Miami ? It’s not nearly as interesting as the fact the Florida Marlins are the only team with three first-round picks. Nor will it affect Tuesday’s amateur draft as much as Scott Boras negotiating contracts for as many as seven of the first 30 players selected.

But that doesn’t make the record number of Cuban defectors in this week’s draft any less significant. In fact, time might ultimately prove that to be the most unique – and important – element of the two-day affair.

This has nothing to do with the Cubans’ talent, however. Just two of the seven defectors – rocket-armed shortstop Yunel Escobar and right-hander Maels Rodriguez – have drawn any real interest from scouts.

It says here if the two players could pick up a lucrative signing bonus by cashing in U.S. residency for Dominican citizenship and forgo the draft for free agency, they’d be foolish not to try.

Ever since pitcher Rene Arocha walked away from his country’s national team in a Miami airport concourse in 1991, Major League Baseball has struggled – and largely failed – to come up with a procedure for dealing with Cuban defectors.

For political reasons, big-league teams can’t negotiate with Cuban residents, so defectors are forced to acquire residency in another country before they can sign.

Since establishing residency in the United States means defectors are subject to the amateur draft – just as Canadians, Puerto Ricans and other U.S. residents are – many of them have followed their agent’s advice and sought ersatz residency elsewhere in order to become free agents.

At its most basic, the choice is clear: You can keep U.S. residency and a small signing bonus or gamble it all away for a chance at big free-agent bucks. Do you take dollars over sense? More often than not, the players – and their agents – have gambled on the big bucks. But the number that have succeeded is dwarfed by those who have failed to impress big-league scouts and wound up abandoned.

In the past several months, three seemingly unrelated events have conspired to make that old, broken-down system almost completely unworkable. First, new U.S. government regulations have made visas harder to come by. As a result, there’s no guarantee a Cuban defector with third-country residency ever will enter this country even if he does sign – and if he does get in, he might not be able to stay.

Second, the fledgling administration of Dominican President Leonel Fernandez is forging closer ties with Cuba and, as a result, that country, long a hospitable place for baseball players heading for the United States, has begun cracking down on defectors.

Finally, teams are much more reluctant to offer the kinds of bonuses that once made the third-country ruse profitable. In all, 33 of the 40 Cuban players who have left the island since October 2003 remain unsigned. For many of those 33, a free-agent offer is never coming, so they remain trapped in uncertainty, banned from returning to Cuba but unable to come to the United States. For them, maybe getting caught in a draft wouldn’t have been such a bad thing after all.