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Oreste and Nelson 
Cemetery guards (and gravedigger) 
Antonio in Havana’s Chinatown |
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| Havana Baseballs | ||
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In May 2006 I visited Havana, Cuba, for two weeks of wandering, experiencing and photographing the Old City, Havana Vieja. Along with my curiosity and cameras came a box of baseballs and a stack of stamp-bearing envelopes addressed to my home in Edmonton, Alberta. I hoped to give one of the baseballs and an envelope to people who would write me to recount the fate of the ball they received: if it had gone to a grandson and was used in street pick-up games, say, or if it was the last out of a home team’s hard-fought win against a bitter rival. Baseball is Cuba’s national sport. My thought was that a regulation baseball would be a good starting point for establishing contact with Habaneros. My hunch turned out to be a good one. The baseballs introduced me to Cubans from all walks of life, and we had common ground right from the start. Baseball is the language of Cuba. The game arrived in the 1860s and Cuba’s first professional teams were formed soon after, in the 1870s, in Havana, Mantanzas and Almendares. By the 1890s, baseball symbolized the distinction between the Spanish-descended ruling class and crillos, children of Spaniards born in Cuba. In 1869, soon after the first Cuban War of Independence against the island’s Spanish rulers, authorities banned the sport when Cubans began preferring baseball to viewing the bullfights they were expected to attend. 
“Baseball was a form of opposition to the ideas of Spain: to play baseball was to be criollo, to be criollo was to be Cuban,” author Milton H. Jamail writes in Full Count, an examination of Cuba baseball and Cuba-U.S. relations. “Baseball was not played by the Spanish. They called it ‘a rebel game,’ ” Gilberto Dihigo explains in Full Count. “Baseball clearly distinguished Spaniards from Cubans, and this is where the Cuban love of baseball began.” Gilberto is more than an interested observer of his country’s favourite pastime. His father, Martin, merits consideration as the greatest baseball player ever. 
The lone Cuban elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, in 1977, Martin Dihigo earned his place for prowess in Negro League and Caribbean baseball. Widely regarded as the most versatile man ever to play the game, Dihigo expertly manned every position on the field and was a successful manager over a 22-year career that ended in 1945. The architect of no-hitters pitched in the top pro leagues in Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, Martin Dihigo was also a powerful hitter and a fluid fielder. Twice he led the Mexican League in both hitting and pitching, and in a third winter season he finished second to Satchel Paige in the most important pitching categories, and second to Josh Gibson among batters. I had a photograph of Martin Dihigo in the bags I carried to Cuba. The picture was folded into a box containing 17 baseballs and two old gloves, one a relic of the 1940s and the other from my own playing days. One dozen of the baseballs were new, fresh from a sporting goods store, still individually sealed in plastic bags. I had hoped to find balls stamped with a red maple leaf logo to mark the Canadian origins of this adventure, to no avail. I settled instead on balls I felt Communist Cuba would next best appreciate: Official League Baseballs leather-bound and hand-stitched in China. Another five baseballs were added to the store-bought dozen during my final preparations for Havana. Three came from a box of odds and ends in my closet, the remains of baseball-playing seasons of long ago. The remaining two came from an acquaintance who retrieved them from beyond the outfield fences of a baseball diamond. All were well-used. Each baseball landed in the hands of a Cuban I met over the course of my stay in Havana. There were no set criteria to determine who would or would not receive a baseball, save that they appeared likely to respond to my request to write a letter in return. Whim and serendipity selected the recipients. I would set out each mid-day from the Moorish-inspired Hotel Sevilla on the edge of Havana Vieja, in the heart of the Old City, with at least two baseballs tucked into my daypack. Of the balls I carried, some were lost to the spillage that comes as when a batted ball disappears into the bleachers. Here are the ones that stayed in the park: “You grow up with baseball all around you. It is part of being Cuban. Baseball is one of the roots of Cuban reality.” — Javier Mendez, Industriales of Havana outfielder, quoted by Milton H Jamail in Full Count
1. The Capitolio Designed to replicate the Capital Building in Washington, DC, Cuba’s neo-Classical Capitolio was built in the 1920s to house the nation’s government, including the assembly for its house of representatives. Today, it is maintained as a tourist attraction. The building’s interior is dominated by the bronze, 56-foot-high Statue of the Republic, cast in Rome and covered with 22-karat gold, under its meticulously decorated 300-foot-high dome. To left and right is the window-lined Salon de los Pasos Perdidos, the Palace of Versailles-inspired Hall of Long Steps, so named for its peculiar acoustics. In the front of the Capitolio, facing the pedestrian-crowded Parque Central, grand steps climb down to a wide sidewalk where photographers using original 1930s Polaroid cameras satisfy the tourist urge for a souvenir to mark their visit to this spot. It was here that I met David, the dispatcher for the taxi stand that operated in front of the Capitolio. He approached me as I shot film of the photographers, drawn by the red maple leaf and ‘Canada’ lettering on my baseball cap. He loved Canada and Canadians, David said, and had friends and relatives in both Toronto and Vancouver. In answer to my question, he allowed that he loved and played baseball, too. David happily received the first of my Havana baseballs, accepted the self-addressed envelope and promised to write soon. He also showed me his fielders’ grip, squeezing through the plastic to hold the ball firmly and demonstrating a quick snap throw to first. He smiled and we waved goodbye to each other. 2. Chinatown Immediately to the west of the Capitolio is the factory of Partagas, the famed Cuban cigar-maker. Tours of the factory were closed this day and into August to allow for building restoration and renovation, so I wandered north and west towards the Chinatown pavilion a few blocks away and settled into a public park across a narrow street crowded with Cubans shopping in nearby stalls. A couple — brother and sister, it would turn out — emerged from the drifting mass of pedestrians and settled at the end of the bench. In conversation, I learned that Antonio, the brother, was a part-time teacher of baseball to children at his son’s elementary school, a service that paid him five Cuban pesos a month. Antonio was a pitcher in his youth. Upon receipt of his baseball, he quickly showed me his grip for fastball and curve. We laughed and he accepted the self-addressed envelope, promising to write soon. The ball would be much appreciated and well cared for by his students, he said. It was not good for Cubans to be seen speaking in public with tourists, Alberto then said, so he and his sister, Oona, led me to a nearby restaurant where we could converse in comfort. “There are 12 million people in Cuba,” Oona said, “and nine million of them are police.” The restaurant featured local musicians who played for tips while we sipped mojitos and spoke of Cuba. Upon departing, I stopped at a streetside vendor and bought two kilos of powdered milk for Antonio and Oona. I also decided that the small, 1940s webless glove I brought to Cuba would be best used by Antonio’s young students and made arrangements to have delivery to him later that week. 3. Stickball Kids There are parts of Old Havana that tour guides and hotel employees advise against frequenting, especially alone or at night. These are the mostly crumbling sections of Havana Vieja lying south and west of Plaza Vieja, a wonderfully reconstructed square bordered by restored Spanish dwellings, administrative buildings and a church dating to the 1500s. One day I found myself in a narrow, cluttered street in this neighbourhood. At one corner fringed with vacant lots littered with debris, three children were playing a form of baseball. One stood to the side of an apartment entrance, armed with a narrow stick, while another skimmed a small plastic bottle cap towards him from the opposite building. The third boy played the field from a doorway to the pitcher’s right. When I dropped my bag to fetch the players a baseball, the game stopped and the bravest of the boys, aged about eight or nine years, approached me with expectation in his eyes. I withheld the envelope, knowing they were unlikely to write, and handed over one of the used balls, a Barry Bonds commemorative item marking the San Francisco slugger’s Last Honest Season, 1999. I wondered if the players would notice. Ball in hand, the youth returned to his game. As I walked away, I noted that the trio continued to play with the plastic bottle cap instead of their new baseball. 4. Cristobal Colon Among the oldest and largest cemeteries in the Americas, Cristobal Colon covers 56 hectares just west of the city’s downtown core. It is the final resting place for the remains of some 2 million people — roughly equal to Havanas’s current living population — and each day accepts 50 to 60 fresh cadavers for interment. Included in Cristobol Colon is a section belonging to the Asociacion Cristiana de Players, Umpires y Managers de Baseball Professional. An estimated 50 former players are buried here, including Armando Marsans, an outfielder with Cincinnati, the St. Louis Browns and New York Yankees between 1911 and 1918. I entered the cemetery from the north, through the main gate on Avenue Zapata, a stone monument to the Three Virtues — Faith, Hope and Charity — sculpted in 1904. Immediately, I was overcome by the grand scale of the graveyard, and by the sea of marble in all directions. Designed in the 1860s and completed from 1871 to 1886, the graveyard is a national monument, a sprawling jumble of mausoleums, headstones and memorials in a dizzying variety of styles from contemporary to outlandish. Maps and numbered streets orient the visitor. While photographing the Mausoleo a las victimas del desastres en la ferretria de Isasi, a towering marble column dedicated to 17 firefighters who lost their lives fighting a blaze in a Havana hardware store in 1890, I was approached by two security guards on bicycles, one of whom was also transporting a gravedigger employed by the Necropolis. The guards proffered me a sip from the flask of rum they carried on their rounds, and we drank to firefighters and Cuba as they recounted the history of several nearby graves and monuments. Talk then turned to baseball, specifically the National Baseball Series underway between Santiago de Cuba and Industriales of Havana. One of the guards was a third baseman on the playing field, and the other was a pitcher. I reached into my bag and offered a baseball to the first security guard, who laughed, gripped the ball and mimicked a throw. Then he made sawing motions on the ball and pointed to his colleague. His meaning was clear: they meant to share but could not cut the baseball in half. I had a second baseball with me and handed that one over as well, satisfying the second guard but leaving the gravedigger without. At his unhappy look, I wondered about my fate if he turned out to be the boatman on the River Styx but let it pass: I had no more to offer. Satisfied with their haul, the guards pointed me towards a particularly interesting section of the cemetery, offered me one last swig of rum and pedalled away. 5. Prado The window of my hotel room overlooked the Paseo del Prado, Havana’s tree-lined pedestrian thoroughfare extending from leafy Parque Central a few blocks to the south, to an intersection with the Malecon, the oceanside walkway to my north. First laid out in 1771 outside the city’s walls, the Prado is a picturesque boulevard lined with older neo-Moorish structures that feature porticos, bars, schools and shops on the ground floor and residences overhead. The Prado is not a place for lingering at night, however, even if there are policemen stationed at every street corner. Still, I took to slipping out there in late evening to settle among the trees, bronze lions and marble benches to enjoy a quiet last cigar of the evening while the street life passed me by. It was just past 11 one night when I ventured out to sit in the shadows with a can of Cristal, a local beer, and was approached by a couple seeking a light for the cigar carried by the man; we began to speak of this and that, and soon Alberto went off to fetch fresh beers to augment the rum he carried in a plastic container. Alberto was a good enough ballplayer to be part of the national team streaming system in his youth. But one night, he said, he had too much to drink and smoked some marijuana before borrowing a friend’s motorcycle to visit a girlfriend, and there was an accident. His left arm bore horrible scars around and below his bicep, which signalled the end of his hopes for a baseball career. He was a pitcher, he said, expertly bouncing the ball off his bicep and catching it in his grip for a hard slider. Cuban citizens should not be seen conversing with tourists in public, said Alberto’s girlfriend, Hannah, so we stepped into a bar just down the street where, for one peso, the management let us sit in the back and drink the rum we had brought with us. We spoke of Cuba for an hour or so, me in halting words and phrases and Alberto in rudimentary English. Then I returned to my hotel room to pick up another baseball and some school supplies and cosmetics to hand over, and we settled into the bar for more talk that carried us into the small hours. Alberto and Hannah walked me back to the hotel after 3 a.m., and we parted with assurances that they would write to tell me the next stories in the life of their new baseball. Upon entering the lobby, however, I elected to immediately return outside for a last cigar and saw that my acquaintances had not gone 20 feet from the hotel before being stopped by the police. The doorman told me the couple was detained for speaking with tourists; when I asked if I could intervene on their behalf, he said yes and I approached the policeman but he wanted no statement from me. Alberto was bundled into a paddy wagon — for questioning, I was told, that would end with his release about four hours’ later — but Hannah was allowed to leave, after turning over several pens to the local constabulary. Later, hotel staff told me the pair was well known to police for fraternizing with tourists and advised me to avoid both people. I did not entirely trust the truth of what I was told but backed away anyway, figuring it was best for everyone if I did not maintain direct contact with them while in Havana, as they were most likely being watched. 6. Osvaldo Before travelling to Cuba, I made arrangements from Canada to buy several boxes of fine cigars from a friend of a friend, thereby circumventing the onslaught of street touts offering suspect quality smokes to unsuspecting tourists. The transfer of goods was arranged for the early hours of a Sunday morning, and I anticipated nothing more than a quick exchange of money and smokes. Instead, my contact — Osvaldo — arrived at the hotel with his wife and two children in tow and invited me to his home to the west of the city, where the cigars would be handed over. Entering the car, I gave a baseball to Osvaldo’s four-year-old son, who squeezed it in wonderment. We cut across the north of the city, through the districts of Vedado, Mirimar and Playa, catching glimpses of the more spacious, well-tended neighbourhoods of Havana’s wealthier citizens. Osvaldo’s was a more compact neighbourhood, with much foot traffic. Before reaching our destination, we stopped at one of the nearby houses, a fantastic concoction of concrete shapes that sported sculptures of plants, birds and unknown deities sprouting from rooflines, balconies, the yard — everywhere you looked. Inset into the concrete were pieces of ceramic, many hand-painted with eclectic shapes and other features. Here, too, were pottery creations, oil paintings and woodworks, all the creation of one man, Fausto, who claimed Picasso as his spiritual father. Shown the baseball Osvaldo’s son had received, the artist laughed and clutched it in his left hand, fashioned his knuckleball grip against the seams, faked a high leg kick and mimed his pitcher’s motion, the arm rising and cycling and ending with a flick of his wrist and an exultant half-shout, half-giggle. At Osvaldo’s, after the cigars were produced, my hosts decided a feast was necessary. Amid much fun and laughter, we smoked cigars and sipped rums, ate sauteed shrimp with peppers and skewers of shrimp and tuna barbecued under a banana leaf, sipped more rum and smoked more cigars and enjoyed a steady stream of neighbours stopping by for a moment or three. Delivered back to my hotel too soon afterwards, I gathered a package of pens and notebooks, a transistor radio and some clothing for distribution among my new friends. I also handed over my weathered, game-used softball glove, telling Osvaldo it was for his son to grow into. We clasped hands and parted with sincere hopes of seeing each other again. 7. Nelson and Oreste One of the security guards in my hotel noticed me scanning a wall of historic photographs across from the patio lounge (including one of a poster of Ted Williams with the caption, Be A Hero, Ask The Man Who Was One, with the word ‘was’ struck through and replaced with ‘is’). We spoke about Cuban baseball for a few moments before Nelson switched gears and mentioned he had a friend nearby who operated a good restaurant; was I interested? I was and agreed to be guided there later that week, provided Nelson ate dinner with me. When we met the next night, I gave Nelson a baseball and envelope, and he laughed at the sight of the gift, bouncing it in his hand, gripping it this way and that and cocking his arm to throw. He was about 25 and played baseball or softball several times a week, whether on a field or in the streets of his residential neighbourhood a half hours’ bus ride away. The ball would see much use, he said. 
En route to his friend’s restaurant, we walked a few blocks west from the Prado. In her homage to Havana’s famed Tropicana nightclub, author Rosa Lowinger accurately describes this section of the city as seeming “to groan under the weight of centuries of secrets.” “The buildings, which are crammed together, discourage access,” Lowinger writes in Tropicana Nights. “Sneaking through these stone and stucco canyons undetected is a futile exercise; everyone is watched from the wood and iron balconies” above street level. “The interiors of the 19th-century buildings ... keep even better secrets.” At one intersection in this section of an old old town, a man broke away from a knot of people and approached, greeting Nelson in warm recognition. Oreste was his name, and he invited us into his dwelling on the next block, a second-storey apartment up a steep flight of stone steps in a narrow, centuries-old block. When we chatted in Oreste’s small living area next to an open kitchen, it emerged that he could arrange a supply of good cigars, if I so wished. It took about 20 minutes to explain that my limit was already exceeded and that more of the same would be a problem, not a benefit; he was disappointed but philosophic. But I wanted to thank him for his trouble, so with Nelson’s agreement, I gave Oreste the baseball I’d handed off to Nelson just a half hour earlier, after assuring Nelson that his prize would be replaced the next day. Oreste was overjoyed: earlier, he had put his fists together and mimicked a powerful batter’s swing to indicate his love of baseball; now, he showed me his grip for throwing a curve and advised that his had been pretty good. Next day, I searched out Nelson to replace his baseball. His fellow security personnel were interested and excited at the sight of the ball, especially a burly one who had been a catcher in his prime and, he said, a SLUGGER, the number four hitter; he mimed a short compact swing and let his right hand describe the arc of a ball leaving the park. Everyone smiled. Breaking away, I went to the pool for some sun and met Maya from Vienna, a perceptive woman just graduated from medical school and taking time off before beginning her internship. Maya was leaving next morning for Holquin, in the east of Cuba, and had hoped to have some quality cigars for her stay on the beach but was just recovered from an illness that had confined her to bed for the past few days. She had had neither time nor opportunity to locate a source. Did I know a contact? Nelson agreed to accompany us to Oreste’s that same evening. When we arrived, Oreste’s apartment was jammed with his wife and both sets of parents, all persons playing dominos while sipping mugs of rum. The cigar question settled to our satisfaction, Oreste’s father pounded his fists together, snapped his wrists and said ‘biesbol,’ then pointed first to his eye, then to the television set against the wall. Did I want to watch baseball on TV? I nodded. I knew the sixth game of the National Baseball Series between Santiago de Cuba and Industriales of Havana was just starting. Oreste’s father pointed to my shirt, a brilliant blue long-sleeve pullover, and said, ‘Industriales.’ Everyone cheered; mine was the same colour as the jerseys worn by Havana’s team, which meant I must be a supporter, too; life was good. We poured rums, clinked glasses all around, yelled at the game on the television, cheered and cursed and laughed and the night rolled on. With the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the second, Industrials’ pitcher Frank Monteith struck out two to protect a 1-0 lead built in the first when first baseman Alexander Mayeta — who would be named Most Valuable Player of these playoffs — hit a sacrifice fly to open the scoring. Mayea later decided the game with a home run. With Havana safely ahead and cruising to what would be a 4-1 win and the team’s third championship in five years, we left to walk to Parque Centrale, where I was told a giant television screen was set up to beam the game to those Havana citizens unable to watch it otherwise. But I had been misinformed — the screen was up for home games only, and tonight’s match was in Santiago de Cuba. The park held only its normal quota of late night loungers and passers-by; I opted instead for the nearby El Floridita and a welcome daiquiri. Back at the hotel, I awoke at 2:30 a.m. to a raucous noise on the Prado below my window, a cacophony of drums, trumpets, shouts and applause. The citizens of Havana were celebrating their team’s baseball win with a slow procession along the walkway. As it passed out of earshot to the south, I compared the pure joy of these fans with the hooligan behaviour in my home city of Edmonton, where one of the hockey team’s 2006 Stanley Cup playoffs wins was followed by rampaging and fires along busy Whyte Avenue, and a wake of broken windows, smashed telephone booths and other senseless destruction. 8. Postscript On the hot, humid Havana morning of my last day in Cuba, I was writing postcards in the lobby of my hotel when Mario, one of the attendants, noticed the card I was inscribing: on the front was an old shot of a young Fidel in baseball cap and uniform jersey, grinning as he gripped a baseball in the pocket of the glove on his left hand. Before he abandoned baseball fields for revolution, Fidel was a good-enough ballplayer to be scouted by teams in the United States. He reportedly turned down the offer of a professional contract from Joe Cambria, scout for the Washington Senators. “Fidel Castro is a big, powerful young man,“ Cambria wrote his employers in 1942-43, when Fidel was 16 or 17. “His fastball is not great, but passable. He uses good curve variety. He uses his head and can win that way for us too.” Mario appreciated the postcard. “Would you like to see another picture like that?” I nodded and Mario led me into the bowels of the hotel, where we entered a back room filled with weights and benches and other exercise equipment, the walls bearing a series of historic photographs. One showed a young Fidel in his baseball uniform, next to another man also wearing a baseball jersey. “That’s Cienfuegos,” Mario said, noting the second man was, like Fidel, a commander in the revolution army of the 1950s, and a pretty good ballplayer. Did I know of Cuban baseball? “Martin Dihigo,” I replied. Mario smiled. He looked at his watch; it was 10 a.m. “Would you like to go for a beer? The ballplayers’ bar is near here, if you’re interested.” We stepped out to the patio and walked to a side gate I hadn’t noticed before, exited the compound and walked across the street to a porticoed building with several shops on the ground floor facing the Prado. These were local hangouts that neither advertised their presence nor employed hawkers to attract passers-by; in fact, the place we entered had frosted windows that denied a glimpse of the interior, and a simple sign marked ‘restaurant.’
I was introduced to the manager and a beer appeared at my elbow. We spoke of Cubans in today’s professional ranks, and when I mentioned Kendry Morales of the Los Angeles Angels of Anahiem, we clinked beers and saluted his play. I knew of the pitcher Rene Arocha, whom I was told was now the pitching coach for the junior national team; we cursed the elbow problems that had ended his career with the St. Louis Cardinals. We talked of El Duque, a boyhood friend of Mario whom I’d last seen on television a month previous, legging out a triple against Los Angeles after sending the ball over Kenny Lofton’s head in shallow centre; I mimed the 36-year-old pitcher — or it he 46? — huffing and puffing into third, and we laughed and smiled. Another beer appeared at my elbow. I had no more baseballs to give, and the copy of Who’s Who In Baseball 2006 that I had carried to hand over to just such a place was likewise long gone. But I felt compelled to mark the moment in an appropriate way, so I offered Mario my well-worn baseball cap emblazoned with a red maple leaf and ‘Canada‘ under the logo. For the bar, I said, and we all smiled again. One hour later, I was en route to the airport, wishing I had just one more day, if only to have shared the bar with the championship-winning ballplayers expected to trickle in later that day. Next time, I said. As a followup to this article, I am collecting used baseball equipment — balls, bats, gloves, bases etc — to deliver to Cuba later this year, to help establish organized leagues for youth in Havana and outlying areas. If you have any baseball equipment you’d like to donate, you can contact me directly: Or ship them (collect) by Purolator to: |
It was a bar. A baseball bar. Signed photographs of the stars of the Industrialies crowded
the walls, along with baseball uniforms, caps, bats and posters. In one corner, high above the patrons, a television played highlights of the recent World Baseball Classic, in which Cuba finished second, ahead of the United States.