My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (20 page)

But I did go back to the Centro Vasco on Southwest Eighth one more time after I came back from Cuba. It was a Saturday night, and it was busy: People were coming for dinner and to hear Malena Burke sing. I wanted to tell the Saizarbitorias about my trip, to tell them that the Basque boy was still there and that the food wasn’t very good, but that the restaurant was just as they had left it and, in spite of the thirty-three years that had passed, was still in fine shape. Then I realized that I didn’t know whether they would be glad or sorry about what I would tell them. In Havana, everyone I met talked constantly about the future, about what might happen when the United States lifted its embargo and when Castro retired, both of which events they expected soon. To the people I met in Cuba, the present seemed provisional and the past nearly forgotten, and their yearning was keen—charged with anticipation. In Miami, the present moment is satisfying, and thought is given to the future, but the past seems like the richest place—frequently visited and as familiar and real and comforting as an old family home.

The music wasn’t to start until after midnight, so for a long time I stood in the foyer and watched people parade in: the executive of a Latin American television network, in a tight white suit and high white shoes; an editor from a Spanish soap opera magazine; a Puerto Rican singer who had just performed at Dade County Auditorium, followed by her entourage; another singer, named Franco, who called out to someone while he and I were talking, “Hey, man, you look great! I thought you were dead!”; and dozens of good-looking couples speaking in bubbly Spanish and all wearing something that glistened or sparkled or had a satiny shine. Toward midnight, Sherman Hemsley of
The Jeffersons
came in with a television producer, and Iñaki wrote “Cherman Jemsli Del Show Los Jeffersons” on a little slip of paper for Malena, so that when she pointed him out in the audience, she’d know what to say.

Malena came onstage at one in the morning. She began with a ballad that had been made famous in Cuba in the fifties by a singer called La Lupe, who used to get so emotional when she reached the crescendo that she hurled things at the audience—usually her shoes and her wig. The room had been roaring before Malena came out, but now it was hushed. Malena had left Cuba just a few months earlier. Someone told me that the tears she sheds when she’s singing about lost love are real. By then, I was sitting at a table in the back of the room with Totty. I had some snapshots with me that I had taken in Havana for the family, because I’d thought they might like to see the old home again. Just as I was about to slide the pictures across the table to Totty, the singer sobbed to her crescendo, so I decided to wait until another day.

Rough Diamonds

Most of the time, the boys in
categoría pequeña
—the Cuban equivalent of Little League baseball—play on days when there hasn’t been a coup in Latin America, or at least not in a country that supplies a lot of oil to Cuba. Unfortunately, the Ligeritos, a team made up of kids from the Plaza de la Revolución neighborhood of Havana, had a practice scheduled for the Sunday in April after the president of Venezuela was deposed. The uprising evaporated in a matter of days, but when I went to watch the Ligeritos play, it was still fresh news, and many people were staying home and watching television reports on the crisis. Kids who wanted a ride to the practice had to wait out the developing story of the coup.

The practice was supposed to start at nine, but when I arrived there were only a few boys at the ball field. The Ligeritos play at a big and fitfully grassy park called El Bosque, at the end of a narrow neighborhood road. The park is flat and open, bracketed by tall, weary trees, and it has an unevenly paved basketball court at one end and enough room for a few baseball games at the other. That day, a loud game between two government ministries was already under way on the best diamond, and a couple of military police officers were on the basketball court taking foul shots with a flabby orange ball. The handful of boys who’d managed to get to the field had gathered on an overgrown area near the basketball court. One had a ball, one had a bat, and another had the most important equipment for playing baseball in Cuba—some sixteen-inch-long machetes, for grooming the field. While the boys played catch, a few of their fathers stripped to the waist and started slicing through the tall grass.

I had obtained an introduction to Juan Cruz, the Ligeritos’ shortstop, through a friend in Havana. Juan is a slip of a kid, eleven years old, with dark, dreamy eyes, long arms, big feet, and the musculature of a grasshopper. His thirteen-year-old brother, Carlos, plays for the Ligeritos, too, but it is Juan who woke up at four every morning during the 2000 Olympics to watch the baseball games and who cradles his glove as if it were a newborn and who always wears a baseball cap, indoors or out. When his stepfather, Víctor, is asked about Juan, he says,”Oh my God, this one dreams in baseball.” In spite of the morning’s news, Juan had persuaded Víctor to drive Carlos and him to the ball field at nine. He popped out of the car almost before Víctor had finished parking and ran onto the field.

The morning was soft and wet, just on the verge of summer. In Havana’s Parque Central, a daily assembly of old men were arguing fine points of Yankee and Red Sox history and the likelihood of Havana’s Industriales sweeping the upstarts from Camagüey in the national series. The Havana baseball mascot—a fat, placid dachshund wearing a baseball shirt, sunglasses, and a Greek fisherman’s hat—was brought to a spot near the trinket market every afternoon for souvenir snapshots. And everywhere boys were playing baseball. They were playing in the parking lot of Estadio Latinoamericano, home of Havana’s two teams, the Industriales and the Metropolitanos; and alongside the Malecón seawall, observed by the snobby young hookers who like to line up there and smoke; and in the dense downtown of Old Havana, wherever some building had finally completed its gradual and melodramatic collapse, opening up just enough room to field a pickup game. Every time I came in or out of my hotel, a group of boys were in the street, dodging potholes as big as washtubs, and, whether it was the bright start of the morning or the half darkness at the end of the day, they were always in the middle of a game.

THERE HAS BEEN BASEBALL
in Cuba almost as long as there has been baseball anywhere. Introduced in the 1860s, it has been the dominant sport in the country ever since; volleyball and basketball are distant seconds, and soccer, the prevailing sport in the rest of Latin America, is hardly played. From the start, baseball has been strangely tangled up with politics. Cubans embraced it as a statement of rebellion because it was a modern and sophisticated export from democratic America, rather than an imposition of imperial Spanish culture on the island. It was also played by people of all races, not just the white elite, which added to its political allure, and Cubans fleeing Spanish oppression took it with them to Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

In 1911, the Cincinnati Reds drafted two Cuban players, the first of more than a hundred to be recruited to the American major leagues over the next fifty years. In the 1940s and 1950s, some teams even had full-time scouts in Cuba. It has long been rumored that, in 1942, a scout working for the Washington Senators met with a promising teenage pitcher named Fidel Castro, a rangy right-hander with velocity but no technique. Castro claims that the team gave him a contract, which he turned down; baseball historians say the Senators never made him an offer. It has also been rumored that he passed on a five-thousand-dollar signing bonus from the New York Giants in order to go to law school. There is no dispute, however, that he remained passionate about the game.

After the revolution, Castro banned most aspects of American popular culture, but baseball was so embedded in Cuba and in his own life—he sometimes pitched for an exhibition team called the Bearded Ones—that it persisted and even expanded, although Castro remade it in the revolutionary spirit. In 1961, he enacted National Decree 83A, which outlawed professional sports in Cuba. Henceforth, all competitive sports would be played by amateurs, the best of whom would receive a small government stipend equivalent to a worker’s salary. This would end, as Castro took care to point out, American-style “slave baseball,” in which players were bought and sold like property and in which players and owners—especially owners—were enriched at the expense of the public. Cuban players would represent their home provinces, would never be traded, and would never get rich. The first Cuban national series, in 1962, was, according to Castro,
“el triunfo de la pelota libre sobre la pelota esclava”
—the triumph of free baseball over slave baseball. Cuba’s gold medals in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics were celebrated as vindication of revolutionary baseball, and the loss to the United States in Sydney was regarded as a calamity. Castro has said he would like two major league franchises in the country, so that Cuban teams can regularly prove themselves against Americans. “One day, when the Yankees accept peaceful coexistence with our own country, we shall beat them at baseball, too,” he said in a 1974 speech. “Then the advantages of revolutionary over capitalist sport will be shown.”

Baseball, with its runs to home, its timeless innings, its harmony between the lone endeavor and the collaboration of a team, has always implied more than athletics. In Cuba, it has also come to describe a social history: The version of baseball you are part of is also the version of Cuba you are part of. There are still scores of retired ballplayers in Cuba who remember the game before the revolution, who hosted American players in the Cuban winter leagues, who might have played a few seasons in Texas or Florida, and whose superstar teammates were scooped up, legally, by American teams. There is a middle generation, players in their twenties and thirties, who were born after Decree 83A and grew up knowing only
la pelota libre,
who saw friends defect to play up north, and who have Castro as an occasional pitching coach and de facto commissioner of the game. Finally, there are the kids like Juan, in
categoría pequeña,
who are now learning to play. Unless Castro lives to be a hundred, these kids will reach their prime without him—the first generation in three who will have baseball without having Castro telling them how to play the game.

JUAN DREAMS ABOUT
both Cuban and American baseball. It is illegal to watch American games in Cuba—that is, it is illegal to have satellite television on which you could see the games. But for years Cubans have been sneaking small satellite dishes into the country by painting them to look like decorative platters, and those people who haven’t managed to get their own dish often barter for tapes of the major leagues at
categoría pequeña
games. As a result, Juan is now equally loyal to the Yankees and to the Industriales. “My favorites are, for the Cubans, Omar Linares, Germán Mesa, and Javier Méndez,” he says, “and, for the Americans, Derek Jeter, Tino Martinez, and Baby Ruth.” When I asked him whom he had rooted for during the Olympics, he just grinned and said, “My team.”

That morning, he was wearing the Ligeritos’ uniform, a white jersey with purple raglan sleeves and the team’s name in jazzy blue letters across the front, and his favorite hat, an old Albert Belle Cleveland Indians cap that he had got from a friend. I asked him if he was an Albert Belle partisan. “No, I don’t really even know him. I just like the picture on the hat,” Juan said, referring to the Indians’ Chief Wahoo logo. The Ligeritos’ neighborhood rivals are the suspiciously counterrevolutionary-sounding Coca-Colas, and the Brigada Especiales, a team sponsored in part by the Special Brigade police, whose barracks are across the street from El Bosque. Even teams with sponsors just squeak by when it comes to equipment. You rarely see wooden bats in Cuba, because of their cost—until two years ago, even the major league teams used aluminum ones—and new leather gloves are a luxury. Many of the kids I saw playing on the street were bare-handed or had gloves that were so limp and splayed that they looked like leather pancakes. The most popular street game in Cuba, four corners (or its variant, three corners), is super-economy baseball—you play it without gloves, and it involves whacking a round thing (rock, bottle cap, ball, wad of tape) with a long thing (tree branch, broom handle, two-by-four) over the heads of your opponents.

While Juan and Carlos took turns swatting at pitches and fielding grounders, Víctor and I sat on a concrete beam lying at the edge of the field. “When I was a kid, I always played four corners,” Víctor said. “We had some sewers on our street, and they had those round metal covers, and we just used them as our bases. With us, it was always baseball, baseball, baseball, all the time.” He smiled and shook his head. “With these guys, with Juan especially, it’s the same. I can’t wait to get him a bike so he can take himself to his games.”

For some boys in Cuba, it really is baseball all the time: Every child in the country is evaluated at the age of five and steered toward a particular sport, and boys favoring baseball begin playing interschool tournaments and join a
categoría pequeña
team. The talented kids are usually well-known to the national scouts by the time they’re ten. (Currently, there is no baseball program for girls, although a
categoría pequeña
is planned for next year.) At thirteen, the outstanding athletes are admitted to one of fifteen Sports Initiation Schools, the first rung in the Soviet-model athletic program that Castro established in 1961. The very best of those are sent to an Advanced School for Athletic Perfection when they turn sixteen. Castro is especially proud of the system. A billboard in the Havana stadium carries one of his favorite declarations: “Cuba has developed a real and healthy sports culture.”