KEY WEST, FLORIDA (Fortune) -- All morning, Henry Blanco, the backup catcher for the Chicago Cubs, sat fidgeting on a wooden bench in a courtroom here - waiting to testify before hopping a plane to hopefully rejoin his teammates tonight in Cincinnati.
Blanco, who was forced to wait another hour after the judge broke for lunch, will be the first witness this afternoon for the prosecution in a case against Blanco's agent, Gus Dominguez, who is on trial for allegedly smuggling ballplayers out of Cuba in hopes of securing professional contracts.
The high-profile case - the first of its kind against a baseball agent - comes just as the baseball season gets underway. But the timing was by design: some of the players that are expected to testify couldn't be called while they were out of the country during the offseason.
Blanco, a Venezuelan, is expected to testify about payments - more than $200,000 total - made from his bank account to a man named Ysbel Medina-Santos, a convicted drug trafficker who claims to have organized two operations to smuggle Cuban ballplayers at the behest of Dominguez.
Prosecutors believe that Dominguez funneled money through Blanco's account without the catcher's knowledge. "Mr. Dominguez has control over a bank account that Mr. Blanco maintains," Ben Daniel, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in his opening statement.
The case spotlights the intersection of the business that is Major League Baseball and U.S. immigration policy toward Cuba. It will likely raise uneasy questions for MLB, which for years has puzzled over how to deal with Cuban defectors.
The U.S. embargo against Cuba prohibits businesses, including baseball, from dealing with Cuba. But once a Cuban player gets to U.S. soil, he becomes a U.S. resident, and baseball has decided that these players should be placed in the amateur draft, as opposed to being designated free agents, a status that would allow players to sign for more money.
One of Dominguez's attorneys described the agent as a family man and a person dedicated to giving young ballplayers an opportunity to make it, in his words, to "the show."
Daniel argued that the whole affair is about a hard-knuckled business deal. "His stock in trade is baseball players," Daniel said.
"This is a guy who wants to bring them in, sign them, and turn them into an income-producing entity for him, an investment if you will," he said.
Dominguez - who pioneered the business of representing Cuban defectors in the early 1990s when he represented Rene Arocha, a right-handed pitcher who in 1991 was the first ballplayer to defect from Fidel Castro's regime - is on trial with two co-defendants: one, who is alleged to have driven the boat in the smuggling operations, and another who is accused of training the players in California.
In the morning, the two sides selected a jury and one juror was excused because his cousin is Bronson Arroyo, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds. Another was let go because his son had played professional baseball. This afternoon, Blanco and Medina-Santos, the government's star witness, are slated to testify. 
