Cuban Baseball Legends: Baseball's Alternative Universe: SABR Digital Library, #40

By Society for American Baseball Research

Minnie Minoso. Martin Dihigo. Luis Tiant Sr. and Jr. Orlando "El Duque" and Livan Hernandez. These are only a few of the leading lights profiled in Cuban Baseball Legends: Baseball's Alternative Universe. The 47 individuals profiled here represent only a small handful of the legions of memorable and sometimes even legendary figures produced over nearly a century and a half by an island nation where the bat-and-ball sport known as baseball is more than a national pastime, it is the national passion. The book presents 47 biographies in all, plus essays on Cuban baseball.

These biographies were researched and written by a team of members of the Society for American Baseball Research. SABR's BioBroject has produced bios of over 3,800 players since 2002. A Spanish-language edition of the book is also available, a new first for SABR. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Society for American Baseball Research
• Release date: Jul 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781943816255

Book preview

Table of Contents

Preface

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Introduction: Baseball and the Cuba-USA Cold War Détente

by Peter C. Bjarkman

PART I: OVERVIEWS

The Cuban League (Post 1962)

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Fidel Castro and Baseball

by Peter C. Bjarkman

PART II: PLAYERS AND PERSONALITIES

Aquino Abreu

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Rafael Almeida

by Zack Moser

Santos Amaro

by Rory Costello

Sandy (Edmundo) Amorós

by Rory Costello

Steve (Estebán) Bellán

by Brian McKenna

Ramón Bragaña

by Lou Hernandez

Bert (Dagoberto) Campaneris

by Rich Schabowski

José Cardenal

by Ray Birch

Paul Casanova

by Rory Costello and José Ramirez

Sandy (Sandalio) Consuegra

by Rory Costello

Mike (Miguel) Cuéllar

by Adam Ulrey

Tommie (Tomás) de la Cruz 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Martín Dihigo 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Pedro Formental 

by Tom Hawthorn

Mike (Miguel) Fornieles 

by Thomas Ayers

Bárbaro Garbey 

by Doug Hill

Silvio García 

by Joe Gerard

Mike (Miguel Ángel) González 

by Joe Gerard

Tony González 

by Rory Costello and José Ramirez

Mike (Fermín) Guerra 

by Bill Nowlin

El Duque (Orlando) Hernández and Liván Hernández 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Mike (Ramón) Herrera 

by Bill Nowlin

Pancho Herrera 

by José Ramirez

Omar Linares 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Dolf (Adolfo) Luque 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Bobby Maduro 

by Rory Costello

Connie (Conrado) Marrero 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Armando Marsans 

by Eric Enders

Rogelio Martinez 

by Rory Costello

Román Mejias 

by Ron Briley, Rory Costello, and Bill Nowlin

José de la Caridad Méndez 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Minnie (Orestes) Miñoso 

by Mark Stewart

Willy (Guillermo) Miranda 

by Rory Costello

Julio Moreno 

by Rory Costello

Tony Oliva

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Alejandro Oms 

by John Struth

Camilo Pascual 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Tony (Tani) Pérez 

by Phil Cola

Pedro Ramos

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Cookie (Octavio) Rojas

by Peter M. Gordon

Chico Ruiz 

by Rory Costello

José Tartabull 

by Joanne Hulbert

Tony Taylor 

by Rory Costello and José Ramirez

Luis Tiant Jr. 

by Mark Armour

Luis Tiant Sr. 

by Rory Costello

Cristóbal Torriente 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Zoilo Versalles 

by Peter C. Bjarkman

Suggested Further Readings 

Contributors 

Preface

By Peter C. Bjarkman

This volume, for all its detail, might well bring charges of incompleteness — and justifiably so. The 47 individuals profiled here represent only a small handful of the legions of memorable and sometimes even legendary figures produced over nearly a century and a half by an island nation where the bat-and-ball sport may well have an even stronger claim as a true national passion and pastime than it does in the NFL and NASCAR-crazed United States. For starters, the six-decade-era following a 1959 Castro-led socialist revolution — a period which I have argued repeatedly elsewhere may well represent Cuba’s true baseball Golden Age — is chronicled here with only a half-dozen diamond legends. An overview article summarizing Cuban winter league history (1878-1961) and paralleling the one provided here for the post-1962 league unaffiliated with organized baseball is quite obviously absent. Finally — and most likely of greatest distraction to an exiled Cuban-American community — the major impact of Fidel Castro on the structure and development of post-1962 Cuban baseball is elaborated with its own separate essay, while similar impacts made of earlier 20th-century or late 19th-century founders, entrepreneurs and officials like Abel Linares, Emilio Sabourín, the Guilló brothers, Alejandro (Alex) Pompez, Teodoro Zaldo and American Papa Joe Cambria are not. Perhaps even more notably, Steve Bellán is the only pioneering 19th-century star receiving treatment here. Space limitations played a far greater role than any quirky editorial p rejudices.

These deficiencies have their reasonable explanations of course. Existing Cuban ballplayer biographies authored for the on-line SABR Biography Project overwhelmingly feature athletes with major league or North American Negro League resumes — that is, players mostly from the pre-Castro epoch of winter league professional action and therefore those of greatest interest and familiarity to most SABR researchers and the general population of North American English-speaking baseball fans. Cold War political history and the wide philosophical gulf separating Havana and Washington since the early 1960s have also thrown post-revolution Cuban baseball into the deep shadows for most big league fans — at least until the recent emergence of a wave of high-profile Cuban League escapees who have been impacting major league ballparks during the recent half-dozen-odd seasons. But those more recent high-profile Cuban stars — along with most of the greatest modern-era island Cuban national team heroes who played out their careers at home — are either still active or too recently retired to meet the reigning standard (i.e., a Cooperstown metric demanding five full years of retirement) for inclusion within the existing SABR Baseball Biography Project’s catalogue of ballplayer profiles.

The handful of post-revolution Cuban stars profiled here is also highly selective yet features several figures of considerable importance to the island baseball saga. Omar Linares is widely considered the island’s greatest all-around ballplayer of the communist-socialist baseball era — sometimes dubbed the greatest third sacker on the planet never to play in the big leagues. Aquino Abreu, an obscure figure indeed for almost all North American fans, nonetheless earned a degree of immortality with one of baseball greatest pitching feats — a three-game string of performances back in 1966 that included a 20-inning single-game shutout effort followed by bookend no-hitters that matched the better known landmark outings of big leaguer Johnny Vander Meer. Bárbaro Garbey was only a minor star in Cuba in the late 1970s and also a hardly distinguished big leaguer with the 1984 world champion Detroit Tigers, yet his game-fixing sins in the Cuban League and later arrival on the North American scene with the 1980 Mariel Boatlift launched the modern defector saga and also reveal a good deal of MLB political hypocrisy in the bargain. And the Hernández brothers (El Duque and Liván) first brought the considerable quality of defecting Cuban Leaguers to the attention of main stream big league fans and media with their tandem post-season pitching heroics of the late 1990s. The remainder of the post-1962 Cuban baseball saga is also outlined here with an introductory overview chapter summarizing Castro-era island league and national team play.

While post-1962 Cuban League history seemed to demand further explanation for the average North American reader, it nonetheless appeared to the editors that the pre-Castro winter league was sufficiently well-documented elsewhere not to require similar repetition here. For those wishing to pursue that particular history in detail there are a pair of excellent sources, Roberto González Echevarría’s The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (1999, Oxford) and my own A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006 (2007, 2014, McFarland). The González Echevarría volume is also available to readers in a Spanish version entitled La Gloria de Cuba: Historia del béisbol en la isla (2004, Editorial Colibrí). A comprehensive statistical history of that earlier era is also provided in Jorge S. Figueredo’s Cuban Baseball, A Statistical History, 1878-1961 (2003, McFarland). The impact of Cuba-USA political relations on Cuban baseball history in the modern era (outlined in this book’s Introduction) is elaborated — along with the full behind-the-scenes stories of Cuban ballplayers defections to Major League Baseball — in my recent volume Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Insider Story (2016, Rowman & Littlefield). The latter book, especially, provides extensive bibliographical suggestions for readers desiring further explorations of the Cuban baseball saga.

This project was an obvious group effort and several important acknowledgments are due here. The 22 contributing authors of course stand at the top of that list. My fellow editor Bill Nowlin was the driving force and deft editorial hand that brought the project to final fruition. This is a landmark SABR Digital Library volume for the very fact that it appears in both English and Spanish-language versions. The latter edition would not have been possible without the expert and strenuous translating efforts of Cuban SABR member Reynaldo Cruz (native and current resident of Holguín). I am of course highly pleased to see this project make its way into the ever-expanding SABR Digital Library catalog, since the publication provides a special and fitting cap to my own two full decades of baseball-related travels around the marvelous Cuban island nation. And with that final fact in mind I must pay special tribute here to Cuba’s original SABR member, Ismael Sené in Havana, who for 20 years has been my loyal friend, supporter and incomparable guide to the alternative universe that is Cuban baseball.

June 2016

Introduction:

Baseball and the

Cuba-USA Cold War Détente

By Peter C. Bjarkman

Cuba’s rich baseball history divides neatly and conveniently into two distinct and quite colorful halves, segments that for all their remarkable separateness share a surprising number of thematic similarities. These two irreconcilable epochs are split asunder by one of the most cataclysmic events of twentieth-century political and social history — Fidel Castro’s impactful 1959 socialist-oriented revolution (later a full-fledged communist one) that altered virtually every aspect of modern-era Cuban life and culture. It is no small irony that Washington politics as well as the imperialistic adventurism of North American Organized Baseball played a central role in the early-1960s demise of the professional phase of Cuba’s national sport, the era first informally linked and later fully subsumed under North America’s corporate big leagues. Nor is it surprising that the same two forces are now again, a half-century later, ringing down the curtain on a long-thriving socialist model of Cuban league baseball that followed Castro’s rise to power, sprang forth in obscurity behind the shadows of Cold War politics, and slowly emerged by the late twentieth century as the most vibrant of imaginable alternative international baseball universes.

The first half of the 15-decade-long Cuban baseball saga extols a professional winter league of 80-plus-years duration that early on provided a main stage for Negro League greats forced to ply their trade outside the closed world of white-only Organized Baseball. The final dozen years of that phase one professional-league saga also involved the absorption of the outlaw Cuban circuit under the expanding influence of corporate major-league baseball, which in turn resulted in a rapid and dismaying exclusion of many native Cuban professionals suddenly no longer welcomed on their home turf.¹ The second distinct episode of island baseball history unfolded in the aftermath of Castro’s January 1959 overthrow of US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, sprouted a thriving domestic league that for six full decades and counting provided the country with its first true island-wide national baseball (the pre-Castro professional league had been by and large a four-team Havana-based affair), and fostered powerhouse national squads capable of thorough domination on the international amateur baseball scene.² Both of these once-thriving but time-limited episodes of Cuban national baseball were eventually destined to be brought to their knees by outside forces that found the island nation not once but twice on the wrong side of history. But each was also in part eventually torn asunder by Cuba’s own domestic social ills (pre- and post-Castro) and outmoded political practices existing well outside the smaller world of professional sports.

Cuba’s inaugural baseball episode — the one featuring for much of its lifespan the four celebrated winter-league professional clubs known as Almendares, Habana, Marianao, and Cienfuegos — is characterized above all else by excessive overvaluation, considerable misunderstanding of historical context, and a damning heavy overlay of excessive Golden Age nostalgia.³ Like most reputed Golden Ages the pre- and immediate post-integration island circuit was in fact never what, only decades later, it was in hindsight touted to be. The pre-1960s Cuban winter league was in fact often a rather ragtag affair for much of its eight decades, marred by interrupted or canceled seasons (usually due to political unrest but also sometimes to economic collapse), shoddy record-keeping until well into the twentieth century (paralleling that of North America’s outlaw Blackball leagues), oversized individual ballplayer legends built mostly on hearsay and reconstructionist history, and the damning impact of idealized reports concerning race relations in early twentieth-century Cuba. Earlier nineteenth-century seasons were actually short-stretch tournaments and not true seasons at all, with either four or five clubs playing schedules ranging from a mere five to 15 games. Only twice between 1879 and 1894 did the league champion play more than 20 contests, there were no official individual batting or pitching records for much of the 1880s, and the ongoing independence struggle against Spain meant cancellation of half the planned seasons during the 1890s.

Racial segregation up north meant that few of the better Cubans found spots on the all-white professional rosters of US Organized Baseball. Thus the Cuban League before the mid-1950s produced almost no important stars on the big-league scene of native Cuban origin — near-200-game winner Adolfo Luque (The Pride of Havana) and immediate-post-integration slugger Orestes Miñoso (The Cuban Comet) were the only two noteworthy exceptions. And more significant still, the island was not at all the racial paradise harmoniously mixing white and black athletes as has been so long reported and so often celebrated. Although the Cuban pro winter circuit featured blacks (both foreign and Cuban after 1900), almost all of the island’s top white stars elected to remain in the strictly segregated and highly popular island-wide amateur leagues where salaries were much higher (resulting from plush off-field desk jobs in the businesses of corporate sponsors) and playing conditions much softer (with games being played only on weekends).⁴

Even the more stable post-integration (i.e. major-league integration) mid-twentieth-century professional league was by few if any measures representative of the oft-reported Golden Age so often hailed by Miami-based expatriates desperately clinging to memories of a lost homeland from childhood. Those expatriate voices have perhaps been the loudest in overvaluing the stature of the pre-1960 island winter-league seasons, but they have more recently enjoyed the added chorus of many Blackball historians searching to resurrect forgotten Negro League stars long rejected by the Organized Baseball mainstream white press.⁵ The former are most often guilty of ignoring the fact that almost no top white big-league stars appeared in Cuba except during brief barnstorming junkets; the latter of dismissing the reality that many of the legendary feats of Blackball greats like José Méndez, Cristobal Torriente, and Luis Tiant Sr. (or Americans like Oscar Charleston and Ray Jabao Brown among others) were performed under rather questionable conditions of barnstorming matches against American big leaguers more interested in Havana nightlife than in serious efforts of the diamond.

Perhaps the most overblown among many misunderstandings concerning the moribund Cuban professional circuit involves the details of precisely how it met its final demise. Popular legend relates the agreeably palatable and simplistic account of how Fidel Castro singlehandedly killed off the island national sport by outlawing professional play in all sports with the March 1961 National Decree 936 and the establishment of a new amateur-style league shaped upon a model of socialist (Soviet) sports structure. But the reality is that, just like other moves toward socialism and an alliance with the Soviets, Fidel’s hand was largely forced by unilateral decisions and hostile moves emanating from Washington. (Details are recounted here in the essay Fidel Castro and Baseball as well as in an opening chapter on modern-era Cuban league history.) On the baseball scene, it was Commissioner Ford Frick who in early 1960 crippled the major-league-affiliated Cuban League by banning further participation of North American pros (or any non-Cubans affiliated with big-league clubs).⁶ The excuse was the safety of American players in a city (Havana) embroiled in the somewhat violent atmosphere counterrevolutionary responses to the new Castro government. Only months latter (in July 1960) it was again Frick, under the pressure of Secretary of State Christian Herter and in response to Fidel’s nationalization of several key US-owned industries, who overnight relocated Bobby Maduro’s International League Sugar Kings franchise from Havana to New Jersey. Castro’s revolution unarguably set drastic changes in motion and contributed mightily to growing Cold War hostilities between the two countries. But Washington politicos and Organized Baseball management (including International League President Frank J. Shaughnessy) played equally major roles in sending island baseball spinning in an entirely different direction.

If Cuba’s early-phase baseball history was largely characterized by misunderstanding and overcharged nostalgia, its post-revolution era has been most heavily colored by debilitating mystery and its own brand of distorting mythology. For decades — at least well into the century’s final decade — the Cuban baseball enterprise evolved its cherished national spectacle far off the scope of North American radar. A couple of generations of genuine stars — many of them likely big leaguers — remained unknown north of Miami.⁷ Cuban League baseball of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was as invisible to the North American press and thus to stateside fans as Negro League baseball had been a half-century earlier. The revamped Cuban system, comprised exclusively of native players, produced an endless string of powerhouse national teams that dominated an international scene to a degree that revamped the very notion of dynasty. From 1961 through the end of the century the senior Cuban squad (competing in such events as the International Baseball Federation World Cup and International Cup matches, the Pan American and Central American Games, and after 1992 the Olympics) won individual games at better than a 90 percent clip. But North Americans were simply not interested in international versions of the sport (convinced that the only true baseball was housed in major-league stadiums or perhaps the affiliated stateside minor leagues) and nobody on American soil paid any attention.⁸ For those few who perhaps occasionally did, it was easy to discount the Cuban achievements since they seemingly were earned by seasoned squads of aluminum-bat-wielding veterans playing against hastily assembled squads of university or industrial league youngsters.

Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding touching Cuba’s new baseball era was the prowess and role of the nation’s supreme revolutionary leader himself. Castro overshadowed everything about Cuban baseball for Americans just as he overshadowed everything else attached to the island’s history of late twentieth-century sociopolitical evolution. Although the legend of young Fidel as stellar pitching prospect had been long debunked by several knowledgeable sources (see Fidel Castro and Baseball in this volume), it would continue to thrive in the North American media and popular imagination. It was a story just too good not to repeat, as Bob Costas once reminded me when I chastised him for giving it new life during a 1998 World Series broadcast. It was also a fiction widely laughed at in Cuba itself. The most unfortunate aspect was that this fiction overshadowed the truly central role Fidel actually did play in the evolution of a new brand of Cuban league domestic sport and in the shaping of a powerful international amateur baseball tradition, a tale elaborated in this book’s opening chapter.

Everything began to change — to undergo a seismic shift — in the North American perception of Cuban baseball during the final decade of the past century and the first decade and a half of the new millennium. And the causes of this radical alteration also carried increasingly seismic-level impact on the island itself. First came a small but nonetheless significant leaking of talent in the form of a handful of early defections, mostly enticed by the endless agitations of crusading Miami-based ballplayer agent Joe Cubas. The first departures — those of pitchers René Arocha (1991), Liván Hernández (1994), Ariel Prieto (1995), Osvaldo Fernández (1995), and Rolando Arrojo (1996) — caused significant upheaval in the Cuban Baseball Federation, and a series of resulting crackdowns (intense security-monitoring on national team tours and the suspension of several stars, like Orlando Hernández and Germán Mesa, suspected of possible disloyalty) aimed at stemming the tide only increased a festering player dissatisfaction at home. The first true impact of defectors on the major-league scene came with the 1997 and 1998 postseason heroics performed by half-brothers Liván (Florida Marlins) and El Duque Hernández (New York Yankees).⁹ A pair of 1999 staged exhibitions between the Cubans and American League Baltimore Orioles aimed at reaching long-overdue baseball détente also seemed to backfire on the Cubans in the long run. By demonstrating the strength of their native squad in those historic matches, the Cubans only further whetted major-league appetites for coveted Cuban talent. Changes in heretofore amateur Olympic-style international competitions introduced that same year — the introduction of wooden bats and, more importantly, inclusion of professionals from the big leagues and their affiliates — leveled the playing field and quickly resulted in a diminution of Cuban domination that had rather serious consequences back home.

Still another major corner was turned with the first edition in March 2006 of an MLB-designed World Baseball Classic event that was part of a plan to extend North American big-league ownership of the international big-league scene.¹⁰ Major-league planners of the new event did not get quite what they bargained for in the end as the inaugural WBC was only a marginal commercial and public-relations success. The USA team fared poorly (eliminated before the final round in San Diego) and that certainly didn’t help in selling the event to television audiences in the United States. Most surprising of all, the ultimate finalists represented the two biggest rivals to MLB hegemony — the Cubans and the Japanese leaguers. If there was indeed a Golden Age scenario for Cuban baseball it undeniably finally arrived with a surprising and even quite shocking WBC road trip culminating in an improbable championship showdown with the Asian powerhouse.

But the Cubans also once again paid a heavy residual price for their rather miraculous successes. When the 2006 WBC first-time magic was not immediately reprised with similar triumphs in following years — what followed were disappointing gold medal final-round losses in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the next two IBAF World Cup events, and second-round ousters in WBC II and WBC III — the response on the home front was an increasing demoralization among spoiled fans used to nothing less than uninterrupted victory. Cuban fanatics back home didn’t quite grasp the shifting quality of international competitions and placed the blame on what they perceived as a falloff in homegrown talent. Of course the Cubans were actually better than ever (and so were their now reinforced professional rivals), something MLB’s core of international scouts intuited even if Cuban fans didn’t. Even if Cuban tournament successes were more modest, they still only increased the likelihood of continued raids on homegrown talent. MLB scouts began flocking on the trail of Cuban teams at all international events like Spanish treasure hunters lusting after El Dorado. And their numbers were equaled by opportunistic player agents plotting to entice further player defections, or at least profit whenever they occurred.

A final crucial corner was turned in both Cuba and the US with the 2009 defection of hard-throwing Cuban League southpaw Aroldis Chapman. That landmark event and the mere size of the reported contract when Chapman inked his lucrative pact ($30.25 million for six years, plus a $1.5 million signing bonus) with the National League Cincinnati Reds less than six months after abandoning a B-level national squad in Rotterdam stirred major ripples on the streets of Havana. It also opened the doors on a new willingness of big-league general managers to throw lavish deals at largely untested Cuban prospects who sometimes (as in Chapman’s case) had enjoyed only uneven success in their island domestic league or with the crack national squads during high-profile international events. With Chapman there was suddenly renewed evidence that Cuban stars could not only land bonanza deals but also could make the MLB grade as impact players (when converted to a closer role in Cincinnati, Aroldis quickly became the league’s top closer while also capturing headlines with unprecedented radar-gun speeds).¹¹ Yet there was a further surprise to the Chapman saga that began playing out on the streets of Havana and across the entire Cuban island. Almost overnight it was no longer loyal national team stars but rather the government-labeled traitors donning big-league uniforms who were the true idols of fans in the streets back home. And when it became evident precisely how much money MLB teams would now willingly throw at the likes of Chapman — and soon Céspedes, Puig, Abreu, Castillo, and another untested teenager named Yoan Moncada — hardened criminal elements from Miami and Mexico also rapidly entered the scene, joined forces with often unscrupulous player agents (some with undercover bird dogs working for them on the island) and became central to increased unsavory human trafficking activities aimed at exploiting the Cuban talent pipeline.

For decades the top Cuban stars with only a small handful of exceptions had stayed at home. Why were they now suddenly departing in ever greater numbers and why would the turncoats soon represent not only a steady stream but within a half-dozen years a virtual floodtide? The reversals actually began with the changes in international baseball in the early 2000s, changes that worked to strip Cuba of its half-century kingpin position while at the same time actually strengthening island talent by drastically upgrading competition and the quality of international tournament events. With major- and minor-league pros now on the scene, the Cuban juggernaut no longer dominated every event and as a consequence the spoiled Cuban fan base heretofore accustomed to relentless blowout victories became quickly disenchanted. A perhaps inevitable conclusion for most boosters in Havana was that the new generation of players was not now of the same quality as stars of the pre-1999 aluminum-bat era, although quite the reverse was actually the case.

As the domestic island economy again sagged in the early 2000s and the embargo remained unbroken, playing conditions in Cuba worsened as well, with worn-out ballparks, broken scoreboards and stadium lighting, shoddy game equipment (mostly from Mexico and homeland production), and limited resources to fund first-class travel for either national teams or domestic-league squads. Tightened security by Cuban officials aimed at blocking defections only stirred more resentment among athletes on the island. The revolution seemingly had stagnated, Fidel was no longer on the scene after 2006 to stem the tide or disenchantment as primary cheerleader for the system, and increasing numbers of Cuban ballplayers (like increasing numbers of Cuban citizens in general) saw little future at home. As more players left, the league evidently weakened to the point where top pitchers and sluggers had little left to prove in local ballparks. When it came to headlining stars, six of eight position players in the starting lineup of the 2013 WBC squad that was showcased in Tokyo (perhaps the best Cuban national team lineup ever) were gone only six months later. The player drain peaked between summer 2014 and December 2015, with more than 150 departures; and although the largest number among the escapees likely had no prospects in US Organized Baseball, several dozen would soon be plying their trade on Mexican League diamonds.

MLB pillaging of the Cuban League did not present an entirely new story. Its roots stretch back to the beginning of the twentieth century and replay an altogether familiar saga at the heart of the ongoing MLB expansion adventure. The business of North American big-league baseball has always been an instrument for spreading the American political message, the US foreign policy agenda of military-based imperialism, American values of individual initiative and free-market enterprise, and the structures of an American capitalist economic system. Nowhere is this history of American baseball’s international adventurism for the purpose of its own corporate profits and as an effective instrument for spreading American influence around the globe better and more accurately elaborated that in Robert Elias’s valuable 2010 book The Empire Strikes Out. But more central still, big-league owners have never tolerated competition either at home or abroad. At midcentury the Negro Leagues were driven out of business once societal changes made their players available for major-league ballclubs. Jorge Pasquel’s expanding Mexican League was a threat not to be tolerated after the dust cleared from World War II. The coming of television and the associated American and National League expansions largely drove a once-thriving system of minor leagues and other forms of local baseball from the scene in the late 1950s and early ’60s. A system of major-league academies largely wiped out thriving local baseball leagues in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela in the final decades of the twentieth century and a major-league-sponsored Arizona Fall League during the same era gutted Caribbean winter leagues beyond recognition. More recently creation of an MLB World Baseball Classic (based on the model of a wildly successful soccer World Cup event) can be taken not as an effort at true internationalizing of the sport but rather as a thinly-veiled attempt to incorporate all foreign leagues under MLB control and ownership.¹²

To what degree are both Washington policy and MLB policy directly responsible for the current difficulties facing baseball’s future in Cuba? This is not a question with a short and lucid answer and I have recently devoted an entire book (Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story) to exploring the complex underlying issues, the sometimes distorted and rarely fully elaborated background history, and the best- and worse-case scenarios looming on the horizon. But there are points to be made here. What has resulted in the past half-dozen years is a full-blown debacle involving the most unsavory tales of human trafficking, including underhanded ballplayer enticement by profiteering agents, plus elaborate ballplayer recruitment efforts aimed as much at dismantling a rival political system as at shoring up big-league rosters or at providing opportunities for Cuban athletes to seize the American Dream. And on these fronts both Washington politicos and MLB officials have anything but clean hands. Washington’s outdated stance on Cuban immigration has continued to cause a surge in illegal immigration ever since the Obama policy changes on détente with the Castro government were first announced in December 2014. And while there is no evidence of MLB officials actually orchestrating illegal emigration of ballplayers, there is nonetheless no shortage of major-league clubs all too willing to scoop up free-agent exiled Cuban players showcased by agents sanctioned by the MLBPA (the league’s ballplayer union) and directly involved in the trafficking operations. Recent federal human trafficking charges levied in Miami courts against former agents of Yoenis Céspedes, Leonys Martin, and José Abreu have made the latter fact abundantly clear.

Two recent developments which on the surface promised some sort of resolution to the growing problems would in fact in the end only ramp up the level of misperception and false expectation. The first was the announcement by INDER (Cuban sports ministry) officials in September 2013 that they would begin offering some individual players to foreign leagues on a temporary loan basis. An immediate assumption spread throughout the US press and first reported on NPR was that this meant direct dealings with MLB and a long-awaited flood of top Cuban Leaguers into the majors and minors, but it was actually a Japanese League connection that the Cuban officials had foremost in mind. By releasing a handful of veterans to Nippon League teams under agreements that both allowed the Cuban athletes to bring their salaries home and also to return for winter action in the island domestic league was an arrangement that allowed the Cuban Federation to maintain at least partial control over its stars. No such agreement with MLB clubs was possible since big-league contracts would not permit high-paid athletes to return home for an added 90-100 offseason games, and the US Treasury Department laws still in effect do not permit Cubans to return salaries to their embargoed homeland. The Japanese plan also had preciously little impacted on stemming defections since younger players saw little chance of enjoying the rare opportunities being added out to a few loyalist veterans like Freddie Cepeda, Alfredo Despaigne, and Yulieski Gourriel (the first wave of stars in the Japanese exchange).

A second development was the Obama détente announcement in December 2014 that was at first greeted with excessive optimism and considerable hoopla by a North American press corps seeing matters only from a US-centric perspective. There were front-page stories hailing an immediate flood of suddenly legal America tourism to the communist island and a seemingly obvious windfall of opportunities for large-scale American corporate investment. There was almost no appreciation for the fact that the Cuban government — while obviously welcoming a warming atmosphere that might bring at least some form of economic relief to a sagging economy at home — would not likely overnight throw in the towel on the revolution’s commitment to keeping full control of its political and social destiny by avoiding full-fledged American cultural and economic invasion. Equally out of touch with the Cuban realities, new Commissioner Rob Manfred spoke confidently of potential MLB academies on the island and a series of immediate spring training visits. (Cuba is a great market for us … Manfred intoned.) But nothing would happen rapidly on either front. Nearly two years later the Helms-Burton embargo laws remain in place, travel for tourism is no closer to being a reality, and legal transfer of Cuban players to the majors still seems far down the road. MLB would indeed send a delegation to hold clinics and promote closer ties in late 2015, but the event (involving several prominent earlier defectors) was carefully controlled by the Cubans. Eventually Obama would make a historic visit and attend a single exhibition involving the Tampa Bay Rays. But a March 2016 proposal floated in the US press by MLB officials and involving plans to skirt OFAC embargo restrictions and legally sign players directly in Cuba did not seem to be one the Cuban officials would ever buy into.¹³

The future for Cuba is not at all clear, and inevitable (most likely rather drastic) change can be expected to be painfully slow. This is equally as true about baseball — maybe more so — as it is about other aspects of the new emerging Cuba-USA détente and the changing scene surrounding long-contentious USA-Cuba relations. A Japanese-style posting system (one putting Cuban players on formal contract and requiring a certain period of service before eligibility for free agency) is a possibility but there has so far been no word of any such emerging plan from the Cubans. In apparent desperation, the Cuban Federation would begin player loans and even schedule a summer 2016 exhibition series with the low-level independent CanAm League, headquartered in Quebec — hardly a promising solution to improving competition and stemming dissatisfaction at home. My visit to the island in October 2015 seemed to reveal that the Cuban baseball officials indeed had no concept at this point of how to proceed in the face of a changing landscape and of what they might be willing to place on the table in negotiations with MLB. This was made clear to me by very reliable contacts fostered over the years within the Cuban baseball hierarchy and the Cuban sporting press.

This is clearly an evolving story, and new wrinkles in the saga may well appear by the time this chapter is in the reader’s hands. One important signal of the sagging fortunes was already sent by the recent surprise departure of the Gourriel brothers — longtime national team mainstay Yulieski and his highly touted young brother Lourdes Jr. (Yunito) — during the February 2016 Caribbean Series matches in Santo Domingo. The defection of the Gourriels sent further shockwaves across the island and suggested, if nothing else, that there was no immediate deal in sight between MLB and the Cuban authorities. Long foremost among Cuba’s baseball royalty (father Lourdes was a major star of the previous generation), the Gourriel family (including the eldest, outfielder Yunieski, also a mainstay with Havana Industriales) had remained dedicated to the system even when so many other had left. Yulieski — a top prospect for big-league scouts ever since the first World Baseball Classic — had repeatedly been pressed about defection in interviews with foreign journalists and had always claimed that he would love to play with his favorites, the New York Yankees. But Yulieski’s guarded message was always that he would only do so if he could leave his country legally and with the approval of his government. That he would flee a national team on the road was only one more piece of evidence that no deal was on the horizon. Had there been some actual form of détente with MLB looming in the near future, Yulieski and his top promising younger brother would almost certainly have waited. The Gourriel family with their close ties to the highest circles in the Cuban government certainly would have known of any such promised imminent developments.

Both of Cuba’s two previous baseball epochs began against the backdrops of violent revolution and the optimism of a promising new social order — the first exploded out of a late-nineteenth-century rebellion against Spanish colonialism and the second was launched with the mid-twentieth-century overthrow of a ruthless Batista dictatorship propped up by American imperialism. The Fidel Castro government was in the end never toppled despite the dreams of several generations of Miami exiles and the strenuous embargo efforts of Washington politicians. As Cuba’s once promising communist experiment has finally begun to crumple and recede in the early decades of a new century, we now also now find a new Cuban baseball universe on the horizon. But this time around there remains none of the optimism that infused either of the island nation’s two earlier thriving baseball enterprises. For the Cubans, if the future remains murky, it also remains unsettling at the best and bleak at the worst. The bat-and-ball sport’s last notable, admirable, and highly successful independent universe existing outside the control of the corporate business of Major League Baseball is now finally tottering of the eve of destruction.

Print Sources

Bjarkman, Peter C. Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story (Lanham, Maryland, and London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016).

Bjarkman, Peter C. A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006 (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company Publishers, 2007 and 2014).

Elias, Robert. The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (New York and London: New Press, 2010).

González Echevarría, Roberto. The Pride of Havana — A History of Cuban Baseball (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1999).

González Echevarría, Roberto. La Gloria de Cuba: Historía del béisbol en la isla (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2004).

Online Sources

Bjarkman, Peter C. U.S.-Cuba Thaw Ss Not So Hot for MLB in The Daily Beast, February 19, 2015.

Bjarkman, Peter C. Fidel Castro and Baseball, in the SABR Baseball Biography Project (August 2013).

Strauss, Ben. Major League Baseball to Let Cuban Players Sign Directly With Teams, New York Times, March 2, 2016.

Notes

1 When the big-league warfare with Jorge Pasquel’s rebel Mexican League concluded in the late 1940s, major-league officials were finally able to persuade formerly independent Cuban League owners to bring their operations under the umbrella of Organized Baseball as a formal member of the National Association-governed body of minor-league circuits. This not only meant that some of the more prominent native Cuban stars who were Mexican League regulars and thus still ostracized by Commissioner Happy Chandler’s big-league ban (Tomás de la Cruz, Bobby Estalella, Ramón Bragaña, Lázaro Sálazar, and others) were forced for a season (1947-48) into an ill-fated, short-lived rival outlaw league operating in recently abandoned La Tropical Stadium; it also resulted in limited slots for local Cubans on the four rosters in the revamped sanctioned league now playing in spanking new Cerro Stadium. The pact with major-league baseball had a major negative impact for both local athletes and club owners, as rules now established by Organized Baseball controlled the makeup of team rosters; only players with limited or no major-league experience were now eligible in Cuba, winning ballgames suddenly took a back seat to player development, and the players assigned were increasingly lower-level North American minor leaguers. The changes thus meant that many veterans — even those not banned by Chandler — were forced to seek their winter employment in a newly thriving Venezuelan circuit. These developments are discussed briefly in the chapter here on Tomás de la Cruz.

2 The history of the latter Cuban League (often called amateur, but professional after 1999 by any standard other than capitalist ownership and mega-sized free-enterprise player salaries) is profiled in the initial chapter of this volume. Despite the obvious caveats about the absence of top-level professional competition, the Cuban senior national team was so dominant for decades that over one stretch (1987-1997) it won 159 straight individual tournament games and across a full half-century (stretching from the 1961 Amateur World Series through the 2009 second edition of the MLB World Baseball Classic) never finished a major international event (50 of them in total) any lower than second place in the standings. It is likely impossible to find any comparable long-range successes among other known amateur or professional sports teams.

3 The main contributor to notions of a Cuban baseball Golden Age in the 1930s, 1940s (especially), and 1950s has been Roberto González Echevarría with his scholarly tome The Pride of Havana and its later Spanish-language reprise La Gloria de Cuba. An extensive counterargument placing Cuba’s true baseball apogee is contained in my own A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006. Since the original publication of the later volume a decade ago, the superiority of more contemporary Cuban players has been further underscored by successes in the three editions of the MLB World Baseball Classic and the headlining impacts of such recent Cuban League defectors as José Abreu, Yoenis Céspedes, Yasiel Puig, Aroldis Chapman, Yasmani Tómas, and most recently 2016 NL rookie-of-the-year candidate Aledmys Diaz.

4 The best example here is Conrado Marrero (see his biography in this volume) who was the widely acknowledged best pitcher on the island in the late 1930s and early 1940s and didn’t opt to turn professional until suspended (for attempting to pitch for two different clubs at the same time) by the popular Amateur Athletic Union league when already in his 30s.

5 The issue of distortions of performances by early Cuban stars against touring white major leaguers is taken up in the biographies here for José Méndez and Cristóbal Torriente, whose perhaps otherwise legitimate Cooperstown enshrinements by a special Blackball committee in 2008 were based heavily of legendary achievements in barnstorming matches of questionable validity. One of the most egregious examples of a noted Negro Leagues historian misappropriating Cuban League history is found when Donn Rogosin writes (in Invisible Men) that since the great white players, the Ty Cobbs and Babe Ruths, participated in the Cuban Leagues, a Negro leaguer knew after a few Cuban seasons whether or not he was a player of major league caliber (156). Of course Ruth and Cobb and Mathewson and a few other early twentieth-century greats appeared only a handful times and only in exhibition games on Cuban soil. When big leaguers became a more regular presence on Cuban League rosters at midcentury, the biggest names and most notable achievers were Max Lanier, Forrest Spook Jacobs, Dick Sisler, and Rocky Nelson — big leaguers, yes, but hardly front-line stars.

6 To be precise here, Frick did not in the end officially announce his decree banning Americans and perhaps also Cuban and other Latin American major and minor leaguers from playing in Cuba; facing a shortfall of cash to pay the Americans and correctly assuming, on good intelligence, that major-league officials were about to pull the plug, the league itself announced it would not import Americans for the 1960-61 season (which proved to be the last in league history). But a number of Cuban big leaguers (including Camilo Pascual, Pedro Ramos, Cookie Rojas, José Azcue, Leo Cardenas, Román Mejias, Luis Tiant Jr., and several others) did play a final season in their homeland.

7 There were occasional reports leaking out about the beauties and strengths of the Cuban circuit, such as an article by Ron Fimrite in Sports Illustrated (In Cuba It’s Viva El Grand Old Game, June 6, 1977) and a chapter in Tom Boswell’s 1987 book How Life Imitates the World Series (How Baseball Helps the Harvest or What the Bay of Pigs Did to the Bigs) that added to the mysterious allure of the distant and shrouded league.

8 One brief exception came with the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis, but that was a blip and not a loud ping on the radar, especially because the Americans didn’t win. A gold medal in the finals at Indianapolis (paced by sensational 19-year-old youngster Omar Linares) launched an incredible string of successes for the Cubans that lasted a dozen years (until the 1997 Intercontinental Games gold-medal loss to Japan in Barcelona) and included 159 consecutive games won.

9 The sagas of these early player defections are the subject of my recently released book Cuba’s Baseball Defectors: The Inside Story, as well as the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Brothers in Exile (2014) and the book The Duke of Havana, co-written in 2001 by Steve Fainaru and Ray Sánchez.

10 A detailed treatise on major-league baseball’s century-long efforts at international baseball imperialism culminating in an effort to construct a soccer-style world cup largely for purposes of expanding major-league-marketed efforts and player recruitment is artfully laid out in Robert Elias’s The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (2010).

11 Chapman had displayed great promise as a 19-year-old youngster at the 2007 Taiwan World Cup, but he had pitched himself off the 2008 Olympic squad with displays of wildness in team tryouts and had also blown up in his one important start against the Japanese in San Diego during the 2009 World Baseball Classic. The second Cuban Leaguer (after early-2000s phenom Maels Rodríguez) to top 100 mph on the JUGS gun in domestic play, he only once paced the Cuban circuit in strikeouts, owned a career mark of only 24-21 (3.71 ERA) with a solid Holguín team, and was never considered a top league or national team ace. His attractiveness to big-league clubs was the bionic arm and 100-plus fastball, and the size of his contract launched a new era of speculation among big-league fans about hidden Cuban stars.

12 Robert Elias (The Empire Strikes Out, 277) best characterizes the MLB motives with the World Baseball Classic when he writes: MLB’s media campaign [in stadiums during the 2006 and 2009 WBC games] focused entirely on individual stars. In every venue, ‘trailblazer’ films were played on the electronic scoreboards, celebrating past major leaguers from each nation and nationality. John Kelly called this the ‘Jackie Robinsonization of international baseball.’ … Because foreign ballplayers had no chance to beat American baseball champions [i.e., there is no true World Series pitting a Japanese League or Cuban League champion against the MLB champion] they instead had to leave home to try to join them. That’s what MLB sought and celebrated; the individual migration of trailblazers and their successors in a baseball diaspora.

13 The plan, reported in the New York Times (March 2, 2016) by Ben Strauss, involved MLB orchestrating a special group of Cuban entrepreneurs on the island who would negotiate contracts with Cuban players and receive the MLB payoffs, thus avoiding US Treasury Department restrictions on any dollars transferred to the still embargoed Cuban government. This, of course, was the furthest thing imaginable from any arrangement likely to be acceptable to the Cuban sports ministry and Cuban Baseball Commission, both government entities.

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Author Peter Bjarkman with recent Cuban defector Yulieski Gourriel (C) and Cuban Sports Ministry VP Tony Castro (R) in Havana

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Author Peter Bjarkman with future big leaguer José Abreu in Latin American Stadium

THE CUBAN LEAGUE (Post 1962)

By Peter C. Bjarkman

The popular national sport of baseball maintained and even tightened its hold on the island nation of Cuba in the aftermath of the 1959 socialist revolution. In fact the national game actually expanded in popularity and elevated in talent level during several decades immediately after Fidel Castro’s midcentury rise to power. Once the four-team professional winter league loosely affiliated with North American major-league baseball was shut down after the 1961 season, the door was finally thrown open for establishing a truly island-wide baseball circuit that would feature homegrown talent rather than imported foreign professionals. And this newly revised version of Cuban League baseball would also launch a five-decade domination of international tournament competitions that now stands as the centerpiece of nearly a century and a half of island baseball history. With its novel brand of post-revolutionary amateur baseball, Cuba would also develop throughout the second half of the twentieth century a genuine alternative universe to better publicized professional circuits represented by the North American and Japanese professiona l leagues.

The political estrangement between Cuba and the United States after 1962 not only largely ended the earlier moderate flow of Cuban ballplayers to North American major- and minor-league teams but also cast an aura of mystery over baseball circumstances on the island. North American fans have known precious little over the past five full decades about Cuban baseball developments. Island league stars have thus played in the same virtual obscurity as did the North American Negro Leaguers of the first half of the twentieth century. One obvious result of this isolation from the mainstream North American sporting press is an unfortunate persistence of several widespread myths concerning Cuba’s post-revolutionary baseball era. First and most damaging has been a notion that the level of Cuban baseball diminished dramatically once the professional winter league was scrapped for a new form of amateur diamond competition. A related and equally false notion is one suggesting that inferior amateur-level play for the first time replaced superior professional competitions as the central focus of the Cuban national sport.¹

Anyone maintaining this latter view overlooks an established historical fact that widespread pre-1950 amateur leagues across the island drew far more interest and produced more native island talent than did the Havana-based pro circuit of the pre-Castro era. The Cuban winter league of the earlier epoch attracted most of its star players from the ranks of imported North American Negro Leaguers, drew a tiny fan following among Cubans living outside the capital city, and produced only a tiny handful of native big leaguers boasting true all-star stature — namely Adolfo Luque (1920s), Orestes Miñoso (1950s), and Camilo Pascual (1960s). It is also indisputable that a half-dozen or more Cuban Leaguers who abandoned the island during the late 1990s and early 2000s for big-league careers in the United States have of late far outstripped the achievements of the small cadre of pre-revolution Cuban major leaguers. Among the new generation of superior Cuban big leaguers originally trained in the post-1962 Cuban circuit we find sluggers Kendrys Morales, José Abreu, Yasiel Puig, and Yoenis Céspedes; flashy infielders Alexei Ramírez, Yunel Escobar, and Adeiny Hechavarría; frontline pitchers Orlando El Duque Hernández, José Contreras, Liván Hernández, and fastball phenom Aroldis Chapman. Chapman (recipient of an eye-popping $30 million contract from the Cincinnati Reds in 2010) would launch a heavy recruitment of native Cuban stars (some smuggled off the island by covert human-trafficking operations) that in the second decade of the new millennium produced megadeals for the likes of Céspedes, Puig, Abreu, outfielder Yasmani Tómas, Rusney Castillo, and touted Boston Red Sox minor-league prospect Yoan Moncada.²

The current Cuban League — known as the Cuban National Series — opened its historic 50th season with the first pitch tossed in November 2010. This yearly National Series competition slowly evolved through several distinct manifestations over five-plus decades and has lately undergone further drastic alteration in the past half-dozen winters. While geographically based league teams have always represented provinces (states) or groups of provinces, these league clubs have often changed names from year to year and have only in recent seasons been consistently labeled for a home-base province, with a team nickname attached (e.g., Cienfuegos Elephants, Villa Clara Orangemen, Camagüey Potters). Recent league structure involved 14 provincial teams and two added ballclubs (the Industriales Blue Lions and Metropolitanos Warriors) representing the capital city of Havana.³ There have also been several manifestations along the way of a second (often shorter) Cuban League season. A Selective Series (usually with the 14 provincial clubs combined into eight regional all-star squads) operated in late spring and summer between 1975 and 1995. And an even shorter four- or five-team Super League was staged in June during four early years of the new millennium (2002-2005). Before the idea of the additional Selective Series competition was conceived, a single Series of the Ten Million was staged in the early summer of 1970 with six clubs engaged in a marathon 89-game slate. The name for the three-month event was drawn from President Castro’s proclaimed goal of reaching 10 million tons in that year’s sugar-cane harvest, and the series was thus promoted as special entertainment for sugar-industry field laborers.

The Selective Series season played from the mid-’70s to mid-’90s was never considered a true league championship by most island fanatics. It did, however, contribute several highlight moments of Cuban League history and on several occasions provided the longest stretch of the year’s domestic baseball action. During its first nine campaigns the Selective Series was actually longer than the National Series: first 54 games compared with 38 (1975-1977) and then 60 games compared with 51 (1978-1983). Across a final dozen episodes the Selective Series season dipped to 43 contests per team (1984-1985), ballooned out to 60 games (1986-1992), then shrank again to 45 (1993-1995). It was during this competition in 1980 that Cuba celebrated its first .400-plus hitter (Héctor Olivera, Las Villa, .459 — father of the future defector and big leaguer of the same name); Omar Linares did not reach that plateau in the National Series until five years later. It was also in the Selective Series that Orestes Kindelán produced the first 30-plus home-run total (30 in only 63 games), with Alexei Bell not reaching that same milestone in the National Series until as late as 2008 (31 in 90 games). The Selective Series also provided seven of the island’s 51 rare no-hit, no-run pitching performances.

The half-dozen even shorter second seasons played during the past several decades — after the Selective Series tradition was finally scrapped — proved even less successful and therefore less sustainable. Two Revolutionary Cup campaigns in the 1990s (both won by Santiago de Cuba under manager Higinio Vélez) were memorable for a handful of individual record-setting performances and little else. Both 30-game events produced .450-plus batsmen (Yobal Dueñas, 1996, and Javier Méndez, 1997) and Santiago’s Ormari Romero claimed 14 pitching victories without defeat across the same stretch. The four-year Super League experiment was an even larger failure although it did witness a playoff no-hitter tossed for Centrales by Maels Rodríguez. The idea of having provincial teams combined into a smaller number of regional squads never gained much traction with island fans. Super League games also fell during the hottest (and wettest) part of the year, and most games staged in the month of June were played to empty stadiums and disappointingly sparse television viewership.

Failure of these experimental extra seasons to garner any true fan enthusiasm is largely explained by a unique feature of island baseball that is also the basic strength of Cuban League structure. Since league teams are government properties overseen by a national sports ministry (INDER, National Institute of Sports, Education and Recreation) — not corporate businesses run for profit — there is no trading or transferring of Cuban League players, with all athletes serving on teams representing their own native province.⁴ Like all Cuban athletes, ballplayers rise through the ranks of regional sports academies, performing for their neighborhoods on various age-group youth clubs and eventually graduating to Developmental League (the Cuban minors) and National Series teams. With the rarest of exceptions, a Cuban League star spends his entire playing career with a single local ballclub. The huge plus sides of this unique system are both the deep-seated loyalties between fans and players and the rabid fanaticism attached to local clubs that truly do represent a fixed geographical locale. (A big-league equivalent would be a Boston Red Sox club employing only players raised and trained in the New England region.) The downside, of course, is that the Cuban League — like the majors in the era before free agency — is not exceptionally well balanced. Larger provinces enjoy heftier talent supplies and thus usually better teams; Havana and Santiago teams (along with occasional inroads by Pinar del Río and Villa Clara) have dominated championship play throughout league history.

Because of such hometown fan loyalties and attachments to local stars, shorter seasons with fewer teams have failed to garner support, if only because the teams playing are not the usual fan favorites. Seeing the local heroes attired in strangely colored uniforms and competing for strangely named squads has little appeal for rooters attached by birthright and home base to Industriales, Pinar del Río, or Sancti Spíritus. What might Boston Red Sox fans make of any two- or three-month season featuring Sox players joining forces with Yankees, Mets, and Phillies stars on a team now relabeled as the Eastern Seaboard Lions? Fanaticism based on long tradition — and in Cuba also on the concept of local neighborhood stars — disappears in a league featuring several months of what are widely perceived as mere all-star exhibition contests.

National Series play was inaugurated in mid-January of 1962 and involved only a handful of teams during its earliest campaigns. Players were drawn from all areas of the island, but the initial clubs known as Occidentales, Azucareros, Orientales, and Habana played the bulk of their first-season 27-game schedule in Havana’s spacious Cerro Stadium (home of the pro winter circuit in the 1950s, rechristened as Latin American Stadium in 1971, and still in use today). The concept initially mandated by the new Castro government was to replace commercial baseball with dedicated amateur play, designed to promote public health rather than financial profit (for either athletes or franchise owners) and thus more in line with a socialist spirit of government at the heart of a revamped societal system. In early seasons the players were indeed true amateurs, and the lower level of early league play reflected that fact. The first few seasons were short, and ballplaying was not yet a full-time occupation for league athletes, who also maintained other professional occupations in the newly minted socialist society.

The historic initial season staged in the spring of 1962 lasted for little more than a full month and followed by less than nine months a clandestine US-backed invasion attempt at the Bay of Pigs. A future league ballpark in the city of Matanzas (Victory at Girón Stadium) would eventually carry the name of the landmark 1961 invasion that solidified the Fidel Castro-led revolutionary government. An opening set of league games was celebrated in Cerro Stadium before 25,000 fans on Sunday, January 14, 1962. President Castro provided a lengthy speech and then stepped to the plate in his traditional military garb to knock out a staged ceremonial first hit against Azucareros starter Jorge Santín. When the actual ballplayers took the field, Azucareros blanked Orientales 6-0 behind three-hit pitching from Santín. In an 11-inning nightcap, Occidentales edged Habana 3-1 with ace Manuel Hernández striking out 17 enemy batters.⁵ A widely reprinted photograph of President Castro stroking the season’s first base hit delivered by Azucareros pitcher Modesto Verdura (not Santín) actually occurred in the same park on Opening Day of National Series II later in the same calendar year.

Four clubs participated in the initial monthlong season, one managed by former big leaguer Fermín Guerra (Occidentales) and a second (Azucareros) directed by the former skipper of the minor-league Cuban Sugar Kings, Tony Castaño. Occidentales under Guerra captured the first short-season title with the circuit’s only winning