a history of cuban baseball
Reviewed by Joseph Arbena, Emeritus, Clemson University
DECEMBER 16, 2007 archive
Despite the island's relatively small size and population, Cuba has long drawn intense attention from North Americans. Geographic proximity to the United States, location along strategic transit routes, profitable crops, such as tobacco and sugar, compelling tropical beats, dances, and beaches, and for decades in the 20th century, the openness to tourists seeking rum, women, and casinos all led many Americans to consider the Pearl of the Antilles an extension of the Great Forty-Eight, virtually a state itself. Under the Platt Amendment, imposed on Cuba after it achieved nominal independence in 1898 and not abrogated till 1934, such was functionally almost the case. Even after 1934, a spirit of Plattism often prevailed on both sides of the Florida Straits.
Consequently, when Fidel Castro replaced Fulgencio Batista in 1959, most Americans felt that the natural order had been disrupted and that Cuba was now a cultural and strategic threat to the U.S. Adding to this, American interest in Cuba was the island's early enthusiastic adoption of baseball, embracing it as part of the national culture, its long interaction with the mainland pastime, and its notable production of highly talented players, another relationship interrupted but not forgotten under the new socialist regime. Over the last decade various authors (e.g., Roberto González Echevarría, Milton Jamail, Louis Pérez., Gerald Gems, Adrian Burgos, S.L. Price, Steve Fainaru & Ray Sánchez, Tim Wendel, et al., plus the PBS special "Greener Grass: Cuba, Baseball and the United States," available on home video, and the Dugout Productions "Stealing Home: The Case of Contemporary Cuban Baseball," also broadcast on PBS) have contributed to our knowledge and understanding of the place of baseball in Cuba and Cuban-American relations and of Cuba and Cubans in baseball's long-term evolution. This resurgent journalistic and academic interest has been driven by the greater internationalization of the game, an increase in defections from the island, the anticipation of a post-Castro re-opening, baseball's greater Olympics status, the new World Baseball Classic, and the 1999 Baltimore Orioles home-and-home series with a Cuban All-Star team.
Free lance writer Peter Bjarkman, known in some circles as 'Dr. Baseball,' has published extensively for both a popular and an academic audience. His earlier contributions include: Baseball with a Latin Beat: A History of the Latin American Game (1994), Diamonds Around the Globe: An Encyclopedia of International Baseball (2005), juvenile biographies of Duke Snider, Ernie Banks, Roberto Clemente, and Ken Griffey, Jr., and several books on American basketball. But his most passionate interest in recent years has been Cuban baseball. In 1999, in collaboration with photographer Mark Rucker, he provided us with Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball, a virtual visual history of Cuban baseball where the words are there more to provide context for the illustrations than the reverse. The focus is on the centrality of baseball in Cuban life and culture, as much before the Castro era as during.
In this hefty new volume, Bjarkman, backed again by Rucker's photos, expands on Smoke, with equally exciting illustrations but more words and tables. The emphasis remains on baseball's long presence on the island. He highlights that legacy first through the careers of four "legendary" stars: Martín Dihigo, "baseball's least known Hall-of-Famer"-that's four halls of fame; Adolfo Luque, "the original 'Pride of Havana'"; Orestes "Minnie" Miñoso, "the Cuban comet"; and Conrado "Connie" Marrero, part of the old Washington Senators' famed Cuban connection.
Reference to the B.C. (i.e., Before Castro) century is further laid out in additional chapters devoted to the Cuban professional leagues from 1878 to 1961, to Cuban amateur baseball before as well as after 1959, and to the play of Cuban blacks in the North American Negro Leagues and in Cuban winter ball alongside both blacks and whites from the States. All of this contributes to Bjarkman's objective of making readers aware of often unseen players across the entire sweep of Cuban baseball history.
Another chapter examines (debunks?) the myths of Fidel Castro's abilities as a pitcher and assesses his real contributions to Cuban baseball. (Members of SLA take notice: here, Bjarkman cites several works of fiction on the subject.) Others examine the legacies of Cubans in the Major Leagues and the reasons behind and the impact of the defections of Cuban athletes, baseball players and more.
While Bjarkman acknowledges the important contributions of González Echevarría to our understanding of that rich past, from the beginning he strongly states his disagreement with the Yale professor on how the baseball of the pre-1959 era compares to that of the last five decades, making this an oft-repeated sub-theme of his narrative.
Nothing in the world is more conservative than a middle-aged male baseball rooter. And there is no more distorted form of history than one tinged with heavy layers of youth-inspired nostalgia.
Cuban baseball does not . . . live entirely or even primarily in a realm of backward-looking nostalgia; nor does the island's national pastime depend on deep-rooted memories to recover its greatest seasons, most glorious triumphs, or most celebrated individual ball-playing heroes. . . . The game's zenith on the island is not centered in the middle of the past century but lies instead in the opening decade of the new one. (p. 1) Nevertheless, the Cuban sports picture today is not all positive; those recent successes have "not completely gilded over Cuba's many baseball warts" (p. 412), the latter a result more, suggests Bjarkman, of economic conditions than of defections or poor administration. Yet, despite some problems in facilities and attendance, "[t]here are two dozen or more legitimate big leaguers playing on the island at the time this book is going to press, and several-maybe as many as a dozen-would likely be almost immediate major league all-stars" (p. 406).
Part IV, the Appendices and Statistical Records section, is a unique source of hard data on Cuban baseball history. Appendix A offers a chronology beginning with the introduction of baseball at Matanzas Bay in June 1866 by U.S. sailors, a story, Bjarkman admits, that competes with the claim that a Cuban returning from the States first demonstrated the game in Havana in 1864. The chronology ends with Cuba's second place finish at the WBC in March 2006 and Osmani Urrutia's ability to bat above .400 for the fifth time in six years in National Series play. Appendix B presents details of those Cuban teams and individuals who participated in the U.S. Negro Leagues, as well as stats on Afro-North Americans who played in the Cuban League. Appendix C provides a statistical record of the 151 players born in Cuba who reached the Major Leagues between 1871 and 2005. Appendix D contains extensive statistics on the Cuban Leagues, divided between 1961 and 1962, when professional sports were officially abolished.
Through this and other publications, Peter Bjarkman is doing for Cuban baseball what Ry Cooder has done for Cuban music, helping us appreciate the complexity, creativity, and emotions of a people whose culture and politics have long been intertwined with those of the United States but who have often been made invisible by social attitudes or political barriers.
Bjarkman, Peter J. A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. 496 pp., 150 photos, appdcs., notes, bibl., index. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-7864-2829-8.
Copyright © 2007 by Joseph Arbena.