Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [89]
If the Cuban people we spoke with felt oppressed under Castro, they certainly hid it well. Fidel remains a hero to members of the older generation, who remember how little they had under Batista. They reminded us that though Cuba is a poor country, it boasts a 96 percent literacy rate, the second highest in the world. Every Cuban attends school, and most graduate from college. We did meet a few young dissidents, but even they credited Castro with improving conditions for the lower classes. However, they felt Cuba had stagnated under his recent leadership and that the island would never assume a place in a modern world economy until after Castro’s demise.
Speaking to any other naysayers would have required us to visit the prisons where Castro detains many political dissenters. Neither I nor any of my teammates ever met with the premier during my trips to Cuba, but we once caught a glimpse of Fidel rolling by in a town car in the middle of a two-block-long motorcade. I remember thinking, This is one funny kind of socialism this revolutionary practices. He gets to ride in stretch limos while many of his people can barely afford to buy a decent pair of shoes.
I had heard stories about Castro’s pitching prowess, how he was good enough as a young college player to compete in the major leagues. Supposedly the Washington Senators almost signed him just before the revolution broke out. The old-timers who saw him play say the stories are apocryphal. Castro possessed enormous physical strength, and he apparently threw the ball harder than most Cuban pitchers of his day. Power, though, is apparently all he had. The word is Fidel’s fastball moved little, and he could not throw a decent curve or any other breaking pitch. He did not start for any of the better Cuban teams, and no one but the most ardent Castro supporter thought he had enough talent to play in even the lowest rung of the American minor leagues.
Castro regards himself as the number one baseball fan on his island, and he encourages Cubans to participate in sports even if he cannot supply enough money to fund many organized athletic programs. Adults and children play catch on nearly every street corner. We passed one avenue and saw a group of men weaving in and around three lanes of traffic trying to retrieve a baseball. They had been fielding grounders in the center of a busy town square.
Just outside of the city, I watched a coach work in a deserted lot with a squad of talented teenage players. The second and short combination impressed me most. The coach introduced them, a pair of brothers who each could afford only one baseball shoe. The second baseman wore his cleat on his left foot; the shortstop’s cleat covered his right. This allowed both of them to push off toward the middle of the diamond on the double play, which they turned as smoothly as the most accomplished major leaguers. In the United States, their skills would earn them a full ride to any college with a first-rate baseball program—provided someone first bought each of them a complete pair of shoes.
Diana and I stayed at a hotel near Vinales. An American camera crew followed us around while filming a documentary on Cuban baseball. One evening the crew’s sound man, a surfer dude type who resembled Brad Pitt, invited us to join him and his compadres for a party at the home of an elderly woman. She had a reputation as a babalao, a priestess of Santería, the Afro-Cuban religion.
Her house sat behind the main drag in Vinales. Imagine driving through a small, modern American city. You pass a post office, a bank, a few stores, and city hall. It is midnight, and no one walks the avenue. The buildings skulk just beyond the reach of the streetlights. You park at the end of the block across the