It was precisely during the decade in which the Great War for Cuba’s independence unfolded (beginning in 1868 and concluding in 1878 with an ominous pact that left the Spanish in charge) that baseball achieved its initial popularity in Havana; soon thereafter it spread to the rest of the country. To get to that point, some fundamental changes had to take place in the configuration of Cuban culture and identity. As the first baseball fields appeared around different parts of Havana and the first games and tournaments were organized, a deeply integrating and, to a degree, democratic current emerged. To stimulate its dizzying expansion, the sport that a few years earlier had been imported by some young aristocrats had to become a popular activity that counted on the participation of Cubans of all social classes and colors, a process that was already quite visible by 1880. In addition, that symbolic representation turned into a feast of cultural confluence when baseball games became popular open-air parties where there was eating and drinking, flirting and conspiring, and, above all, music and dancing to the rhythm of the danzón, the music created by and performed by blacks and mulatos that would become the Cuban national dance. Baseball, music, society, culture, and politics coincided on the sports field in a rich and dynamic configuration of Cubanness.
From then until today, we are Cuban because we play ball, and we play ball because we are Cuban. Thus, my father’s dream and mine has been the same as that of so many millions of people born on this island in the Caribbean throughout these 150 years.
THIRD INNING
Baseball, la pelota, is a sport, but it is also a way of understanding life. And even of living it. And in my case, I can say that I am a writer thanks to the fact that I couldn’t become a baseball player.
The neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana where I was born, and where I still live, did not have a field with the necessary conditions for playing ball according to regulations. But, as in dozens of other Havana neighborhoods, the kids of my generation learned to play ball in alleys and more or less suitable barren fields, where we sweated out the need that, when it became an extreme passion, we called “the vice of ball” in my day. On the corner of my block, in a school yard, in a vacant lot near a quarry, in a sandy plot on the outskirts, I played ball every minute of my life that it was possible to do so. With or without improvised uniforms, with or without gloves, with the bats and balls that turned up in the years in which the greatest shortages prevented us from acquiring those implements, my friends and I devoted ourselves to playing and dreaming of baseball.
In my case, the “vice of ball” acquired the proportions of true addiction: besides playing the game, I lived it. In my school notebooks, I sketched baseball fields and imagined games. When I ran down the street, I imagined I was doing so in a stadium, and I ran through the square because I had hit a decisive home run. I clipped photos of Cuban ballplayers of the time and glued them in a notebook. I watched the games broadcast on television and became a fan of one club, some of whose players became the greatest and best idols I’ve ever had or ever will have. I lived surrounded by baseball, inside it, because my neighborhood, my city, my country were an enormous field on which an eternal game was unfolding. And life was a baseball.
If I owe my father for the injection of that overwhelming Cuban passion, then it is my uncle Min, as we all called him, to whom I am grateful for many of my best memories regarding the game. As opposed to my father, who was always a disciplined and compulsive worker, Uncle Min was a party animal who would drop everything to go to a game in any of the parks around the city. Almost every Sunday, for several years, I went with him and his drinking buddies to games at the Latin American Stadium. But many mornings and afternoons, I got into his pickup truck with other fans like him to go see lower-division games in neighborhood stadiums in different parts of Havana.
When I was ten or eleven years old, I began to practice the game in a more organized way and learned many of its many secrets and the greatest of its mysteries: baseball is a strategic sport in which, when it seems like nothing is happening, the most important thing could be happening. My father, who was friends with Fermín Guerra, a great Cuban star of the 1940s and ’50s, managed to persuade the maestro, who was already retired, to accept me at his small academy on the fields of the Ciro Frías sports area, a few kilometers from my house. Later, when I was about fifteen years old, I joined a team that played games on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings on the fields of Havana’s Sports City and of La Estrella chocolate factory, and I continued learning, competing, and dreaming of glory.
Two or three years later, when I realized that I would never be a fast pitcher or a powerful hitter and had to recognize that the baseball elite was not a category I would be able to join, I very rationally decided that, if I wasn’t going to be a player, then I would be a sports commentator. What counted was being close. But that dream was also cut short because, even though I had the required high grades, when I finished high school, I was told that that year there would be no spots available at the University of Havana’s School of Journalism, since someone had decided that there were enough journalists in the country. With my dreams abandoned, I ended up at the School of Letters, where the fate I had not dreamed of awaited me, although I now believe it was written in my chromosomes. Because it was there, upon seeing that other classmates wrote stories and poems, that my latent competitive spirit as a ballplayer pushed me in that direction: if others wrote, why shouldn’t I? Thus, out of that competitive spirit, I started to write and embarked on the definitive path of what has been my life: that of a frustrated-ballplayer-cum-writer.
FOURTH INNING
Out of necessity, a public spectacle with a mass following creates myths and legends, leaves its mark on spaces and times. The history of baseball and of Havana is plagued with them.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, illustrious youth from Havana such as Julián del Casal, one of the great voices of poetic modernism, wrote chronicles and commentaries reflecting the presence of baseball and its stars in the sports, culture, and daily life of Havana. At one of the emblematic places for youth gatherings back then, the Louvre Sidewalk (so named because of the café in that spot), converged writers, dilettantes, independence activists, and young people who were practitioners or lovers of baseball, and consciously adopted it as an expression of belonging and a banner of nationalism. And so the first myths about Cuban baseball were founded.
Throughout the twentieth century, Cuban popular mythology continually added the names of white, black, and mulato players, such as Emilio Sabourín, the martyr baseball player of independence; Carlos Maciá, the first great star of this sport; Martín Dihigo, called “The Immortal”; Alejandro “The Knight” Oms; José de la Caridad Méndez, crowned “The Black Diamond”; Orestes Miñoso, nicknamed “The Cuban Comet”; Manuel Alarcón, alias “The Coppersmith”; Omar Linares, known as “The Boy”; Orlando Hernández, nicknamed “The Duke,” like his father, Arnaldo, among many others. Although without a doubt, the most mythical of all the great players Cuba has produced was Adolfo Luque, for whom one nickname was not enough—he had to be given three, one in Cuba and two in the United States: “Papá Montero” in his country and “The Perfect Havana Cigar” and “The Pride of Havana” in the lands to the north.
Adolfo Luque’s adventures and great feats fill half a century of Cuban baseball history and fulfill an important mission: that of a nationalist reaffirmation in a period of deep national frustration, following the long-awaited independence that was also mediated by a North American intervention, and an onerous amendment to the new constitution that gave us neocolonial status. This is why Luque generated many anecdotes on and off the playing fields, inside and outside of Cuba, and, in many ways, his personality and the impression he made as an athlete synthesized the character and quality of being Cuban, both on and off the island.
His career as a player, in the 1910s and ’20s, unfolded in the Cuban Professional League and in the U.S. Major Leagues, where he was one of th
e first Latinos to join and to win, inspiring other Cubans to believe that they could also achieve something like that. In Havana, he mainly pitched for the storied Almendares club, although he also lent his services as pitcher to the Havana team, the former’s archrival. In the U.S. Major Leagues, he mostly played for the Cincinnati Reds, with whom he had a season of twenty-seven wins and eight defeats—quite a feat. Later, as a coach, between the 1930s and ’50s, he worked in the United States, Cuba, and Mexico. And wherever he went, he left his imprint as a born and bred man of Havana.
It seems that Luque’s main characteristic as a person and as a baseball player is that he went from festive to irascible with little in-between. A drinker of rum and beer, a dancer, and cigar smoker (to which his northern nicknames alluded, inspired by two very well-known brands of cigars at the time), he embodied the essence of his time and place: being impulsive, aggressive, and unpredictable was part of his Cubanness. Despite being white, his nickname of “Papá Montero” was given to him because of how similar his personality was to that of a famous black ñáñigo (member of an Afro-Cuban religious sect), who was known for his skill at dancing the rumba (“a louse and a rumba dancer”) and his penchant for cockfights, women, alcohol, and, by unavoidable logic, brawls.
The peak of Papá Montero or the Pride of Havana’s baseball fame seems to have come in 1923, during the season in which Luque won twenty-seven games; upon his return to the island, he was received with a massive parade running through the streets of the capital and to the most important field of the time, the Almendares Park, where he was met by a new car, purchased for him by the people of Havana. In the procession, according to what I’ve read, was a danzón-playing orchestra strumming “¡Arriba, Luque!,” a song composed by Armando Valdés Torres in his honor.
FIFTH INNING
The myths of Cuban baseball by necessity had an influence on practical life. Without a doubt, baseball diamonds were the center of intense sporting and social activity and have been considered sanctuaries. Havana has had three great “cathedrals of baseball”: Almendares Park, founded in the nineteenth century; La Tropical Stadium, famous in the 1930s and ’40s; and the Grand Stadium of Havana, opened in 1948, later renamed the Latin American Stadium, still active in the working-class neighborhood of El Cerro. In them, several generations of Cubans have experienced initiations similar to mine.
But the rest of the city was also invaded by baseball for decades: photos of players and teams, banners, colors, and uniforms made the presence of baseball and its idols common in houses, streets, and the city’s public places. Almanacs, cups, plates, fans—the most varied objects were emblazoned with the insignias of the best-known teams: the Almendares scorpion, the Havana lion, the Marianao tiger, and the Cienfuegos elephant. In every neighborhood, there was at least one field where you could play the game.
At the same time, the people’s language became filled with phrases and situations taken from baseball: being “caught between bases” was to be surprised while doing something wrong; “I’m three [balls] and two [strikes]” was an expression of enormous doubt; to be “wild” was to be mistaken. Meanwhile, baseball was the subject of many popular songs, tobacco brands were introduced with names referring to baseball, and people of all sorts took to wearing baseball T-shirts.
To my mind, no other social and popular activity—with perhaps the exception of music—has had a greater influence on Cuban cultural life, in the making of identity and in the sentimental education of so many people born on this island.
SIXTH INNING
For twenty years, my father, such a lover of baseball, turned his back on its development in Cuba. His reaction was visceral: with the Revolution’s elimination of professional sports on the island, in 1960, the former Cuban winter league disappeared, along with its most representative teams, among them the Almendares club, of which my father was a devoted fan.
Even today it’s difficult for me to process the depth of the frustration my father must have felt seeing the team he loved for his whole life vanish. But I can begin to understand it, starting with a proof I would call ontological: a man can change identities, citizenship, political parties, lovers . . . but it is very difficult to switch sports alliances. And my father, who had lost his team, could only make that transition over the course of twenty years, throughout which he lived without watching or wanting to know anything about baseball in Cuba.
A curious thing also happened after 1961, when the so-called National Series of Amateur Baseball was instituted in the country, and nine new teams were founded (although one of them was still called Havana, like the city and the province). With very little difficulty, people took to the new banners, to players who were almost unknown until then, and gave them their favor and fervor. The only explanation I find convincing is not political, social, or sports related in nature, but rather, has existential and identity-related origins: Cubans cannot—or couldn’t—live without that sport that was theirs, through which they thought and expressed themselves, for which they existed.
The history of the baseball that was played in Cuba starting in 1961 is undoubtedly glorious. It was perfectly connected with a robust tradition despite its having been introduced, politically, as a break with and improvement over the past, since there was talk of the “victory of free baseball (amateur) over enslaved [baseball] (professional).” This new baseball grabbed the country’s attention, created new fans, generated other idols, and filled the vital space that Cubans had always devoted to that sport.
Twenty years after that radical change, when the dream of becoming a baseball star had already ended for me and I was writing my first stories, I convinced my father to go with me one night to the Latin American Stadium to see a game with the team of which I had become a fan when I was a boy: Havana’s Industriales. And my father fell into the trap that he had avoided for two decades because the prospect of entering a great baseball stadium, seeing the lights shining on the reddish soil and the green grass of the diamond, breathing in the smell of earth and glory, seeing the players’ multicolored uniforms, and feeling the pulsing of a national passion were enough to vanquish even the most deeply rooted rancor. At some point before the beginning of the game, while the players were warming up and the air was charged with that sticky magic of baseball, my father asked me the name of the team dressed in blue, like Almendares, and I told him it was the Havana Industriales, then he asked me which one was my team, and I confided to him that it was the very same Industriales. Later, as the game went on, my father told me that he, too, was rooting for the Industriales. And he continued to do so, from that day until his death, with the same passion, with the same enjoyment and suffering and feeling of belonging that he had had as an Almendares fan for the first thirty-three years of his life.
SEVENTH INNING (THE LUCKY INNING)
Although I could not be a star on the ball field, and I couldn’t even work as a sportswriter focusing on baseball, my passion for this tangled-up, cerebral sport never disappeared. I was never cured of the “vice of ball.”
People like me, born and raised in a baseball culture, are attracted to any ball game. The attraction is stronger than your will. That is why, frequently, as I walk down some street in Havana and come upon a group of kids playing ball, I stop to at least watch the end of the play. As if it were important. And it is important.
I enjoyed my great moment as a doubly frustrated ballplayer and sports commentator in the 1980s, when I was kicked off of a cultural magazine and, as punishment, sent to work for the evening newspaper Juventud Rebelde. And there I had to become a journalist, practicing journalism. I was lucky that, precisely because I was not a press professional, my work stood out amid that of my colleagues because of its heterodox, literary style and I soon enjoyed a rare privilege: I could write about what I wanted, how I wanted, and as much as I wanted. So I proposed to my colleague Raúl Arce, the newspaper’s official baseball chronicler, the project of interviewing a group of old ballplayers, the same ones w
ho, twenty or thirty years prior, had been our idols.
It was thus that I was able to fulfill a delayed dream: for two years, on every propitious occasion, we would meet up with some of those veterans who had brought us so many joyous moments. To meet them, understand them, make people remember their greatness, their failures, their humanity, was a privilege I still feel today, because thanks to them, I came to understand many things about the dramatic and deep relationship between Cubans and the game of baseball. Their personal stories relating to baseball, with all the peculiarities belonging to their era and its social and family context, had been very similar to mine: that of a vice, that of a greater passion.
Those interviews published in the newspaper were later collected in a book called Soul on the Playing Field, which was published for the first time in 1989 and that today, in times that are less propitious for the publishing industry and for Cuban baseball, is still in print and being read.
EIGHTH INNING
After the Almendares team uniform that my father bought me before I was a year old, I didn’t have another complete baseball outfit until 1968, when my uncle Min emigrated to the United States and gave me the one he used to wear. That revolutionary decade of the 1960s, in which even the nature of baseball on the island changed, was one of such shortages that it became nearly impossible to get a ballplayer’s outfit.
I remember like it was yesterday the pride with which I left the house when I slipped on that uniform of Uncle Min’s. Before that, my mother had had to subject it to general repairs so that it would fit my thirteen-year-old frame, and, in the process, I asked her to replace the number 22 it originally had on the back with a number 3, the one used by Pedro Chávez, the Industriales player who was my first great sports idol. Although the letters, the socks, and the cap were red and not blue, the kid who went out to play ball that day, dressed in his flaming uniform, had to be the happiest in all of Havana.
Cuba on the Verge Page 10