Havana

by Mark Kurlansky

  •

  Revolutions always involve a certain degree of delirium, but Castro’s revolution was particularly delirious. It was not just about power changing hands or about politically remaking the government. The goal was to change everything—to change social relations, including the relationship between men and women, and to put an end to materialism. The revolutionaries wanted to change human nature and create “the new man.” (Though the new society was supposed to be less sexist, the phrase was always “the new man.”) The new man sneered at personal enrichment. The state looked after him or her, and he or she was dedicated to serving the society.

  All of this change was thrilling. Edmundo Desnoes remembered the early years, the 1960s, as the most exciting time of his life:

  The intensity. The destructive macho embrace of revolution. To see everything turned upside down is shattering, gave me a “rush,” as the young here/there now refer to meaning. That has remained with me and makes everything taste trivial. The passion of revolution has spoilt consumer pleasures. I have only death to look forward to, as I crumple up and rot.

  But then the special period came, and Pandora’s box was opened. When the Cuban government lost its Soviet subsidies, it could no longer provide for everyone’s material needs. Before, the revolution had essentially told people, “We will provide your food, your housing, your health care, and your education, and you will use your abilities to provide some service for this society that has provided everything for you.” No one—not doctors or music stars or baseball players—was becoming affluent. But they were contributing. They felt part of a great experiment.

  In 1990, about the time Castro had first used the phrase “special period,” I talked to singer Pablo Milanés. He was one of the great stars of nueva trova ballads. He earned only a modest Cuban salary, like the rest of his countrymen, and when on tour, pulling in millions in hard currency for the state, he still earned only four hundred pesos a month for himself. I asked him if he ever thought of leaving Cuba and becoming wealthy like a few other Cuban musicians, such as trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, had done. He said, “We prefer to live in this kind of society. We have the possibility to do our art. It makes a lot of money, but that is not fundamental for us. If we cared about that, we would live in another country and be millionaires.”

  But when the special period arrived and Cubans were told that in order to have enough food to survive, they had to fend for themselves—open a paladar, start a shop, sell something on the street, drive a taxi for foreigners—everything changed. Because once people started thinking this way, their anti-materialism outlook, their sense of contributing to the society, began to fade.

  Baseball players who had been content living on small salaries became increasingly discontented. They always play for their hometown team, and their family and neighbors always go to their games to cheer. For away games, their fans packed into trucks or buses and followed them. But now, an increasing number of players started to think that money was more important than this comfortable and supportive system, even if it meant playing for strangers in a strange land. When a Cuban defects to the United States and plays for the major leagues, he is for the first time in his life, with the possible exception of a few international games, playing in a stadium where there is no one he knows.

  By the late 1990s even soccer players were defecting to the United States to play professionally, though this meant that during international tournaments they could no longer play for either the Cuban national team or the U.S. national team—a player is allowed to play for only one national team in his career. But still, they could make more money playing in the United States, and making money was now a recognized and respected goal.

  Doctors, too, once the humble heroes of their neighborhood, began forgetting about how they had received a free education and began demanding what they saw as their right, as doctors, to be rich.

  •

  Is anyone more delirious than the anti-Castro exile? What drives them especially crazy is that Fidel Castro’s revolution has lasted, providing Cuba with one of the longest periods of political stability in its history. That was completely unexpected. Those opposing Castro left for Miami thinking they would be back in a few years. Instead he died in bed at the age of ninety with his succession and the continuation of the revolution firmly established. I once asked the former Dominican Republic president Juan Bosch, who was Fidel’s friend and who, despite winning a democratic election, had been able to hold power for only seven months, what he most admired about Fidel Castro. His answer: “The way he survives.”

  Castro regularly called his opponents in exile either rats or worms. That latter term—gusanos in Spanish—is further evidence that Castro wanted to be a long-living version of Martí. Martí had also used the term gusanos for his enemies—Cubans who supported the Spanish.

  Using the term gusano for exiles has caught on in Havana, where many have gusano relatives, and it is often said without rancor. There are also gusañeros, a word that merges gusano, the worm, with compañero, the comrade. A gusañero is a Cuban who lives abroad but supports the revolution.

  Some writers living in exile, such as Reinaldo Arenas and Heberto Padilla, rendered their work almost unreadable by their obsessive hatred of Castro. Arenas even blamed Castro when he contracted AIDS in Florida. Cabrera Infante, the son of a founder of the Communist Party of Cuba, who left in 1965 and became a dedicated Castro hater, at least maintained a Cuban sense of humor about it by coining the word “Castroenteritis.”

  Even Roberto González Echevarría, in his otherwise excellent history of Cuban baseball, The Pride of Havana, felt compelled to expend a great deal of energy proving that Castro was not a professional-caliber pitcher—as many of his supporters have claimed. Undoubtedly he wasn’t. Is it important to prove? There is no record of Castro pitching in the Cuban League, which is often claimed by his supporters. González Echevarría took the trouble to go through sports records at the University of Havana when Castro was attending law school and found a November 1946 Law School vs Business school game in which an F. Castro pitched for Law and lost 5–4. Of course, the author conceded, there are a lot of Castros in Cuba and this might not be the F. Castro. The only other games with evidence that Fidel pitched were a pair of exhibition games the Revolutionaries played shortly after taking power with the team name Barbudos, the bearded ones. There are a lot of photos of him from those games. The angry exile ­triumphantly shows one of these photos in his baseball book and points out that the Commandante, in a windup, reveals his grip on the ball, thereby amateurishly tipping off the batter as to the type of pitch he is about to throw.

  It is a particularly pointless argument because Castro freely admitted that all the stories about his baseball skills were myths and said he was better at basketball. The Castro side is equally excessive. Many Castro supporters claim that Castro was recruited as a pitcher by the New York Giants, a claim for which there is no evidence.

  The dialogue in Havana is all about making the claim, not establishing the facts.

  EPILOGUE

  The Nocout

  Lo mataré. ¡Lo mataré! Lo juro por . . . (¿Por quién vou a jurar?) No puedo jurar por Dios. No creo.

  I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him! I swear to . . . (to whom would he swear?) I can’t swear to God. I don’t believe in Him.

  — GUILLERMO ROSALES, El Juego de la Viola (1994)

  Like delirium, dance, irony, humor, and glassless windows, baseball is one of those Havana things that is always there—something else to argue about, even though in recent years, Cuban television has been showing more international soccer matches than Major League Baseball games. Havana children have put away their small balls and sticks and taken to foot-dribbling large balls down the street. This might even be intentional on the government’s part. Just as baseball was originally popularized as a way of embracing America and rejecting Spain, Cubans may now be turning back to soccer as a way of rejecting the United States and embracing
Europe. Europe, after all, has become far more important to Cuba’s economy than the United States, both in terms of tourists and as a trade and business partner. But for the time being, baseball, even with these signs of its decline, remains the dominant sport. In fact, if the U.S. embargo ended and Cubans could play in the major leagues in the summer and the Cuban League in the winter, the way it was done before the revolution, baseball would probably experience a revival in both countries.

  Soccer game in the street, Havana. © 2015 Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

  From the beginning, baseball meant far more in Cuba than just baseball. In the 1860s, when baseball was just starting in the United States, Cuban students studying there brought it home and organized teams to play against the crews of American ships. So originally it served as a way to show defiance on the part of educated Cubans toward American arrogance. But in one of the great examples of a self-fulfilling prophecy, the Spanish banned the sport, out of suspicion that it was being used to rally the independence movement.

  In truth, there was little connection between baseball and the independence movement at first, except that it was attracting the same people: American-educated, affluent young men. But the Spanish argued that the game was an excuse for these troublesome men to arm themselves with wooden clubs. They also saw it as an American incursion into what was supposed to be a zone of Spanish culture. On this last point they were right. And in fact, once the Spanish banned the sport, Cubans did start embracing it as an anti-Spanish statement.

  A baseball team was formed by Cubans in Key West for the express purpose of raising money for Martí’s movement. Soon Martí himself became a baseball fan. Baseball even had its own martyr, a young Habanero, Emilio Sabourín, who used baseball to raise money and support for the cause, until the Spanish arrested him and sent him to a prison on the North African Spanish enclave of Cueta, where he died of pneumonia in 1895 at the age of forty-five.

  Cuban baseball has always been centered in Havana. Cubans always play for their hometown team, so Havana, with its larger population from which to choose players, always has the dominant teams. Originally there were only three teams—Matanzas and two Havana teams, Habana and Almendares. The first game in this three-team league is said to have been played in 1874 at the Palmar del Junco, a Matanzas field that still exists. Habana beat Matanzas, 51–9. It is likely that there were earlier games in Cuba as well, but of course the story of the first baseball game in the U.S. in Cooperstown, New York, is also a fabrication.

  A number of Cubans played professional ball in the United States in the nineteenth century, starting with the Habanero Esteban Bellán, who was a big hitter in U.S. professional baseball in the late 1860s and ’70s and also organized the Palmar del Junco game. From 1900 until the Cuban Revolution in 1959, seventy-one Cubans played in the major leagues. Many more would have done so had black players not been banned from the majors. Instead Cuban black players played in the Negro leagues.

  Once the color line was dropped in 1946, numerous top Cuban players could play in the Cuban League in the winter and the majors in the summer. That ended with the Cuban Revolution and the American embargo, although a substantial number of Cuban players have played in the major leagues since the revolution. There would have been many more if the U.S. government did not force them to defect.

  After the revolution, the government said that baseball was not a profession. Players were still paid, but they received very low salaries, like everyone else in Cuba. Teams were reformed and renamed. From the beginning, Havana has always maintained at least two teams, and though the names have changed several times, one has always had a blue uniform and one a red. Havana’s two teams of the 1950s—the Almendares Alacranes (Scorpions), in blue, and the Habana Leones (Lions), in red—became the Industriales and the Metropolitanos, respectively.

  The Industriales were so named because at the time there was a campaign to increase Cuban industry, or as González Echevarría liked to put it, “Che Guevara, minister of finance, had embarked on the harebrained plan of industrializing Cuba.” Today the Industriales, who play in Cuba’s largest stadium, the 5,500-seat Estadio Latinoamericano, are the island’s most popular and winningest team.

  •

  Habaneros, both fans and players, have a brainy but also a conservative approach to baseball. It is difficult to say whether they approach the game the way they do because Havana is a city with a long tradition of chess, or if their approach reflects the way they think, and that is why they are also good at chess. They are not drawn to the game’s flashier aspects. That may be why base stealing is little appreciated—it’s a show-off move. The big home run hitter, the showy player who wants to be the hero of the moment, is not liked by Havana fans. Yoenis Céspedes, a big-hitting Cuban outfielder for the eastern team, the Granma Alazanes, who defected in 2011, said that he was motivated to leave not by politics or even money, but because he felt that Cubans didn’t appreciate him. He may also have been frustrated because he happened to have been born in a town whose team never makes it beyond the semifinals in the Cuban League, and there was no possibility for him to move to a different team.

  Havana produces great ballplayers because they study the game—the timely, well-placed hit, the shift in positions, when to bunt and when to swing, and whether a batter is more likely to walk or strike out. Havana pitchers usually have more finesse than power—deceptive breaking balls, tremendous control, placing pitches on the very edge of the strike zone, and a deep understanding of which pitch to use for which moment. Cuban pitching has probably also been helped by the use of aluminum bats; because of the embargo, Cubans cannot afford to be replacing broken wooden bats. These metal sticks have more life in them when the ball makes contact, and they don’t break when a fastball cuts in on their handle. So it has become more important for pitchers to prevent batters from making contact unless implementing a specific strategy, such as inducing a ground ball for a double play.

  It is always exciting to go to a ball game, and a ball game in Havana is always the opening of a debate. One day as I was leaving my hotel on the Parque Central to head out to a game, a bellboy came up and whispered to me, “Want a woman?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “She’s a mulata.” An attractive woman in the corner of the lobby started blowing me kisses.

  “No. I’m going to the baseball game,” I said.

  The bellboy couldn’t believe it. “A mu-la-ta,” he repeated with feeling.

  “But it’s Industriales and Santiago,” I countered with equal persuasion. Santiago and Industriales is a bit like the Cuban version of the Red Sox and the Yankees.

  “Santiago. Really?”

  “Claro que sí. Should be a great game.”

  “Who’s pitching?”

  “René Espín for Industriales,” I said.

  “He’s not that good.” These Havana fans were tough. He started explaining to me what Espín’s weaknesses were and what approach he had to take to Santiago’s lineup. As he was explaining all this, the mulata in the corner was growing increasingly irritated, but he didn’t notice.

  At a game at the Estadio Latinoamericano, that odd mix of barbarism and elegance that is Havana is always evident. Pleasant-looking women serve Cuban coffee, dark and so sweet it seems like syrup, in ingeniously folded pieces of paper that serve well as a cup. During the fifth-inning break, the women go out on the field and serve coffee to the umpires. For most of the rest of the game, though, people are shouting profanities at these same umpires. And that is why the coffee, the only snack available at the stadium, is a much better refreshment than the snack available at stadiums in provincial Cuba, where only chupas (lollipops) are served. It is unimpressive to be shouting “¡Pendejo!” and other expletives at the umpires while sucking on a lollipop.

  Beneath the shouting is a steady murmur. It is the sound of fans discussing the strategy of the game. This discussion continues after the game is over, as they leave the stadium and as they board buses hom
e. And it is continued the next morning by fans or fanatics—it’s the same word in Spanish (fanático)—in the Parque Central, in a spot near the José Martí statue known as the Esquina Caliente, the hot corner. The term, when not referring to this particular spot, refers to third base: There is no time to reflect on strategy at third base. Some play must be made instantly. It is the hot corner of the diamond.

  The topic on one particular morning was about the fifth inning of the Industriales game the night before. The fifth inning, two innings before a possible victory—is critical in Cuba the way the seventh inning is in a nine-inning major league game, because in Cuba, if a team is ahead by ten or more runs after the seventh inning, the game is ended. This is known as a nocout, a term borrowed from boxing.

  No nocout was going to happen in this particular game, because the score was tied. There were runners on first and second and no outs. The batter hit a soft grounder in the infield, and the Industriales pitcher grabbed it and fired it to his second baseman to force out the runner from first base. The second baseman fired to first to get the batter, but this allowed the runner who was on second to come around and score the go-ahead run. This meant that the Industriales were now losing by one run. But there were now two outs and no one on base and it would be easy to get out of the inning. But whether this or throwing to third was the right move was the heated topic the next morning in the park.