One report found that most baseball stars made less than $2,000 annually and that all players would receive sports leave pay at the same rate they would get from their off-season jobs as engineers, sports instructors, handymen, etc.[23] The situation would get worse in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which was Cuba’s main trading partner. This led many players to defect to the United States due to deteriorating economic conditions. Amidst such action, even Fidel Castro admitted himself that it’s hard to prevent the baseball stars from defecting. He would later proclaim, “if you have to compete against six million dollars versus three thousand Cuban pesos you cannot win.”