The Cuba Opening: Not About Baseball but Humanity

12/18/2014

Adolfo Luque pitched with Christy Mathewson and later taught Sal Maglie in Mexico. Martin Dihigo was banned from the majors because of the color bar, but was ultimately admitted to the Hall of Fame.

When I was in Cuba in 1991, aging baseball fans asked about the old Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox.

How was Bob Feller? How was Al Lopez?

They were polishing ancient memories the way they maintained vintage 1950’s cars. They loved the game itself, debated the strategy of their national teams, held on to the history of the old banished professional clubs like Almendares of Havana.

This was their national sport, brought there in the 1860’s by Cubans named Guillo who had worked in Mobile, Ala., and nourished by Esteban Bellan who played for Fordham University and the old professional Troy Haymakers. Later, Americans came for the Spanish-American War and played baseball in their leisure time.

Baseball is now part of the patrimony. In the inescapable age of the Web and videos, information crackling over the narrow sea between Florida and Cuba, fans know that Yasiel Puig and Aroldis Chapman have made it big in the major leagues. Is there more where they came from?

This is the first question people ask of a sports columnist who went to Cuba for the 1991 Pan-American Games and has kept up on it ever since. Perhaps the national baseball treasures would be the most desired product in Cuba (although, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, Cuban-trained ballet dancers are in demand all over the U.S.)

The level of potential major-league talent may be very thin. Plus, it’s really not important. What matters is that Cubans have been starved by the block-headed policies of Fidel and the follies of American leaders. Now President Obama is bringing rationality to half a century of mutual apartheid.

Cubans have been living in many forms of poverty. I got the feel in 1991, including a trip to the Bay of Pigs.

*- I discovered I could buy items like shampoo – shampoo! – in a dollar store to which I had access because of my journalist credential for the Pan-American Games.

*- A well-placed Cuban, volunteering as a journalistic resource, admitted to not minding a hot shower in a hotel.

*- Our interpreter, who spoke perfect English, had to wait for two straggling buses to get home after a 12-hour day. We had to persuade her to take a cab we provided.

My talented new friends were strangers in their own land.

Never underestimate the anger in the aging Cuban-Americans, who lost so much. But life goes on.

Surely, there are more players like Minnie Miñoso and Tony Pérez in Cuba. But more important, there are people who need nourishment and work and hope. And shampoo. And visas to travel across the narrow sea -- not in a flimsy boat like Orlando Hernandez, El Duque, but in something safe.

Baseball is the least of it.

The Malecón, where people fall in love and stare at the sea. Photo: Zé Eduardo, Flickr

Douglas Logan y Gonzales de Mendoza

12/18/2014 04:36:59 am

Vecsey, you're an honorary Cuban! It's a state of mind [or soul]. This move by Obama is one of his best. For too long we have been suffering at the hands of the bozos on both sides of the Straits of Florida. Soon my kids will be able to visit their ancestral land the same way the Vietnamese boat people can. Palabras honorosas.

George Vecsey

12/18/2014 07:01:03 am

Gracias, Sr. Me gustaría volver pronto. GV

john jeansonne link

12/18/2014 07:18:21 am

George,
Bueno! I, too, thought immediately of the '91 Pan Am Games, and of all the glimpses we got that the U.S. policies were bleeding the Cuban people white, while Fidel lived the good life. It's as if President Obama had been with us then to see the fallacy of our ways.
Cheers,
John

George Vecsey

12/21/2014 12:18:55 am

John, I am honored that you found my site. How are you doing setting up yours?
Those were great times in Cuba. I think Bill Rhoden and Bryan Burwell made a drive across to Santiago. One time somebody was griping about the chicken in the press hotel and somebody -- Alex Wolff? Merrill Noden? -- said, "Well, everybody in Havana is doing without protein today so we can have chicken." Of course, we contributed with our bloqueo. Saludos, GV

Alan Rubin link

12/24/2014 06:16:29 am

George

President Obama’s long overdue normalization of US-Cuba diplomatic relations is win-win opportunity that will require a lot of patience and compromise. Our embargo was a failed policy that should have been scraped years ago, but for the hard-liners in both countries.

Cuba’s economy took a beating when the Soviet Union abruptly pulled out between 1991 and 1993. The opportunity was there for the United States to fill the void.

Unfortunately, the anti-communist phobia that existed in our government since the 1930’s has had a devastating effect upon our foreign and domestic policies. The Dulles brothers and J. Edger Hoover were the major driving forces behind these policies, but they had many willing allies.

Stephen Kinzer’s “The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War” is a fascinating, but disturbing book. Any recent book on Hoover will do, but Seth Rosenfeld’s “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power” is equally chilling.

Although there were behind the scenes discussions with Cuba for a few years, the loss of Venezuela as Cuba’s patron made perfect sense for President Obama’s timing.

I can relate to all the NYT’s reporting since Presidents Obama’s announcement of opening up of ties to Cuba. My wife Sandi and I visited Cuba for a week four years ago this spring with a small group. Tony, our guide, said that it was an interesting time to visit as things were beginning to change. He came to Miami as a young boy and runs a travel agency that specializes in trips to Cuba. Of all his many relatives, only one aunt still talks to him.

A young college sitting next to me on the plane had mixed feelings about her week study/vacation trip with her classmates as her mother was born in Cuba and was vehemently against her going. He Columbian father was in favor.

Cuba is an interesting and exciting country. Although Communistic, much of their population either experienced a free economy or learned about what it was like from relatives. There is a basic entrepreneurial spirit among much of the population, which will probably respond positively to a renewed relationship with the United States.

The Baltic countries, which had been oppressed under Soviet, Nazis and Russian rule from the 1930’s to 1992, have been much slower to develop western democracies and a system of free enterprise.

We spoke with many guest lecturers, from government officials, academics, heads of art and cultural organization. They were very candid about life in Cuba. There was much they liked, but also much to criticize. None of them could understand why there was not diplomatic relations with the United States.

The good paying jobs are in the military, government and tourism. Doctors and other professionals are poorly paid. A Doctor earned about $80 a month, an amount that a tour bus driver can earn that in a day. Cuba has an excellent medical system. However, many doctors and nurses go overseas for several years at a time to earn money and return to live until they need more money.

There is a duel monetary system, one for Cubans and one for foreigners. The currency is not interchangeable. Medical care is free and people get a monthly living and food allowance.

The streets were always filled with people during the day as there was little incentive to work. Also, many received money from relatives in Miami.

Although long range change should be good for the people of Cuba, it will not be a painless process. It will be important how the Cuban government weans its people from the current to the new. The United States should give the necessary technical and financial help, but should not try to tinker with their government. We should aid them in being what they want to be and avoid our past disasters in nation building.

As for baseball, the spirit has never died. At a small rectangular park near out hotel in Havana, one corner was reserved for baseball discussions, which went on all day and into the evening. I have a very limited understanding of Spanish, but I could tell that it was several levels above that of a discussion. No anger, just a lot of intensity and fun.

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QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

The Cuba Opening: Not About Baseball but Humanity

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