Word: publication
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...snow would melt - or an adult who still cries every time Field of Dreams is shown on cable - knows that baseball is far more than just a game. And the U.S. government is starting to recognize that it can harness the national pastime's awesome power as a public-diplomacy tool in tricky parts of the world where traditional efforts have been met with - well, traditional results...
...Last month, 56 U.S. softball players traveled to Cuba for a series of goodwill games that probably did more for America's public image on the island than any single political effort over the past 50 years. And in Nicaragua, where political relations with the U.S. have frayed ever since former revolutionary Daniel Ortega returned to power in 2007, U.S. ambassador Robert Callahan has discovered he can do some of his best work wearing a baseball mitt. (See TIME's top 10 sporting moments...
...think the State Department is coming to realize, belatedly, that [baseball] can be a very effective tool in public diplomacy," Callahan told TIME. In the case of the U.S. and Nicaragua, he said, "of all the things that unite us, I think the great sport of baseball is the most important...
...Following Callahan's Oct. 28 speech, hundreds of Ortega supporters attacked the U.S. embassy with rocks, eggs and improvised explosives fired from homemade mortars, which packed enough punch to break bulletproof windows. For several weeks afterwards, Sandinistas continued to hound Callahan, surrounding him at public events and forcing him to flee - on one occasion with the help of riot police...
...Baseball has even helped Callahan score some points with government officials who call him a "yanqui imperialista" in public. At a recent private event, Sandinista hard-liner Comandante Bayardo Arce, who's also president of the Nicaraguan Professional Baseball League, reportedly practiced some baseball diplomacy of his own with Callahan. "He puts his arm around me and says, in front of all the Sandinistas, 'This is my amigo from baseball - we share the love for the great sport of baseball,' " the ambassador said. However, he added, baseball is the only thing he and the former revolutionary can talk about...