The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [22]
The only fact in the Abner Doubleday story that seems to be true is the date: 1839. Somewhere around then these games had evolved into something recognizable as baseball. It was originally a sport for city people, and in 1845 a Manhattan book dealer, Alexander Cartwright, wrote a rule book for his local club, the Knickerbockers, who would later change their name to the Yankees. Cartwright’s rules became the rules of baseball, and he traveled around the country establishing baseball clubs in various cities. By 1857 there were sixteen clubs in New York City alone. The Civil War helped spread the sport throughout the United States. But it was sugar—that is, American sugar executives—who brought it to the Caribbean during the Dance of the Millions.
The American presence in Cuba predates baseball and even sugar interests. When America was a British colony, there was a considerable British presence in Cuba. In 1762 the British even took over Havana for several months. While the Dominican Republic seemed a distant, unknown place to Americans, Cuba was regarded as nearby and familiar. In 1817, when the Spanish declared Cuban ports open to international trade, American business stepped in. Cubans became familiar with Americans and American culture. American companies won contracts for development, especially in Havana, where both the gas street lighting and the granite cobblestone pavement were American. There were American consulates throughout the island.
And so by the 1860s, when baseball was becoming established as the American national pastime, the Cubans were learning about it and started playing it. The Spanish may have inadvertently tied the independence movement to baseball in a self-fulfilling prophecy when in 1868, at the start of the Ten Years’ War, they banned the game, suspecting that it was somehow a pro-independence conspiracy. There was no clear tie, at least until the ban, but affluent young men were becoming independentistas , and they were also taking up baseball, which the Spanish saw as an incursion by Americans and also an excuse for the rebels to arm themselves with wooden clubs.
The failed 1868 -1878 war cemented Cubans to the American sport not only because the Spanish had made the accusation but because pro-independence Cubans, including José Martí, fled to the United States, where baseball was becoming a craze. The Cubans learned the game and even organized Cuban and Cuba-versus-U.S. games. Martí himself was seen at a Key West game in which the Cubans beat the Americans. Martí, always aware that after the Spanish were defeated the Americans would be the next problem, reportedly claimed the victory was a good omen for the cause of independence.
Cuban baseball, like American baseball, has a mythical first game. In Matanzas in 1866 according to one story, the crew of an American ship decided to teach the game to the Cuban dockworkers who were loading sugar. In another version an American ship tied up for repairs and taught the men fixing their ship. In some of the versions the Americans were trying to sell the Cubans baseball equipment. But there is also another story that says the first game was not even in Matanzas but in Havana, from where two affluent young Habaneros named Ernesto and Nemesio Guillot had been sent off to Spring Hill College, a prep school in Mobile, Alabama. They came home in 1864 with bats, balls, and Cartwright’s rule book and trained a team in the affluent Vedado section of Havana, making this neighborhood, according to some baseball historians such as Peter Bjarkman, the true birthplace of Cuban baseball—not the always