THE SUNDAY PROFILE : THE Bat Man : He barely made it out of Cuba. Then he bet his life savings on crafting the hottest sticks in baseball. Life for Juan Faxas hasn’t been boring.

The crack of the bat, the sound that comes from squarely hitting a round ball with a round club, is perhaps the sweetest in all of sport.

But for Juan Faxas, once a scourge on the sandlots of Havana, it was the cracking of the bat that ruined his major league baseball debut.

That’s because he no longer swings bats, but makes them. And for a bat maker, there’s nothing worse than a hitter with a handful of splinters. Which is exactly what Dodger catcher Carlos Hernandez got when he tested Faxas’ first batch of Glomar brand bats during a workout four years ago.

“I was shocked,” Faxas recalls, “because I was so proud. It was my pride that hurt the most.”

Yet even with so many bats broken, he was unbowed. After all, for someone who has survived 16 months in Cuban labor camps, it’s hard to get too worked up over a pile of kindling.

Faxas simply ordered a new shipment of wood, returned to his garage workshop and came back with the prototype for a bat that, according to its maker, had found its way into the hands of more than 140 major leaguers before last season’s strike.

“When I was growing up, if someone told me one day I’d be making bats for players in the major leagues, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Faxas says. “It would have been like a dream.”

Living that dream would mean giving up a career as an electrical engineer, draining his life savings, and forcing family and friends to band together to keep the company’s 3,800-square-foot Fullerton workshop running. Faxas, now 54, figures he’s spent nearly $500,000 on the business so far and is still a long way from breaking even.

But money is not everything, he says.

“When you come through an experience like [the camps], you really value some other things. And when things get tough, when I think I have it hard, I just reach back and pull out a memory.”

*

Most all the furnishings in Faxas’ modest home, hard against the Pomona Freeway in Diamond Bar, originated in a tiny garage workshop.

“Since I was a little kid, I have been working with wood,” Faxas says between draws on the latest in a series of Pall Malls. “My father was the one that taught me. That was his hobby too.”

That and baseball.

It was the golden era of professional baseball in Cuba, when Havana was home to a minor-league affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds and the center of the world’s top winter-league circuit. But all that changed after Fidel Castro took power in 1959.

One of the new regime’s first decrees outlawed professional sports on the island, chasing the Reds back to the mainland. But Faxas had little time to mourn. Under another decree, the produce business he shared with his uncle was seized by the government.

“They told us, ‘Now it belongs to the people,’ ” Faxas recalls. “What the hell were we? We were people too.”

Forced to pick a new career, Faxas soon found himself in a high school classroom giving lessons in math and physics. Again, he ran afoul of the authorities, who banished him to the industrial arts department.

“In mathematics and physics there was too much pressure from the Communists. Everything had to relate to the revolution. Every mathematics problem was based on the revolution. And you were missing the real thing,” he recalls.

Nevertheless, Faxas counts his five teaching years as his most fulfilling.

“That’s the biggest satisfaction that you can get,” he says. “When you get a bunch of kids and you go with them through a year and at the end of the year you know that they are prepared to go to the next step . . . you are doing something for humanity.”

There was little satisfaction elsewhere. Faced with severe shortages of food and other goods, Eugenia Faxas, whom Juan had married just months after Castro’s triumph, put the same meat bone in a pot of boiling water day after day and called it soup.

Making such sacrifices for a political system they did not believe in became unbearable.

“You got to a point down there that your life means nothing,” Juan Faxas says. “Believe me. I got to that point. I felt I was better off dead than living over there.”

But then the couple received the first good news in years: Eugenia and the children would be allowed to immigrate to the United States, where relatives had settled.

Juan, however, was denied permission to leave. So, on Christmas Eve in 1967, 5-year-old Juan Carlos and Brenhilde, 2, kissed their father goodby for what everyone believed would be the last time.

“That was hard,” Faxas says, the emotions welling up anew. “That was one of the hardest decisions that I made in my life. I knew I was going [to be jailed]. But that was the least of my problems.”

Just as Faxas expected, he had little time to reflect on his loss. A telegram soon arrived ordering him to pack a small bag and report to a nearby park. From there, he and others were taken to a work camp. The men understood that this was the price they had to pay for their families’ freedom.

“We were working 12, 14, 15 hours a day,” he says. “Cleaning fields, cutting sugar cane, planting sugar cane, planting coffee. We were all over the main island. Pin~ar del Rio, Playa Giron, Santa Clara.”

Sixteen months later, those travels came back to haunt him. Faxas finally received permission to leave the country, providing he could obtain releases from all the camps he had worked in. If he failed to get them within three days, he could not reapply for five years.

With no hope of reaching each place, Faxas begged an army officer at the airport for help, a move that could have landed him in a far worse place than a labor camp.

“I was to the point where it didn’t make a difference,” Faxas recalls. “Whatever happens, happens.”

The lieutenant, apparently unmoved by his pleadings, scribbled something on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope and pushed Faxas toward an unsmiling immigration official.

“Who knows what the hell he put in this envelope,” Faxas remembers thinking. “Maybe they’re going to put me against the wall and that will be it.”

But whatever the note said, it satisfied the immigration officer, who stamped Faxas’ passport.

“When I saw that plane taking off, it was such a difficult emotion to describe,” he says. “I was happy because I was finally leaving Cuba. But when I looked down and I saw what I was leaving behind, it was something that grabbed you in the chest. . . .

“The years have gone by and I still have that grab down here. It hurts.”

*

The Glomar bat factory is not much farther than a long fly ball from the Fullerton train station. It’s not yet 1 o’clock on a recent Friday afternoon, but Faxas has written the day off as a loss. “Be careful with me today,” he tells a visitor. “I’m in a very bad mood.”

He has just turned away a shipment of wood, leaving the workshop’s five lathes empty and quiet.

“We could have made bats out of everything that they sent, but they wouldn’t have been according to the specs that we want,” Faxas says. “Maybe we can do it, but you are taking a chance that the bats would start breaking and then what are you doing? Destroying all the work that we have been doing for the last two or three years.”

Glomar has earned a reputation for making nearly indestructible bats.

“They have everything you want in a bat, but most important of all, they have good wood,” says Andres Galarraga of the Colorado Rockies, who used Glomars to win the 1993 National League batting title.

“It’s the best bat I’ve had, hands down,” says Charlie O’Brien of the Atlanta Braves. “They don’t break; they don’t dent.”

Faxas scrutinizes each shipment of white ash for hardness, grain patterns, moisture content and half a dozen other factors. As much as 70% of the wood never gets through the factory door.

Many of the pieces that do pass inspection are turned by hand to a player’s specifications. Bobby Bonilla of the Baltimore Orioles, for example, uses a 38-ounce model with a thick barrel. The Toronto Blue Jays’ Roberto Alomar uses a 34-inch, 32-ounce bat with a hollowed-out barrel and a thin handle.

It’s slow, painstaking work, as the calluses on Faxas’ hands attest, but on a good 15-hour day the five-person Glomar crew can finish 120 bats. Glomar’s craftsmanship is reflected in the price. At Home Run Park in Anaheim, one of the few places that stocks the brand, the bats sell quickly despite starting at $39.95. (By comparison, industry leader Louisville Slugger turns out a machine-made bat every 20 seconds. Its pro model costs $24.99.)

“We are lucky that we are still alive,” Faxas says. “No way that we are making any profit. We are just fighting, fighting to stay alive. It’s hard. Very, very hard.”

Last year’s players’ strike not only cost him more than $50,000 in unfilled orders but scared away a group of well-heeled investors. It also convinced Faxas of the need to pay more attention to the retail market rather than just servicing professionals. He also hopes to diversify, perhaps with a line of batting gloves and fielders’ mitts.

“The feeling that we got is that we are in front of a gold mine with a pick and shovel,” he says.

Mario Valdes, 42, Glomar’s vice president for pro marketing, nods in agreement. The whole thing was his idea. After a mutual acquaintance showed him a toy bat that Faxas had carved, Valdes pressed the friend for an introduction. Then he talked Faxas into giving big-league bats a try.

“Juan showed me what he was doing and right away we struck up a good friendship,” Valdes says.

Like Faxas, Valdes had to trade his family for freedom when he left Cuba three years into the revolution. A church group arranged to bring the 9-year-old, who suffered from asthma, and his younger sister Gloria to Miami. After several weeks in a refugee camp, a Nashville family took them in for what was to be a short stay.

“My parents were going to come in two or three months,” Valdes recalls. “That’s what we all were expecting.”

But the Cuban Missile Crisis intervened, severing ties between the Castro government and the United States and stranding the Valdeses in Cuba for another five years.

The Glomar logo traces its origin to those difficult days. The name, Valdes says, combines the first three letters of Gloria and Mario.

Both the Valdeses and the Faxases have spent more time exiled from Cuba than they did living there. And although they renounced their Cuban citizenship to become naturalized citizens here, there’s no doubting where their loyalties lie. In a room off the main Glomar workshop, a huge map of Cuba is tacked to the wall and a bust of 19th-Century Cuban nationalist poet Jose Marti watches over a pile of invoices. Along another wall are crossed Cuban and American flags.

“I am Cuban. I am very proud of that,” Faxas says. “We love this country very much, but we love Cuba too. We were born there.”

And it’s where they hope to die. Should the long-predicted downfall of the Castro government ever come to pass, the Braves’ O’Brien will have to find a new bat maker.

“It will be a time to go and reconstruct,” says Eugenia Faxas, a tiny but forceful woman. “We want to help. We have the knowledge. We can go back in the schools; we can teach the kids.

“We have to help.”

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Juan Faxas

Age: 54.

Background: Born in Havana. Naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1976, he lives in Diamond Bar.

Family: Juan and Eugenia, his wife of 35 years, have two children, Brenhilde, 30, and Juan Carlos, 33, and a 9-month-old granddaughter, Olivia.

Passions: Woodworking, cooking.

On quitting his job as an electrical engineer to make bats: “Life is like that. You’ve got to take a chance. People want to do a foolproof business, 100% sure, and take the risk out. Business doesn’t work that way.”

On the U.S. government policy of repatriating Cuban refugees recovered at sea: “That’s outrageous. When you see that somebody exposes the life of himself and his children and they prefer to die at sea than to live over there, hey, you have to have some humanity and you have to have some consideration. That’s the most inhumane thing I’ve seen in my life.”

On seeing players succeed with his bats: “I really enjoy that as a personal satisfaction. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to take credit. He’s the one hitting the home runs. I was sitting right here.”