Home Run

Baseball has always enjoyed a prominent position in American history. In timelines, it corresponds with developments in transportation, industrialization, westward expansion and corporate mergers. In Cuba, however, the sport doesn’t parallel history: It is entwined with it. The same impulses that gave rapid popularity to Cuban baseball during its initial era from the mid-1860s to the first U.S. occupation in 1898 likewise inspired breakthroughs in music, dance and literature. On the surface, their game appears just like ours--three strikes yer out, a neatly executed double-play, going, going, gone!--yet as Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria explains in “Pride of Havana,” the game in Cuba spread with the enthusiasm for independence from Spain, and to play second base was to similarly oppose colonial rule.

That the publication of “Pride of Havana” and other forthcoming books on the same subject coincides with all the commotion about the Cuba-Baltimore series is mere happenstance. These books have been long in the making, yet one is perplexed that there has been virtually nothing written about Cuban baseball in this country in the past. In “The Pride of Havana” (the name comes from a nickname for Dolf Luque, the well-known Cuban player-coach-manager who spent the years 1914-’35 in the Majors), Gonzalez Echevarria gives us an extraordinarily complete history of the game on the island. I say extraordinarily not just for its breadth and depth but because of its excruciating chronological detail, sometimes game-by-game, inning-by-inning, batter-by-batter, pitch-by-pitch. The author, a professor at Yale noted for his writing on the broad range of Spanish-language literature, presents a clear and present danger to readers: Prepare yourself not just for the broad sweep of Cuban baseball--a story as compelling as any to come off the island--but also for stultifying detail that on occasion makes “The Pride of Havana” read like a prose version of the statistic-laden “Baseball Encyclopedia.”

“Pride” begins with an account of the Tuesday, Feb. 25, 1947, game between Cuba’s two leading teams, an event the author considers the pivotal contest in the nation’s history. It not only pitted the two grand old men of Cuban baseball, Dolf Luque and Mike Gonzalez, against each other in a strategy-filled contest as managers, it also represented the last game truly independent from American influence. Before the victory by Almendares over Havana, Cuban baseball developed on its own: Its leagues were haphazardly arranged, almost anarchic at times; its players were free agents who could walk across the street for a better deal; seasons were often inexplicably canceled in the home stretch; and owners traded their teams and even stadiums as one might trade properties in a Monopoly game. This made for an altogether enjoyable sport, confusing only in the way Southern California’s freeways are to outsiders but innately understood and appreciated by the natives. Beginning the next season, however, an accord between the United States and reluctant baseball interests in Cuba regulated who could play how many games of winter ball in Cuba, formalized relations between teams on the island and in the States and, in effect, made baseball in Cuba beholden to U.S. sports management. It was baseball’s Platt Amendment.

Baseball in Cuba began during our Civil War, as near as the author can determine, when Nenesio Guillo returned home from college in the States in 1864 with a ball and a bat, “the first to be seen in Cuba.” Guillo and a couple of other U.S.-schooled chums started playing almost immediately, and the game spread from there. It took off so fast that within 15 years ballplayers from the States traveled to Cuba to play, a pattern that has continued to the present (albeit fairly irregularly and low-key in the Castro years). Baseball was played by the U.S. military occupying force, whose presence from 1898 forward included ballgames against Cubans.

In its initial decades, organized baseball was usually played on Sundays, “between the city and the countryside, between art and nature.” After a game, “a sumptuous dinner and dance” took place “at which the players celebrated with each other with toasts and bantered about the game . . . often reading poems and other literary texts.” Cuba’s struggle for independence was, in part, a “conflict between the modern spirit guiding the Creole elite . . . and the backward spirit of the mother country.” In other words, baseball versus bullfighting. Guess who won.

The game came to reflect the pressure points of Cuban society, such as racial tolerance, sugar mill identity, home-grown elites, foreign tourism and gambling. As Cuban baseball developed its singular qualities, groundswells of support would emerge for personalities both on and off the field. The Cuban-raised author, an avid fan from infancy, describes the game’s carnival atmosphere in the 1950s, with four-team Sunday doubleheaders, ball boys and groundskeepers known throughout the island, grandstand vendors with their own distinctive styles, open betting, press box regulars and foul line photographers and jokes about the official scorer Julio Franquiz. (A press booth joke that invariably followed a close play: “Who made the error?” The answer: “Franquiz.”) Public address announcer El Conde More commanded such prestige that “for a young ballplayer it was kind of like investiture to have his name echo throughout the park in More’s authoritative voice.”

I have a friend who lives in the mountains of Arizona whose goal in life is nothing more than to create an inning-by-inning account of the 1923 season of the Santa Clara Leopardos, a team Gonzalez Echevarria equates with the 1927 New York Yankees. Devotion to Cuban baseball, having seeped off-island, is likely to increase as its players continue to impress fans on real and artificial turf. (The author’s brush with fame: When his Dad, a shortstop on a long-ago mining team in the 1940s, played another mining team, he threw Minnie Min~oso out on a hot grounder. On his way back across the infield, the future Major Leaguer said to Sr. Gonzalez, “Got a good arm there, whitey.”)

For all its writerly problems, “The Pride of Havana” is a history book likely to be unequaled in its field. Certainly nothing of its nature exists in Cuba, which should but won’t translate it for home consumption. (With our limited resources, goes the official Cuban line, why publish Cubans who have left us when there are so many writers here anxious to be published?)

From Babe Ruth’s visit in 1920s, which degenerated into opera bouffe, to the current series against Baltimore, Cuban baseball fanatics have joyfully embraced interplay with the game’s American practitioners. “The Pride of Havana,” while covering Cubans who have played in the States and elsewhere, keeps its feet firmly planted on the island. I found only three minor errors--Jose Marti did indeed write of baseball; the son of Martin Dihigo, the best player to wear the Cuban colors, lives in Mexico, not Cuba; and pick-up games and informal intramural games are not at all uncommon these days. (Havana’s Jewish Community Center, once struggling to establish a minyan, now fields one.) The reader, having slogged through “Pride,” can optimistically question: Who’s to say Cuba’s golden age of baseball isn’t yet to come?