by Dick Cluster
Once firmly established in these three islands and three mainland countries, baseball flourished in the twentieth century as more teams formed to represent cities, towns, workplaces, social clubs, and barrios. There was amateur ball, professional ball, and ball that was somewhere in between, with gate receipts subsidizing players and equipment. Sponsors and promoters, including both industrialists and politicians, also made payments under the table, and there was also a rise of gambling on baseball, which plays a role in a number of the stories in this collection. The saga of the emergence, eclipse, and rebirth of the many professional and semipro teams and leagues in each of the countries is too complex and eclectic to try to cover here, but what is perhaps most noteworthy is how the game was local, Caribbean-wide, and linked to the United States, all at once.
Domestically, the twentieth century saw the emergence of professional and semipro rivalries as intense as any sports feuds anywhere. In Santo Domingo this meant the crosstown rivalry between tigers and lions, Los Tigres del Licey and Los Leones del Escogido; in greater Havana, between Los Alacranes of Almendares and Los Leones (again) of Habana. Nationally, especially in later periods, it was Licey vs. Los Aguilas (Eagles) of Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic; Caracas vs. Los Navegantes de Magallanes in Venezuela;4 Havana’s Industriales vs. almost any other province in Cuba—shades of the Yankees’ role in the American League—or, in Nicaragua, Managua’s similarly regarded Bóer team vs. Chinandega or León. (In the earliest days of Nicaraguan ball, it was fashionable to name teams after warring nations or armies; Bóer is the only such name that survives.)
Yet at the same time, among ballplayers trying to make a living from the game, there developed a kind of international market in which players with established reputations moved from league to league and country to country according to where economic and political conditions offered the best salaries and where varying summer/winter seasons allowed. Thus, in the course of his twenty-five-year career (1922–47), Martin Dihigo—known as El Maestro and El Inmortal, and in many eyes the greatest player of all time—pitched, played every other position, too, and player-managed in his native Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. He then retired to Cuba, where he became the first minister of sports under the Castro regime. Similarly, the great Dominican infielder-outfielder Juan Esteban “Tetelo” Vargas played at various times for Licey, Escogido, and San Pedro de Macorís in his native land and for teams in Venezuela, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, where he settled after retirement.
In a few cases—most famously the Cuban hurler Adolfo “Dolph” Luque, who won the last game of the 1933 World Series for the Giants after a long National League career—these international moves included the US major leagues. But most of the star players were too dark or Latin-featured to get past the major-league color bar (even the white-skinned Luque was constantly taunted by opposing benches for his ethnicity), so they played in the US Negro leagues instead. Dihigo played for Negro league teams, including the New York Cubans and Homestead Grays. He is the only player to be enshrined in the baseball halls of fame of Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. Tetelo Vargas played for the New York Cubans, as did many other Latino players between 1935 and 1950. The team included not only Cubans but Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans as well. It was owned by Alejandro “Alex” Pompez, born in Key West to yet another pro-independence Cuban exile, who in this case left his entire estate to the independence organization when he died in 1896. Pompez (1890–1974) got his start in New York as a Harlem numbers banker, later served as an important New York Giants scout, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2006.
The color bar, however, did not mean that there was no other contact between Latin Americans and major-league ball. In the years before free agency and television rights made baseball a high-paying profession, major-league teams played frequent exhibition games against Negro league clubs and touring Latin American teams. US teams and all-star squads likewise traveled throughout the Caribbean basin to play exhibition games, while individual players from the American, National, and Negro leagues supplemented their salaries by signing with Latin American teams for the winter season. This meant that, until the color bar came down, Latin American leagues provided US players, both black and white, with their only true experience of integrated baseball, from the dugouts to the hotels. (There were, of course, some limits, particularly in Puerto Rico and pre-1959 Cuba, where whites-only private clubs and beaches were the norm.) It meant, too, that Latin American fans had direct experience with the US leagues. While cheering wildly for their own teams when they confronted those from the North, fans also developed loyalties to major-league players or franchises, which they often followed via radio or newspapers as passionately as they followed their own.
Another aspect peculiar to the Latin American game was the episodic presence of politics. Always, of course, the victory of regular or all-star teams in international tournaments was an occasion for intense national pride, as will be reflected in a number of stories, including “How Tomboy María Learned She Could Fly” and “Apparition in the Brick Factory.” Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic vied fiercely for many Caribbean-wide titles. During the tiebreaking final game of the 1941 Baseball World Cup between traditional winner Cuba and underdog Venezuela, all schools and most shops in Venezuela were closed, the national government cabinet meeting was postponed, and the entire country listened to the radio broadcast from Havana. The victorious Venezuelan team, first to win an international championship, was ever after enshrined as the Heroes of ’41 and was received with a valedictory address and poem by the popular writer and politician Andrés Eloy Blanco, represented in this volume by his classic tale of rural rivalry, “The Glory of Mamporal.”
But particular teams or leagues were often sponsored for internal political purposes as well. Two very different examples will give an idea.
The first is from Yucatán, where baseball became tied to a local variant of the Mexican Revolution. As mentioned above, Yucatán had flourished as the scene of a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century export boom in henequen fibers, which were made into twine that was used in the new mechanical harvesters employed in agriculture in the United States and beyond. Because of both geography and commerce, the peninsula was relatively isolated from the rest of Mexico but well linked by ship with the United States and Cuba. So the revolution came late to Yucatán, five years after the rest of the country, first under the leadership of left-leaning General Salvador Alvarado (1915–18) and then that of the elected socialist governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922–24). Both attempted to break the longstanding power of a small aristocracy of landowners and exporters over the Mayan-descended farmworkers (essentially serfs) and the wealth of the henequen economy. The elite had sponsored some urban teams and paid to import Cuban players to bolster their performance, but in the small towns and plantations the laborers were forbidden to travel without permission and required to work from dawn to dusk. When a 1916 decree ended debt peonage, forced labor, and travel restrictions for some eighty thousand rural laborers, grassroots baseball was a big beneficiary, with town teams traveling to play each other and those in the cities, and every hamlet wanting its own squad. In the early 1920s, alongside the distribution of hacienda land to laborers, support of baseball was raised to the level of ideology, seen both as a way of promoting Mayan culture and as a symbol of freedom. The sport was linked to ancient Mayan games played in the ball courts being unearthed in the ruins of Chichén Itzá and other sites, and again (as in Cuba in the previous century) it was contrasted with the bullfight, a symbol of the Spanish Conquest and the prerevolution era. Further, as Felipe Carrillo Puerto put it, “Every man has a right to recreation. It will be good for their bodies, but it will be even better for their souls. . . . They have been slaves so long that they have forgotten how to play—slaves do not play; and people who play are not slaves.”5 Widespread physical education was added to school curricula, and the Soci
alist Party’s base organization created a special sports section headed by a teacher of baseball, provided team travel subsidies to further break down the isolation of the countryside, distributed over twenty thousand US dollars’ worth of baseball equipment, and organized ball clubs in more than seventy percent of the state’s communities. Team names included Emiliano Zapata and (in Spanish) Agrarian Reformer, the Martyrs of Chicago, and Red Yucatán.
Carrillo Puerto was deposed and executed by the local military and the central government in 1924, but Yucatán has remained one of Mexico’s fervent baseball regions. Today the Leones de Yucatán play in a Mérida stadium named after the Mayan feathered serpent deity Kukulcán—although a 2015 sale of naming rights to the US car rental company has now rendered it, officially, the “Kukulcán Alamo.” Meanwhile, in 2006, as soccer eclipsed baseball in the Mexican capital, the long-time Tigres of Mexico City moved to Cancún.
At the other end of the political spectrum have been the teams promoted and subsidized by the right-wing military rulers Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, and Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela (or, more specifically, his son, Colonel Gonzálo Gómez) to bolster their prestige. The most famous case is that of Trujillo, though he was not himself a baseball fan. After renaming Santo Domingo as Ciudad Trujillo in 1936, he was determined that for reasons of personal and political prestige the city should not lose another national championship to either Santiago de los Caballeros or San Pedro de Macorís. Therefore, he decreed that for the 1937 season historic capital rivals Licey and Escogido should be combined into a single team, Los Dragones (Dragons). Since his brother José was already a major investor in Licey, Trujillo put that team’s general manager in charge of the new club, with unlimited cash at his disposal to outbid the rival cities not only for Cuban talent but also for stars from the US Negro leagues, to whom he would offer much higher salaries and promises of better conditions than they had known in the States.
The result was an all-star Dragones team managed by a Cuban and made up of Americans, Cubans, one Puerto Rican (Pedro “Petrucho” Cepeda, father of future San Francisco Giants great Orlando Cepeda), and a sole Dominican. Puerto Rican sportswriter Jaime Cordova has written that, though unknown to most modern fans, this was one of the best teams assembled anywhere at any time.6 The players were frequently monitored by armed guards, and once before a crucial game they were jailed overnight to keep them away from the bars and other temptations. Ciudad Trujillo narrowly won the championship, the dictator won the bragging rights, the relieved foreign players left the next day, all the club managements found themselves drained of cash, and Trujillo decided the whole thing wasn’t worth another effort. Professional ball in the Dominican Republic collapsed for the next ten years, prompting Dominican players to seek their fortunes abroad. During the next decade the torch of domestic Dominican baseball would be carried most strongly—once again—by the sugar mill–based teams of San Pedro de Macorís.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, three events changed the picture, though not the essence, of Latin American baseball: the attempt of a Mexican millionaire to start a league that would rival the American and the National, the end of systemic racial discrimination in the US majors with Jackie Robinson’s debut on the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, and the aftereffects of the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
That the challenge to the dominance of the US major leagues should come from Mexico was logical on the one hand because of the country’s size, but surprising on the other because it was the lone baseball-playing Latin country where the sport was not the dominant national pastime. Soccer was equally popular, bullfighting remained the largest spectator sport, and the strongest baseball loyalties were—following the origins discussed above—concentrated in the Pacific Coast and in the Southeast (Yucatán and Veracruz).
Nonetheless, the flamboyant millionaire Jorge Pasquel, owner of the Veracruz Azules (Blues) and a financial power in all of Mexican baseball, decided in the 1940s to reorganize Mexico’s summer league to recruit players of all colors from the Caribbean and the United States and thus to play ball of a caliber and profitability like that of the American and National Leagues. Pasquel’s motives are still a subject of much dispute. Some point to national pride (and they note that, as a seven-year-old, Pasquel witnessed the bombardment of Veracruz by US warships in 1914) or integrationist motives, others to his outsized personality, and still others to his desire to boost the profile of his longtime friend and ally, Veracruz governor and then Mexican president (1946–52) Miguel Alemán. Some assert that by threatening to raid major-league rosters, Pasquel hoped to get US baseball authorities to add a Mexican team to one of the leagues and make the World Series international at last.
Whatever the case, in 1945 and ’46, as players of all ethnicities returned from World War II, Pasquel sought to recruit them to play in the Mexican League. His representatives offered large signing bonuses (then mostly unknown in the United States) and generous salaries to Negro league stars who had previously played in Mexico and also to such American and National League luminaries as Ted Williams and Stan Musial (to whom Pasquel allegedly offered a fifty-thousand-dollar contract, as opposed to the thirteen thousand dollars Musial would get for 1946 from the St. Louis Cardinals). Major-league baseball responded with a ruling that any player who went to Mexico would be banned from organized base-ball for five years. The baseball commissioner, Pasquel claimed, even used his influence with the United States–based equipment manufacturers to get them to refuse to fill the Mexican League’s wholesale orders for bats and balls, so they had to buy their equipment piecemeal from sporting goods stores.
In the end, the Mexican League managed to recruit a few major-league stars (most notably the Giants’ pitcher Sal Maglie), but not many. Further, it had become evident that the major-league color bar was about to be broken; Jackie Robinson’s signing by the Dodgers was publicly announced in the fall of 1945, and negotiations with Robinson and other players were under way before that, so this was not the moment for younger African American players to risk their future careers. Pasquel attempted to recruit Negro league catcher Roy Campanella and outfielder Monte Irvin for the ’46 season, since both of them had played in his league earlier, but they had already been signed or approached by their future major-league clubs. Gate receipts failed to reach expected levels, and by 1947 the league was down from eight teams to four and the salaries of Cuban and US players were cut. The league folded in 1948, further contributing to baseball’s decline in Mexico as a national sport.
Robinson’s successful debut with the Dodgers in 1947, meanwhile, opened a new chapter in Latin American baseball, because major-league clubs were now willing to sign Latino ballplayers of any complexion or features. Mexico’s Roberto “Beto” Ávila (known as Bobby Avila, stress on the second syllable, in the States) won the American League batting title in 1954. Cubans Orestes Miñoso (Minnie Minoso to Chicago White Sox fans) and Camilo Pascual, Puerto Ricans Victor Pellot (Vic Power) and Roberto Clemente, and the Venezuelan shortstops Luis Aparicio and Alfonso “Chico” Carrasquel all became stars in the fifties, followed by many more in the decades to come. So baseball became entwined with another aspect of Latin American–US relations: emigration and the pursuit of the American Dream, which will figure in a number of the stories in this book. Most of the successful ballplayers, though, retained their ties to their home countries, and they often continued to play or manage there in winter ball. In the 1970s Ávila was elected mayor of Veracruz, after which he became commissioner of one of the various successor Mexican leagues; the ballparks in both Veracruz and Cancún bear his name today.
Though a few Dominican players debuted in the US majors in the 1950s, what really turned US clubs’ attention to the Dominican Republic was the break in commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuba. In the sequence of Cuban economic reforms, US economic sanctions, Cuban nationalizations, and US reprisals over the period 1959–62, baseball was not exempt. In 1954 the Havan
a Sugar Kings had become the first Latin American franchise in a top-ranked US minor league, the Triple-A–level International League that also included the Montreal Royals (where Jackie Robinson had played in his trial year of 1946) and the Toronto Maple Leafs. In 1959, with Fidel Castro in the audience, the pennant-winning Sugar Kings beat the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association in the annual Little World Series of the top minor leagues. Castro also threw out the first ball to open the 1960 season, but the league, under pressure from Secretary of State Christian Herter, pulled the franchise and reassigned it to Newark, New Jersey. The US economic embargo soon made it impossible for players residing in Cuba to be paid in the United States, while the Cuban government eliminated professional baseball and replaced it with a state-run and officially amateur league. Cuba restricted emigration, and the departure of ballplayers for the United States was officially viewed as political defection; by the same token, under US law the only way for Cuban players to gain admittance to the States was to declare themselves political refugees. By and large, Cuban players did not do so until the 1990s, when the combination of economic depression in Cuba and the lure of astronomical major-league salaries in the United States changed the situation again. Only in 2016 did Cuba and the United States begin talks that may result in an agreement to allow Cuban players to play under circumstances somewhat like those of other Latin Americans.
In any case, the end of the Cuban pipeline brought the opening of the Dominican one, in which the trickle that began with the debuts of Oswaldo “Ozzie” Virgil and the Alou brothers, Mateo and Felipe, in 1956–60 became a flood of talent that in many ways now dominates the US game and the Dominican imagination. Pitchers Juan Marichal and Pedro Martínez are in the Hall of Fame, and Dominican-born players in the major leagues far outnumber those from anywhere else outside the United States.