The Cuban Controversies

Dodger Senior Vice President Tom Lasorda has nothing against Cuba. He pitched there in the winter league several times in the 1950s and remembers the baseball stadiums filled with fans wearing their teams’ colors, the passion for baseball that superseded all else, sometimes even family.

“Cuba was a great place to play in,” Lasorda said. “It was a beautiful country, great hotel, great eating places. Greatest fans you ever want to see. They really love baseball.”

United States-Cuba relations crept back into the sports world Monday night when the Baltimore Orioles hosted the Cuban national team at Camden Yards. It completed one of the most unusual home-and-home series this country has seen, since it began with a game in Havana in March.

Lasorda thinks this form of baseball diplomacy with Fidel Castro is a bad idea. Many Cubans who were forced to leave their homeland are against the games as well, and I certainly wouldn’t go against their feelings. It’s interesting how the United States can drop bombs on a guy whose policies we disagree with in Yugoslavia and say “Batter up!” to a guy whose policies we disagree with in Cuba.

“I don’t think they should have played,” Lasorda said. “I think it was a slap in the face to the people who were kicked out of there, the people who were taken from their homes, their homes taken away from them [by Castro]. The people whose wealth was taken away from them. It’s a slap in the face to those people.

“Why him [Oriole owner Peter Angelos] to go there? Who selected him to go there? What was his purpose to go there? He’s certainly not doing anything to bring some better relations.”

For Lasorda, the loss of liberty was only temporary. He was in Cuba when Castro’s troops overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1958. Since no one tells stories quite like Lasorda, he can take it from here:

“When it happened, we lived in a private club, Club Nautico. We lived there, a lot of the jai alai players lived there, a lot of the baseball players lived there. It was owned by one of Batista’s relatives, who was a minister in his cabinet.

“When they came in to take over the city, there was a national strike. Nobody could do anything. We couldn’t play ball for nine days. We got word that they were going to come out and burn down the Nautico club.

“The Cuban people who lived there, they gathered all the guns that they could come up with. We walked patrol at nights, looking to see if these guys were going to come out and burn the place down.

“[Castro’s soldiers] got as far as the gate. Then, for some reason, they changed their minds and came back.

“My son at that time was about 5 or 6 months old. Right outside the gate, maybe a couple hundred yards, was the supermarket.

“When they called this general strike, nobody could get out of where we were. We had run out of baby food. We had a cook, we had enough stuff to eat, but we didn’t have any food for the baby. I went out of the gate with a couple of other people and broke into the market and got baby food and came out. The baby had to have baby food.

“You didn’t know what you were getting, because they all had Spanish labels.”

When the situation calmed down and baseball resumed, Lasorda’s team was supposed to play in the second game of a doubleheader. While he was sitting in the stands during the first game, 25 or 30 men ran out of the stadium.

“All of a sudden, we heard this flurry of bullets being fired, bop-bop-bop for 15 or 20 minutes,” Lasorda said. “All of a sudden, they come back in, they tell us in the building across the ballpark were a few of Batista’s men.”

Needless to say, that wasn’t a time Lasorda chose to tell of how he had once had lunch with Batista, who wanted to make up for a Cuban player’s charging Lasorda with a bat after Lasorda had brushed him back with a pitch.

It might be one of the few times Lasorda held his tongue. The Orioles versus Cuba on Monday did give him cause to recall his days in Cuba. It just didn’t give him much incentive to watch.

“I might be watching the Dodger game over that game,” Lasorda said.

That sounded like the right thing to do.