Article and Pictures courtesy of Rhodes magazine, Fall 2002 © Rhodes College.

Studying Baseball -- Havana Style

Text and photos by Eric Henager '89
Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Rhodes College

Street baseball in old Havana. The corners are bases.

Contents:

Miami to Havana
An American In Havana
The ‘North American Game’
The Identity of the Cuban Ballplayer
Baseball Becomes Cuban

Cuba and the Unites States, once a happy couple, have for more than four decades experienced relationship problems. If we listen to some of the loudest, most powerful voices involved in the conflict, it seems that the divorce was final a long time ago. Ongoing battles over custody and property suggest a slightly different analogy in which the two nations, while not yet divorced, are irreconcilable partners who just can’t arrive at a settlement agreement. I prefer, however, to think of the situation as a very unfriendly, 43-year trial separation in which significant parts of both sides desire a renewed bond. Although economic and cultural differences make it impossible for the U.S. and Cuba to live together at the moment, there are signs that they still care deeply for each other and that they still share important common interests and passions. During my 2001-02 sabbatical, the Associated Colleges of the the South generously provided funds that allowed me to travel to Cuba to study what is, for me, the most captivating of these links, the game of baseball.

Miami to Havana

Biblioteca Nacional José Marti, where the author conducted his research

My research project involved an exhaustive reading of late 19th-century writing on baseball in 11 literary/cultural journals published in Cuba. But before I even got to the piles of dusty, crumbling volumes housed in the National Library in Havana, my travel experience itself began underlining for me the U.S.-Cuba relationship problem and the way I would look at baseball.

The flight from Miami to Havana, for example, already suggested the shaky ties between the two nations. It didn’t even start at a real ticket counter, but rather at a converted baggage claim area in the bowels of Miami International Airport -- perfect in my case for increasing the sense that I was doing something illegal. There, luggage was weighed, departure taxes paid, and far more officials than seemed necessary put far more stamps than seemed necessary on the various pieces of paper required for a U.S. citizen to travel to Cuba.

These preliminaries took three to four times longer than the flight itself, which ascended over the city that many supporters of the on-island regime consider the capital of all things anti-Cuban. The plane reached a cruising altitude, maintained it for only 20 minutes or so, then descended into the city that many off-island Cubans consider the capital of all things anti-Cuban.

Young girls in old Havana

The terminal in Havana used for the special flights arriving from Miami is everything that Miami International is not, especially for the traveler who is not of Cuban heritage. That is, nothing is weighed, nothing is searched, your passport is not even stamped. The only official stamp is reserved for a little tourist card that is not attached in any way to your passport and can thus be removed later, erased from your record. Havana airport is thus a great disappointment for the traveler who might have assumed a bit of a James Bond complex by the covert boarding operation in Miami where I personally felt that I had accomplished something that required sneakiness and guile when I made it through all the checkpoints. I even remember hearing in my head that piece of movie background score played when 007 is slipping into a Soviet military compound or the lair where the evil zillionaire keeps all the buttons he needs to destroy the world.

In Havana, on the other hand, customs and airport officials barely seemed to care I was there. If not for the television monitors running commercials for the Revolution (a concept whose irony still floors me), I could have imagined I was arriving in Des Moines to visit Aunt Flossie instead of the country with which for 43 years my country’s government has maintained a constant relationship of mutual political, economic and rhetorical aggression. It does indeed bear repeating that the special flights from the U.S. arrive at their own terminal set apart from the rest of Havana’s airport. Beyond that one fact of segregation, however, arrival in Havana was completely routine -- so much so that I think I heard rumba, rather than spy music, in my head as I passed through customs.

An American In Havana

The Malecón, seawall

The Hotel Colina is not a luxurious place. But if you want to be smack in the middle of the primarily residential district called Vedado and a short walk from the National Library, there’s not a better, more economical option. The hotel’s name, which could be something like “Hill Hotel” in English, refers to the highest point in Havana, a spot it shares with the University of Havana across the street, a large hospital and a few surrounding businesses, offices and homes. From the Colina, then, most destinations are down. When you leave the hotel, gravity carries you along without much physical effort (an important consideration in June heat) to the Malecón (seawall), to Old Havana, or to the area of the Plaza de la Revolución, depending on which side of the hill you choose.

The Colina, like most other Cuban hotels set up more or less exclusively for foreign guests, is up high in another sense that again underlines the Cuba-U.S. spat. Other than hotel staff, Cuban citizens are, while perhaps not strictly forbidden, unwelcome. While I always walked in the front door and through the lobby the same way I would at the Peoria Holiday Inn (on my way to see Aunt Flossie in Des Moines), the door guard routinely asked to see the hotel registration card of guests with those physical features most frequently represented in the Cuban population. Cubans seeking access to the hotel were at best closely watched and more often turned away entirely. Whether or not this de facto segregation is the product of a specific design to reduce interaction between Cuban citizens and the world outside Cuba, it serves as a reminder that U.S. economic and travel policies are not the only factors working to isolate Cubans.

Crowded street

Before I give the impression that travel in Cuba is carefully controlled and manipulated (and before I risk further confusing the U.S.-Cuba relationship question with more reference to fictional British spies), I should insist that I, like all travelers to the island, moved about freely and had -- as far as I know -- completely unmonitored interaction with countless Cuban citizens, the vast majority of whom treated me extremely well. No more frequently than I do in the United States did I get the sense in conversations that political or cultural pressures were getting in the way of meaningful interpersonal exchange. I enjoyed, in particular, an especially satisfying and honest working relationship with the librarians in the National Library. Working with them, I developed a profound admiration for what Cuba and Cubans do with limited resources to conserve items that are significant to their national cultural heritage. Although the materials I consulted were turning to dust, they were treated with love and care by the people charged with the task of maintaining them.

The ‘North American Game’

That brings me, finally, to the research work itself. Space doesn’t permit an exhaustive description, so I concentrate here only on that part of my work on early Cuban baseball writing that continues the themes developed above. From the late 1870s to the early 1890s, literary and jounalistic representations of baseball in Cuba were marked by preliminary signs of the island’s problematic connections with its powerful neighbor. As can be expected, there is some conflicting thought about the first game and how the sport arrived in Cuba, but what seems most likely is that at some point in the 1860s, élite Cubans who had attended college in the U.S. began to bring back, along with their university degrees, a new game called baseball. Although in fewer than 15 years the game’s popularity grew enough to form a viable (then, shortly thereafter, thriving) professional league, the process of making baseball Cuban would be fascinatingly slow, and in certain key ways, continues almost a century-and-a-half later. The journals I studied, interesting enough because of their format in which box scores and reports on baseball games shared page space with literary, theater and opera criticism, also provide a rich resource for the study of the very early representations of baseball as it began to take on a new Cuban identity.

One crucial moment for this sort of writing was, to give only one of hundreds of examples, a disputed game between the clubs Matanzas and Fe in April 1888. The game’s outcome was determined in large part by one controversial play for which the umpire’s decision favored Fe, the eventual winners of the contest. The Matanzas’s captain argued mildly but left the field without filing an official protest. The assistant captain, however, filed a protest with the scorer and the league later declared the game’s result annulled. A storm of arguments and accusations raged in Cuban journals for almost a month until a writer for the weekly, El sport, gave what he considered to be the final word. He published three letters sent to him from baseball officials in the U.S., all of whom stated uncategorically that since the protest had not come from the Matanzas’s captain, there was indeed no official protest and that the Cuban league’s decision to erase the game’s results from the standings was illegal. Chas Maddock, dean of U.S. umpires, went so far as to write that any league who would take into consideration such an invalid protest should be condemned to Hell.

Mural on Calle Jamel

I was surprised to find that, although the controversy in its written form continued for a few more weeks, no writer brought under scrutiny the assumption that opinions expressed by U.S. baseball officials should have direct bearing on the administration of the Cuban league. Dependence on the authority of U.S. game rules, a willingness to respect controversial decisions made by U.S. umpires but to severely critique those made by Cuban umpires and consistent references to baseball as a “North American game” continued to mark the representation of baseball in Cuba throughout the last decades of the 19th century. The journals, which began near the end of the century during Cuba’s own decisive struggle for political independence, finally depicted a game that was developing a local identity. And by the time one gets to the journals from the first years of the 20th century, it is not at all unusual to find issues like a November 1901 edition of El score in which one story proudly tells of a previously unbeaten traveling U.S. all-star team that had suffered a 14-11 loss to a Cuban squad after assuming that its winning streak could never end in a land “where baseball was just beginning to be born.” Another piece in the same issue severely critiques a U.S. umpire whose decisions were not even half as good as “those of our own fair and honest gentleman, Mr. Cachurro (translations, mine).”

The Identity of the Cuban Ballplayer

The development in Cuba of a bit of an attitude concerning Cuban baseball versus the U.S. version is precisely at the point of my research where I began to think that the experience of traveling to Havana was important for the formation of my ideas on this project. I of course had to travel anyway since none of the journals I looked at is housed anywhere other than the National Library. Travel had the added benefit of allowing me to familiarize myself with a country that interests an ever-growing number of students and with a city (Havana) that pioneering Rhodes students like seniors David LaFevor and Rachel Chaney had already visited for long-term study programs. But the travel experience had a direct impact on the way I saw the material I was researching in the solid links I was able to perceive between the early representation of Cuban baseball and the ongoing U.S.-Cuban relationship problem. In much the same way that what it means to be Cuban has for more than 100 years been complicated by Cuba’s proximity to the United States, the meanings of Cuban baseball have always been problematic due in large part to the game’s historical and continuing ties to its U.S. counterpart.

It would be extremely difficult, for instance, to name a player who represents the spirit of Cuban baseball. The identity of the Cuban baseball player ranges from an Osvaldo Hernández, who (appropriately) puts on the Yankee uniform in exchange for a multimillion–dollar contract, to an Omar Linares who, though better than most major league third basemen, continues to put on the Cuban national uniform in exchange for honor at home, a slightly improved diet and the occasional opportunity to travel.*

Fidel Castro often refers to figures like Hernández and Linares in his consistent representation of baseball as not one but two completely distinct games: the “slave” baseball played in the United States in which players are treated as commodities and therefore treat the game itself as a way to obtain capital, and the purer Cuban version in which competition is a form of collective art. Castro’s motives for portraying baseball as such are as clear as major league baseball’s constant efforts to portray the U.S. game as a symbol of the American way of life. While there are certainly ways in which baseball expresses the wide gap between Cuba and the U.S., my study of 19th-century representations of baseball suggested to me that the game has in certain other ways always been a bridge. In the 1880s, when Cuban publications were obsessed with new uniforms and every new change of rules in the U.S., players from U.S. clubs began to travel to Cuba to play in the off-season, and newspapers in the U.S. now and then even published as a novelty Cuban League box scores in Spanish. More recently, two games in 1999 between the Cuban national team and the Baltimore Orioles stand as proof that, even if nowhere else, the baseball field is a space where the two countries can meet.

Baseball Becomes Cuban

As I worked in Cuba and Miami, it often occurred to me that “life on the hyphen” -- the phrase that writer Gustavo Perez-Firmat uses to describe the in-between existence of many Cuban-Americans -- is also an appropriate description of the baseball relationship between Cuba and the U.S.

Cuban baseball in particular remains today in and in between the two nations in much the same way it is represented in late 19th-century writing: stuck between its U.S. roots and a distinct Cuban identity.

The English-language terms used in the first formalizations of baseball still mark the game’s U.S. origins even when it is played on a barely cleared patch of ground in remote parts of the Cuban interior or when it is spoken in the loud, animated baseball debates that regularly take place in Cuban plazas.

On the other hand, almost as quickly as the game spread in Cuba, Cubans began (as early as 1911) to be a significant presence in the U.S. game, and by the 1920s, names like Adolfo Luque begin to form part of national baseball lore in both countries. As much a bridge as an expression of the U.S.-Cuban gap, baseball, it seems to me, occupies a cultural space in which national boundaries, embargos and communication barriers are always penetrable and in flux. Whether George W. Bush or Fidel Castro throws out the first pitch, baseball simultaneously takes on a flavor of the place it is played and resists attempts to make it 100% Cuban or 100% U.S. American. Cuban baseball in particular remains today in and in between the two nations in much the same way it is represented in late 19th-century writing: stuck between its U.S. roots and a distinct Cuban identity.

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