami with a suitcase, just lost."

Mother and son have been reunited. Carreras is sitting in her son's apartment now, Rolex on her wrist, Guccis on her feet, tiny white dog yapping on the balcony. The Cuban government allowed her to leave for Game 7 of the World Series, so she saw her son before that game, in a skybox, for the first time in more than two years. Livan, winner of Games 1 and 5, walked in. And as they held each other, the mother wept, and the son screamed, "Don't! Stop! Stop crying! Please!" But he could feel the way she was shaking in his embrace, could feel her shoulders shuddering with the sobs, and he couldn't help it anymore. He started crying too. As all this was happening, America's national anthem was playing.

Orlando wants this. The baseball. The family reunion. The anthem. All of it. It is why, while his brother began spring training, Orlando was still in Costa Rica, working out in a gym filled with the stink of piled-up garbage, practicing daily at a baseball field featuring a rusty scoreboard and a ghetto behind the leftfield fence. Orlando could have come straight from the Bahamas to Miami after the U.S. granted him a humanitarian visa, but then his rights would have been assigned to one major league team by lottery. By going through a third country like Costa Rica, he made himself a free agent, thus setting up the most American of possibilities-a bidding war. One of the first English phrases he learned, he learned from the dollar:
"In God we trust," he says through a smile.

He had never known money. Never mind a childhood without toys; he had a childhood without underwear. He shared a cramped room with his brother and grandparents, sleeping on the floor until he was 16, an experience so painful that "just talking about it makes my back hurt." He adds: "I don't remember much from my childhood. It's easier that way."
Even as a superstar, Orlando used his car as an illegal taxi. Even as a superstar, Orlando had to wash his own uniform, with that stolen detergent. So while working out in that Costa Rican gym, near a malfunctioning Jacuzzi, he doesn't complain but says, "We had something close to Jacuzzis in Cuba. They were called puddles." At lunch, eating shrimp bought with money borrowed from agent Joe Cubas, he says, "We live on an island, but we've never eaten shrimp." When he orders his favorite rum drink now-una Cuba Libre (a Free Cuba)-he refers to it as "a lie on ice." The other day, while in a car with his agent, Orlando kept searching for a handle to roll down the window. Cubas had to explain power windows. "Me cojio el desarollo," Orlando said. Evolution caught me. "Where he comes from," Cubas says, "there is no evolution."

He is doing some evolving now, about $6.6 million worth. That's what the New York Yankees will pay Cuba's winningest pitcher to wear the most American uniform in sports. So last week, at a press conference at Victor's Cafe in Miami, Orlando was flanked by both his agent and his publicist as he talked about making his life into a movie. There was a buzz in the back of the room then, behind the 20-plus TV cameras, and Livan broke through to see his brother for the first time in nearly three years. They embraced in front of the room, flashbulbs going off all around them, an extraordinarily private moment captured in an extraordinarily public way.

They had taken such different routes to get here-Livan crossing a street, Orlando crossing an ocean-and now the little brother was asking the big brother please not to cry, but the big brother was burying his face in the little brother's neck and sobbing nonetheless. Out in the parking lot, right next to the handicapped spaces, a lady looked over them. She was green and 12 feet tall and she had a torch in her hand. And emblazoned in gold under her feet, in Spanish, were the following 18 words:
Light the path of our Cuban brothers so
they are safe and sound in the land of liberty.

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