James Traub, reviewing a new book on Dominican baseball success in today’s N.Y Times, blames the dearth of Cuban baseball talent in the U.S. on “the United States’ trade embargo against Cuba, which shut off the flow of Cuban players after 1962 (unless they were willing to defect).”

Here I thought it was Castro’s totalitarian policies that kept all Cubans, including the baseball players, imprisoned on their own island all these years, except for those brave few who risked life and limb to defect. But that’s not the way the New York Times and its contributors see the world. And so we have a new kind of economic law: The way to beat an embargo is to defect to the embargoer, hoping that the target of the embargo doesn’t shoot you first.