Baseball, in Cuba, is a rebel's game. It got to Cuba in the 1860s, when Cubans studying in the United States brought the game home. The island then was still a colony of Spain, which promoted bull fighting as a national sport. The increasingly larger numbers of Cubans flocking to baseball literally were not playing along with the occupying power. They were rebels.
That beginning winds up, in this century, in an ironic twist. One-time revolutionary Fidel Castro now controls baseball in Cuba start to finish. One of Castro's first actions when he seized power in 1959 was to ban professional sports, a facet of Cuba's isolation that people continue to hedge by using short-wave radios to listen to games or rigging coat hangers to catch radio signals. The government monitors children's teams and sends promising players to baseball academies at age eight. For the historic game this year between Cuban all-stars and the Baltimore Orioles, the government controlled who got all 50,000 tickets for Havana stadium seats.
The Cuban government calls professional baseball "slave baseball" or "leased baseball." Cubans, however, still follow American baseball and, through it, have a special link to the United States that 40 years of isolation and embargoes have not broken. Before 1959, Cuba contributed more players to major league baseball than any other foreign country, and the country continues in that tradition: After some of its best players defected to the United States in the 1990s, Cuban baseball suffered a slump.
Cubans embrace baseball with passion. In the stands at games, the drums and timbales, dancing and singing can be ear-splitting. They bring verve and talent to baseball, so that the game itself is made better by Cuba's contribution to it.
To get an insider's view of Cuban baseball, washingtonpost.com interviewed Milton Jamail, whose book, "Full Count: Inside Cuban Baseball," will be released next year by Southern Illinois University Press.
[ close window ]
