My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (21 page)

The Ligeritos’ coach, Máximo García Cárdenas, was at El Bosque when I arrived, and, after greeting the parents, he called the boys together for some drills. Cárdenas is sixty-five years old. He played professional baseball in Cuba from 1955 to 1960—the last five years that pro ball existed in the country. In 1961, he left for the United States and pitched in the Double-A Texas League; he spent the next fourteen years with various teams in Mexico. When he returned to Cuba, he went to work for the National Commission of Baseball as a pitching coach for the Cuban national team. He has been coaching the Ligeritos for four years. He has known baseball before and during Castro and likes to keep his hand in the baseball that will come after him. “Some of these boys are very, very good,” he said during a break. “Watch Héctor, this one.” He gestured toward a wiry boy wearing the team jersey, Snoopy socks, and black Nike sneakers. The boy noticed Cárdenas pointing toward him, so he crouched and put out his glove and got a tough look on his face. “That one might really be something,” Cárdenas went on, keeping his eyes on the boy as he spoke. “He could really be something.”

By ten, the news from Venezuela must have been drying up, because a dozen more boys appeared, fanned out, and started throwing to one another, ducking around the men who were still clearing the field with machetes. The kids were dressed in an international array of T-shirts advertising Mexican rock groups, Korean cars, Canadian concert tours, and American baseball teams; all of them were slight and tan and excited, too earnest to horse around much yet old enough to affect a little bluster.

Now that most of the team was in place, Cárdenas started another series of drills, hollering at the boys to move quickly and watch the ball. They practiced for ten minutes or so, and then Cárdenas called them together near the scrap of cardboard that was marking third base. He divided them into two squads for the practice game and then turned to Héctor, who was the captain of the team. Héctor stood at attention in front of him, and the rest of the boys lined up to the side. “Are you and your colleagues ready?” Cárdenas asked him.

“My colleagues and I are ready,” Héctor said.

The boys yelled, “Ready!”

“Are you ready to play for the good of the team?” Cárdenas asked.

“We are ready,” Héctor said.

The boys again yelled, “Ready!” They jostled one another and crowded closer to Cárdenas.

“Who owns the right to sports?” Cárdenas asked.

The boys chanted,
“El deporte es un derecho del pueblo!”
(“Sport is the right of the people”—one of Castro’s trademark slogans.)

“Tell me again?”

“Sport is the right of the people!”

“Once more?”

“Sport is the right of the people!” they yelled, and then scrambled to their positions on the field.

JUAN SAYS THAT
if he doesn’t get to play baseball professionally, he would like to be an investigator, a policeman, a doctor, or a hero. “Those would be okay,” he says, “but I would like to be a baseball player.” He says he would be happy to have his career either in Cuba or in the United States, although he likes Cuban baseball more than American. “The Cubans play for fun, not for money,” he explained to me between innings. I asked him what he thought of American athletes, and he said, “They play only for the millions. A real player plays because he likes baseball and doesn’t need that much money to live a normal life.”

At the top of the second inning, Javier Méndez, an outfielder for the Industriales and one of Juan’s heroes, stopped by El Bosque with his four-year-old son, Javier Jr. Méndez is broad chested and sturdy, with meaty arms and legs, and he has a goatee and a buzz cut and big dimples. That morning, he was wearing Oakley sunglasses, an Olympic website T-shirt, and a cast on his right hand. Méndez is thirty-seven years old and a huge star in Cuba. He had been on pace to tie the Cuban record for lifetime doubles and to get his two thousandth hit—something only ten other Cuban players have managed—when he was struck by a pitch and had to end his season. He had hoped to retire this year, but he wants to polish off those records. “Next season,” he said, flexing the fingers of his injured hand, “if all goes well.”

Méndez had come by to visit a friend whose son played for the Ligeritos, but it was also a chance to let little Javier take a few swings. The boy was dressed in a tiny, spotless Industriales uniform and an oversize batting helmet. When he swung, the bat nearly toppled him. When he finally hit a pitch, he toddled straight to second base. “Javi, tag first! Tag first!” Méndez shouted. He yelled something to Cárdenas, and they both started laughing. “Oh my God, look at him,” Méndez said. “Well, I wasn’t any good when I was young. I was weak and really small. I just practiced and persevered. I grew up in a fishing village, but I didn’t know how to fish, so I played baseball. But I wasn’t any good until I was sixteen.”

Méndez has been on one Olympic team and won a slew of national championships. The Cuban government allowed its players to take sabbaticals in Japan in the early nineties, and Méndez and a few other Cubans played there for two seasons, but he subsequently returned to his team, at around the time that the pitcher Liván Hernández defected to play in the United States. Just a few years later, Méndez’s teammate (and Liván’s older brother) Orlando Hernández also defected and signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the Yankees. Star athletes in Cuba often receive gifts from the government—cars, houses, equipment—but most of the time their compensation is measly.

A few days after the Ligeritos’ practice, when I took Juan and Carlos to a major league game between Havana’s Metropolitanos and Camagüey, a vendor offered to sell me not only coffee, cigars, and potato croquettes, but, for fifteen dollars, any of the players’ hats or shirts—as soon as they were done using them in the game.

Méndez has played one game in the United States. On May 3, 1999, the Cuban national team played the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards, as part of a cultural exchange that had begun in March, when the Orioles played the national team in Havana. The Cubans won the game in Baltimore, 12–6, suffered an interruption during the fifth inning when an anti-Castro protester ran onto the field, and lost one pitching coach, who defected afterward. The game was nevertheless considered a success—the beginning of what was being called “baseball diplomacy.” Méndez loved playing in Baltimore and said it was a shame about the defection, especially since it might interfere with any future games. “You know, it’s hard when anyone on the team leaves for other countries,” he said. “It’s hard on the team. It’s hard on the fans. It makes people very depressed.”

I asked him if it was a good life, to be a Cuban baseball star. He watched the next boy come up to the plate and slap at a pitch. “It’s a good life,” he said, “in a sense.”

The boys drifted over to see Méndez, most of them too shy to get close or say anything when he asked them how they were doing. He watched the game intently, applauding the good hits and the good catches, shouting encouragement and corrections along with Cárdenas, as if this were the most important game in the world, a big-league game, a game he might play in now or one that Cárdenas starred in forty years ago, rather than a matchup between gawky boys on a ragged field on a quiet street in Havana.

It was now midday and the game was over. Juan had had a great morning: Not only had he hit a single and a double and made one flashy catch—a hard-hit bad-hopping shot from Héctor—but he had got up the nerve to ask Méndez to pose with him for a photograph. Even after the other boys had headed off, Juan wanted to keep hitting, but his father said it was time to go home.

The Congo Sound

Hervé Halfon, a French person who hates French people, owns a record store on the rue des Plantes in Montparnasse, just a few Métro stops from the Eiffel Tower but spiritually closer to avenue Gambela in Congo or to the Mokolo district in Yaoundé, Cameroon. The store is called Afric’ Music. It has a small sign and an unremarkable window display, and it’s about the size and shape of a Parisian parking space. Inside, Hervé has spared all expense on the décor. Besides the floor and ceiling and one long counter, the store is nothing but rows and rows of CDs in racks and on shelves and in piles, all of them devoted to African music, except for a section reserved for the music of the Caribbean. A sound system sits somewhere behind the counter, out of view and, more important, out of reach of any customer who might want to, perhaps, switch the new N’Dombolo recording for something by M’Pongo Love. The sound system is on, loud, all the time. If you walk down the rue des Plantes, you will at first hear just the usual rumbling and tootling and clattering sounds of a Paris street, and then, as you pass the open door of Afric’ Music, you will be blasted by a few bars of a Congolese ballad, and as soon as you step past the door, the ballad will suddenly be out of earshot and the Paris street sounds will resume, as if you had walked through a harmonic cloudburst.

As is the custom in record stores all over the world, a song rarely gets played in its entirety at Afric’ Music. What happens is that Hervé and a customer will be listening to a song—let’s say, something by Wenge Tonya Tonya—and a certain guitar line will make Hervé think of a cut on an old Franco and O.K. Jazz album, which he will put on, and then the Franco song will remind the customer of a song by Les Youles that he heard the other day on the world music show on Radio Nova, so Hervé will turn off the Franco and put on Les Youles, and then another customer will wander in and suggest that the Les Youles song is a pitiful imitation of a much better song recorded twenty years ago by Tabu Ley Rochereau. Hervé will have that recording, too, so he will play it, and then the two customers will start arguing about it, and then Hervé, in his role as a peacekeeping force, will take off the Tabu Ley record and put on something uncontroversial, like the new album
Bang Bang,
by Carimi, whose members are Haitian but grew up in Miami.

AFRIC’ MUSIC OPENED
twenty-six years ago. The store was founded by Hervé’s cousin David Halfon, who had picked up a taste for African music at clubs around town. At the time, David was working as a salesclerk in a musical instrument shop in the Paris neighborhood of Saint-Michel. On a gamble, he asked the owners of the shop to let him sell African records and tapes out of the back corner of the store.

There was no store in France devoted to African music in 1976, even though there were already more than a million Africans living in the country, many of whom came from the French-speaking nations of Gabon, Benin, Togo, Mali, Chad, Ivory Coast, and Senegal, as well as from Zaire—the country now known as Congo—whose music, called “soukous,” or just
la musique moderne,
was the least parochial and most widely embraced throughout Africa. Moreover, a number of the Congolese expatriates living in Paris happened to be that country’s greatest musicians. And even though there was nowhere to buy African music in France in the mid-seventies, much of it was actually being recorded in studios in Paris and in Brussels and shipped back to Africa for release.

This peculiar cross-continental journey was actually in keeping with the history of soukous—and of all African music, which, in the words of the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, was essentially “a music of encounters.” To begin with, soukous was a mélange of indigenous village music and Cuban rumba, which had become popular in Congo through a series of records released there in the 1930s. Rumba was in fact finding its way back to its origins, since it, too, was a mélange—in this case, a combination of Spanish music and the sounds brought to the Caribbean by African slaves. In other words, soukous had left home, absorbed a new culture, returned home, and was being absorbed and reinterpreted once again. The music that resulted was especially elastic. Its lyrics were almost always sung in Lingala, a trading language of the Congo region and a distinct African dialect, but one that is generic and unprovincial—a sort of lingua franca with no fractious history attached. But what made soukous the preeminent music in Africa was its sound, the voluptuous interplay of three or four or even five guitars, swirling around keening melodies and a dreamy, compelling beat. It is emotional, complex music, with the brightness and propulsion and hot guitars of popular music but with a less hurried, mounting intensity. It sounds neither contemporary nor old; it is melodic and highly structured, even orchestral, but also powerfully rhythmic and cyclic, like a chant. You can dance for hours and hours to soukous music; it has that kind of drive. But it is also strangely, ineffably poignant. Even the biggest, brassiest soukous songs have a wistful undercurrent, the sound of something longed for or lost.

KINSHASA
, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was once the home of Africa’s most energetic recording industry. Gary Stewart, in his authoritative history,
Rumba on the River,
recounts how, in 1948, a Greek merchant named Nicolas Jeronimidis opened the Ngoma studio in downtown Kinshasa. Eventually, there were a score of studios, including many owned and operated by Congolese, and soukous’s most successful musicians ran studios of their own. Soukous was the sound on every street, in clubs, on the airwaves, even on public address systems, which blared the music for anyone who didn’t have a radio. It became so entwined in the country’s sense of identity that in 1960, when its delegates went to Brussels for a conference on independence, the leading soukous orchestra at the time, Joseph Kabasele and African Jazz, accompanied them.