When I was ten years old, in 1967, my father, William Craig, was assigned by Look magazine to profile Jim Lonborg, star pitcher of the Red Sox’s “Impossible Dream” team. We had box seats through the late-summer months of what may have been the most exciting pennant race in U.S. baseball history. I got to visit my heroes in the locker room, and for old-times’ sake—my father having been a Boston high-school pitching phenom—we watched the season-ending, pennant-winning game from Fenway’s bleachers, which were full until the instant Rico Petrocelli caught the last line drive. Then the stands emptied onto the field, where fans were tearing the players’ clothes off and mounted policemen swirled like corks in a flood.
So maybe I’m qualified to say that Cuban baseball is quite possibly the best baseball in the world.
It may not have the greatest concentration of superstar athletes. The fastballs may not average out as the world’s fastest. Maybe not every player in Cuba’s top league would make it on a Major League Baseball team. And yes, some of Cuba’s best defect to the U.S.A. As fan in chief Fidel Castro has admitted, “If you have to compete against six million dollars versus three thousand Cuban pesos, you cannot win.”
Still, strikes, steroids, poor broadcast coverage, and boutique ticket prices have estranged many Americans from what was once a grassroots-to-grandstands connection. The players seem more like spoiled mercenaries than athletes or sportsmen.
Not in Cuba.
The Cuban obsession with béisbol is almost as old as the game. It seems to have taken vigorous root in the early 1860s, seeded by U.S. sailors and expats and nurtured by young cubanos returning from Stateside schools. By 1868—at the beginning of the Ten Years’ War—baseball was already Cuba’s favorite sport. Its democratic spirit offered a subversive contrast to Spain’s national pastime, the bullfight: improvisation versus ritual, teamwork vs. hierarchy, an American diamond drawn on an open field versus a Spanish arena in which a white man and his minions torment and slaughter a wild black bull.
Perhaps most appealingly, baseball could unite any group of Cubans willing to play together. At the sandlot level, the game often integrated itself. That made it much more than a game. As rebellion swept the island, it was obvious to both Cubans and Spaniards that the war was going to be won or lost by cooperation—or mistrust—among Cuba’s blancos, negros, y mulatos. And now the old Stateside fear of a free, black Cuba was reversed. Spanish authorities were appalled by events in the U.S.A., where post–Civil War Reconstruction was approaching its brief zenith, amending the Constitution to protect and enfranchise millions of newly freed black citizens. Baseball was a dangerous emissary of America’s wretched mongrel culture. Cubans were playing and watching the game instead of attending bullfights, which were powerful symbols of loyalty to all things Spanish. In 1869, the colonial government prohibited baseball playing in Cuba.
Spain won the war, but baseball proved as impossible to eradicate as the desire for freedom. Cuba’s first major league was officially formed in 1878. White Cuban social clubs formed segregated leagues, but the grassroots game was clearly more conscious of capability than color. The Cuban League was integrated in 1900, forty-seven years before the U.S. major leagues. The rich history of the Stateside Negro Leagues was actually a shared U.S.-Cuban experience, with many black greats playing on Cuba’s integrated teams in the winter and returning to the States for segregated summer ball. If Americans think of Cuba at all, they think of old U.S. cars and other fossils left behind when we abandoned a Cuba that wouldn’t obey us. But our conjoined history in Cuba is a living thing, from the busy base at Guantánamo to the hip-hop rumbling in Havana’s backstreets, and one of its liveliest expressions is béisbol, a game that still holds us as tight as el squeeze play.
When I saw my first Cuban ball game, in 2001, I thought I’d died and gone to baseball heaven. We arrived late at Guillermón Moncada, but that didn’t much matter, since all seats in Revolutionary stadiums are more or less equally good and equally uncomfortable. As we settled onto our long bleacher bench, a batter for Isla de la Juventud (Island of Youth) chopped a low liner to the Avispas’ shortstop, who stood on tiptoe to make a casually graceful catch, the first out of the second inning. As the crowd whistled approval and the shortstop lowered his glove like a cat retracting its claws, third base, second, and first all moved in a little closer, punching their mitts and calling his name.
So the shortstop lobbed it to third, who sidearmed it to first, who flipped it to second, and around again; just a little affectionate pepper, nobody feeling left out. And when the pitcher finally cocked his head, they let the ball go with regret, like a beloved pal called home for supper.
They looked like they just wanted to play.
In Cuba, kids still play catch on quiet corners and organize their own sandlot games. They make their own pelotas out of leather scraps, stuffing, and string. Tickets to inspiring big-league games are only five pesos nacionales, a price anyone can afford. A cone of roasted peanuts costs about a penny.
In Cuba’s majors, the fourteen provinces each field a team, plus Havana’s two. Each team is composed of guys who actually live in their province, meaning that each team is a sporting mixture of candidates for the national team (which competes internationally) and fellows with more modest talents. Some of the players have turned down back-channel offers from MLB teams, choosing instead to stay home with their families. A few look more like they belong in a fast-pitch softball league. Cuban coaches can never count on playing with a Yankees-style, TV-money-stacked deck. Back in the U.S.A., the free market has all but killed baseball’s sandlot spirit. Castro’s Commies have kept the hometown game alive.
I saw other things that might strike an American fan in Cuba as odd. For example, there’s no organ player to lead Santiago fans’ cheers; they dance to a deep-groove bata drum band led by a guy wailing on a crazy double-reed horn.
And for all Cuba’s broad palette of skin tones, there was a sameness in the stands, in the color of everyone’s clothing. Every fifteenth woman seemed to be wearing the same hot pink halter top with a collage print. Every seventh guy sported the same navy blue sport shirt. Kid after kid wore the gray tee with Siempre (“Always”) stamped on the back.
It was a sameness reflecting the extremely limited variety of clothes available from impoverished Cuba’s stores. My Stateside eye had been bothered by it, but the Cubans didn’t seem to mind. They were doing their best, looking good with what they had, dealing with totalitarian dress-down conformist chic.
And then there was the ultimate un-American touch: instead of pitches for cellphones and beer, the billboards at el Estadio Guillermón Moncada shout Commie slogans:
“The Cuban athlete is an example of patriotism and fighting spirit.”
“Physical fitness education is a guarantee of participatory sports, helping to build community.”
“The athlete brings honor and glory to his town.”
Imagine asking a U.S. sports fan to swallow propaganda like that.
On the TV above the bar, the pregame pageant swirled through stages including traditional dancing, young athletes on parade, ministerial speeches, and choruses of call-and-response cheering. The volume was up high enough to frazzle the little speaker. Seeing me strain to parse the buzzed-up audio, Faribundo did what kind people everywhere do for clueless foreigners: say it again, louder. Repetition might have helped, but he talked almost as fast as he swallowed his cervezas. My balky español quickens prodigiously after a few days’ warm-up, but on day two I was still hearing in slow motion. As the béisbol pageantry dragged on, I called a translation time-out and swapped the small screen for the big picture.
The Restaurante El Morro is no three-star eatery, but what it lacks in sabor (flavor) it pays back in vistas. The restaurant is a series of patios built down the sharp shoulder of a nearly two-hundred-foot cliff dropping right into the Caribbean. The lowest, broadest terrace is the main dining area, roofed over with palms but open to 180 degrees of oceanic horizo
n. To east and west, the Sierra Maestra stretches out as a seemingly endless seawall.
For all the 250 miles of Cuba’s south coast, there are only two significant breaks in this barricade. One of them is fifty miles to the east, where the mountains stoop to hills and part to form the mouth of Guantánamo Bay, just a little more than a mile wide. The other is just a short scramble from the Restaurante El Morro’s patio, a gap in the cliffs about five hundred feet wide, forming an umbilical channel that winds north for two miles of narrows and shallows before swelling into Santiago Bay.
Guantánamo and Santiago are two of the world’s great natural harbors, their almost landlocked bays offering protection from all but the most powerful storms. Santiago Bay’s narrow, steep-sided entrance has also been one of the great natural fortresses in naval history. Artillery placed on these heights can easily command the tiny strait. Santiago mayor Pedro de la Roca y Borja started building the fortress here in 1633, basing it on a design by Giovanni Bautista Antonelli, the Italian military architect who, confusingly, also designed the El Morro fortress at the mouth of Havana Bay.1
It was high time. Almost a century earlier, in 1553, a French pirate named Jacques de Sores—nom de guerre, “the Exterminating Angel”—had raided the town and extorted eighty thousand pesos for the favor of not demolishing Santiago’s unfinished cathedral. Nine years later, the French struck again, this time burning the roof off the great church. They came back for more plunder in 1586, and in 1603 they burned the poor cathedral down.
The construction and arming of Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca was still incomplete on October 19, 1662, when the Jamaica-based English pirate Christopher Myngs landed a force of nine hundred musketeers in a small cove three miles east of the fort, at Aguadores. He marched on Santiago, simply bypassing the castillo. Then-mayor Pedro Morales could gather only 170 soldiers and somewhat more volunteers to oppose the English attack. He lost, badly, and retreated to the village of El Caney. The English ruled Santiago until November 15. Though they couldn’t find the well-hidden chest of the Royal Treasury, they took the time to steal everything else they could get ahold of, including sugar, slaves, and even the cathedral bells. Of course, they burned the phoenix cathedral down to the ground, and burned and blasted the incomplete Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca after taking all its guns.
A rebuilt and expanded fortress succeeded in repulsing a French flotilla in 1678 and another seaborne pirate attack in 1680, but the disaster of 1662 had pointed out a few enduring truths. For one, Santiago is a Caribbean city, much closer to Hispaniola and Jamaica than to Havana. In some ways, Santiago has more in common with those other islands—a sea, a climate, an Antillean orientation and culture—than with Cuba’s capital. It is at least as physically and culturally separate from Havana as Texas is from New York.
For another, a fortress guarding the bay’s narrow entrance isn’t of much use when the enemy has no intention of forcing that passage. Any time an invader lands a strong force out of range of El Morro’s guns, the castillo becomes little more than a scenic overlook.
The threat of piracy—a Caribbean constant from 1492 right through the 1700s—suggested a sorry duality in the problem of entering Santiago Bay. An enemy fleet would have a very hard time sailing through that slash in the cliffs guarded by the great fort and supporting batteries. But that narrow entry also could make it hard for a defending fleet to get out. Suppose an enemy fleet took up a blockading position, just beyond range of the castle’s guns. Ships leaving Santiago Bay would be forced to emerge into the Caribbean one by one, each vessel in turn exposed to the enemy’s massed fire.
And even that poor fighting chance depended on the way being clear. What if an enemy landing force seized the castle? What if saboteurs succeeded in mining the harbor’s crooked exit passage, or wrecking a ship in its constricted channel? Trap the home team in Santiago Bay and there goes the ball game.
Out on the restaurant’s patio, most of the chorus folk were still eating, but some were walking back out to the fort or the little open-air market right in front of the bar. We’d be boarding the bus in a half hour or so. This was my last chance to explore the fort that defied the U.S. Navy in 1898, forcing the Army to fight its way overland to San Juan Hill.
It’s hard to fully appreciate el Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca from the landward side. The citadel was built down into the brow of these cliffs, designed to dominate the harbor entrance, not the road to Santiago. Which isn’t to say the dry side is unprotected. Approaching from the restaurant and crafts booths, I walked up the gentlest of counterscarps, a barely tilting downslope cleared to provide a field of fire. I couldn’t see more than the fort’s highest ramparts until I entered the ravelin, a v-shaped strongpoint that isn’t revealed to be an outwork until friend or foe steps inside. Then I was looking down into a great ditch between high, smooth stone walls. Attackers who got past the outworks would fall into this trap, to be slaughtered by defenders who had retreated into the castle, burning the bridge from the ravelin behind them.
Walking across that bridge into the fort is like creeping up behind a giant who’s been buried to the ears in a crumbling island; you don’t understand how much of him there is until you’re standing on his crown, looking down on his great body and limbs breaking loose from the cliff, challenging the sea.
El Morro marches down its two-hundred-foot cliff in terraced ramparts and parapets. The upper fort is triangular, its sides and sharp points barbed by the ornate geometry of baroque military science. Below the citadel, gun platforms were carved onto and into the cliff, right down to the big wave’s splash. The harbor entrance is so tight that, in the days of sailing ships, an officer standing by the lowermost battery would interrogate passing ships. He could easily read the expressions of the people on deck as they called out a vessel’s name, home port, captain, and destination.
The entire complex of fortress and batteries covers about six acres on the map. El Castillo sits up on the bluff like a conquistador’s Moorish helmet. Across the channel, the batteries of La Socapa are dug into the slightly lower western bluff, one on top and another halfway down. To do something a socapa means to do it on the sly. Shielded by earthworks, easily camouflaged with jungle scrub, these batteries were much harder to spot than El Morro. Other batteries were sited within the harbor mouth and on the heights to the east and west.
The technological developments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rendered El Morro’s cannonball-proof, thirty-foot-thick walls obsolete. High-explosive shells could tear down stone forts; shrapnel could sweep all living things from castle ramparts. Modern ship-to-shore war was going to rely on quickly built, well-concealed earthworks like La Socapa and emplacements dug into stone or sheathed in concrete. By the mid-1800s, El Morro functioned as a symbol, as a barracks, a strategic lookout, and, most infamously, a prison.
Crossing the bridge over the ditch and marching through the sally port’s deep tunnel, I emerged onto the great triangle’s inner space, a tangle of stairways, passageways, and split levels. Broken planes and tight angles limited the damage done by any single explosion, and multiple levels were necessary to build the fortress into the cliff. But there’s something inevitably sinister in the way its paths and rooms narrow and darken as I descend.
The cells at the lower levels radiate the misery of centuries of suffering by disobedient soldiers, pirate prisoners, rebels against empire, and idealists opposed to dictatorship. The dungeons saw frequent use right into the 1950s, when torturers working for Fulgencio Batista’s U.S.-trained secret police broke bones and psyches down here.
I stopped in front of El Calabozo de los Muertos, “the cell of the dead.” The contrast between the light in which I stood and the darkness just ahead shut one world away from another as definitively as the rusty, barred door. A man locked on the other side might as well have disappeared.
Virginius passed under El Morro’s guns as a captured prize. After the arrival of HMS Niobe put a stop to t
he killing, the surviving ship’s company were marched out to the fort and thrown into deep-down cells like this one, where they suffered a long month before being freed. Some sources say that the Spaniards never told them negotiations were proceeding in their favor; the day before they were freed, Virginius’s people were told they would be shot in the morning. Priests were sent in to hear confessions through the night, and men wept and moaned as they tried to reconcile themselves to death.
It’s said the Spaniards enjoyed their little joke.
I thought of the debates going on at home over the Abu Ghraib photographs, interrogations at Guantánamo, and the legal definition of torture. Right up to 1898, Spanish rule was famous for its use of the whip and the garotte, but the Spanish empire’s enforcers weren’t burdened with the pretense that they were ravaging souls in the name of freedom. They knew that torture is the use of pain to punish or persuade. Any kind of pain, including the pain of believing you’re about to die, or the pain of not knowing whether you’ll ever be free.
That was when I realized I didn’t know where Maricel’s father, Oscar, had been arrested, or where they’d taken him. Could he have been a prisoner in this fort—maybe in the Calabozo de los Muertos?
A breeze moved over the battlements and stirred the air in the cell. I smelled piss and something musky. Maybe bats.
I’d heard stories of Oscar’s exploits, stories of his disappearance, and stories of his legacy, including the honorific “martyr of silence,” meaning he was tortured but never talked. I’d focused on the cause and the sacrifice and somehow never heard the mere geography. I knew Maricel had been born in Santiago, and perhaps I’d always assumed the whole story was set in Oriente.
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