After two days of meetings bogged down in questions of wording, the Baltimore Orioles are set to play the Cuban national team in Havana on March 28. A second game in Baltimore remains a possibility.
Overcoming State Department objections, representatives of Major League Baseball, the Orioles and the Cuban Government emerged tonight from a four-hour meeting with an agreement for the Havana game, a participant in the meeting said. The representatives, he said, would try to conclude negotiations for a game in Baltimore as soon as possible.
But the participant cautioned that the Cuban representatives at the meetings Friday and today still had to get final approval from Cuba -- presumably from Fidel Castro -- and that the Players Association still had to agree to the Havana game even if a Baltimore game is not arranged. The Players Association, he said, wants a two-game series.
Baseball and Orioles officials thought they had an agreement in principle Friday, but they learned at a meeting that night that the State Department thought otherwise. When the approximately eight-hour meeting ended shortly after 4 A.M. today, no agreement was in place.
Another participant in the meetings said the game had been put on hold by State Department objections to the proposed recipients of any proceeds from the game. The fate of the proceeds apparently was not determined at tonight's meeting.
The first participant said the details of the proceeds would be worked out to the satisfaction of all parties, but they would be used mainly for baseball-related endeavors. Much of the disagreement was centered on wording, he said. ''It was a case of everybody getting comfortable with the language,'' he said.
The baseball people who attended the Friday meeting expected it to be relatively brief, perhaps an hour and a half, with the topics of discussion logistics for the game in Cuba and a possible second game in Baltimore. They expected to put in place the deal in principle that had been reached earlier in the day.
The State Department, one of the participants said, had told the commissioner's office and the Orioles to make an agreement with the Cuban Government, which they did. ''But then,'' the person said, ''they came in and said conditions had to be changed. That happened about four times last night.''
Among those at the meetings were three representatives from the State Department; four from the Cuban Government; Sandy Alderson of Major League Baseball; Peter Angelos of the Orioles; William Schweitzer, the American League lawyer, and Michael Weiner and Tony Bernazard of the Players Association.
The Orioles' preferred date for a game in Baltimore is April 3, but if they do not have enough time to work out the logistics, the game could be played later in April.
