During the recent Pan American Games, where athletes from 42 nations gathered in Rio de Janeiro for a fortnight of topnotch competition, one contest that wasn’t on the official calendar caught the public’s eye. Call it the defection game.Guillermo Rigondeaux and Erislandy Lara managed to elude their official minders and slip through a hole in the fence surrounding the athletes’ villa. From there, the story gets fuzzy. Apparently Rigondeaux and Lara were to meet up with a German agent, who reportedly promised them passports, air tickets, and contracts to fight in Europe. In a word: freedom. Somehow, though, the plan collapsed. A few days later, they were arrested by the Brazilian police and bundled off in a plane back to the Antilles, where their fate is uncertain. (A third deserter, from the Cuban handball team, hailed a cab to a suburb of São Paulo, where he evaded capture and filed for asylum.) And that was that.

Or was it? There’s nothing new about Cubans on the lam. The escape rate among athletes is especially high, perhaps because they can outrun their state nannies. Little wonder that the island’s remaining delegation to the Rio games was ordered out of town well before the closing ceremonies on July 29. But the latest desertions raised eyebrows, not least for the unceremonious way the host country expedited the boxers’ ouster. Was president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pinch-hitting for Fidel Castro?

Brazilian officialdom bristle at the mere suggestion. The athletes “practically pleaded to go home,” growled Justice Minister Tarso Genro. Few outside of Lula’s inner circle are buying the official version. Why would the pair of sports heroes put their careers, lives, and families at risk by running out, only to turn on a dime and say it was all a misunderstanding? And why wait to be busted by the police to declare one’s devotion to the patria amada? And if the athletes volunteered to go back, why were they hustled out of the country without so much as a world to the press? Human Rights Watch, the Brazilian Congress and the Brazilian bar association are demanding an investigation into the summary deportation. “The country’s image will be stained if the government acted in support of Fidel Castro’s Gulag,” said the Rio daily, O Globo. One senior legislator even cited the case of Olga Bernário, the German born spouse of a Brazilian communist leader who was deported to Nazi Germany, where she met her death.

That may be stretching the point. What’s clear is that the Pan American Games incident is just one more play in the schizophrenic game Brazil and Cuba have carried on for years. The fact is that much of the Latin American left has always viewed this tiny island in the Caribbean as a kind of ideological Disney, where cherished fantasies that the rest of the hemisphere left behind years ago live on in a bubble. The feelings run especially deep even in democratic Brazil, where scores of higherups in the ruling Workers Party burn a candle for the enchanted kingdom. (Honors go to José Dirceu, Lula’s former right hand man who was taken in by Castro during the Brazilian dictatorship, and even resorted to Cuban surgeons for a face lift to fool the generals back home.)

That fondness never really translated into broader political backing for the Cuban model in Latin America, but it has served the maestro well. To wit: every time the Castro regime has been singled out by the international community for human rights violations - including the summary execution of three would-be escapees who hijacked a Cuban ferryboat in 2003 - Brazil ritually abstains. “Fidel has been indulged like no other Latin American leader,” former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso remarked a few years back. That’s one Pan American record Lula seems unlikely to break.