Cuba's All-Stars

Natural History, April, 1999 by Tom Miller

No one can accurately pinpoint the day in the nineteenth century when the first Cuban hit a ball and ran toward first base. Sons of the well-to-do who went to college in the States (a tradition until the late 1950s) undoubtedly brought the game back with them. Havana-born Esteban Bellan, who played on Fordham University's baseball team in 1870-71 and then professionally for a few seasons, is generally credited with introducing the game to Cuba, although one account has a U.S.-schooled Cuban carrying it home in the 1860s.

It's also likely that Cuban workers in Florida cigar factories came back with the game. And merchant marines dropping off American goods and picking up Cuban sugar probably played ball in front of--and with--Cuban dockworkers and others. One theory has it that during the U.S. Civil War, ships unable to dock at Southern ports because of the Northern blockade continued south until they dropped anchor in Havana and that there, to entertain themselves, the crews played baseball. Whatever its passage to the island, the game was instantly popular wherever there was space for a field on the edge of town. The first written account shows Havana humiliating Matanzas 51 to 9 on December 27, 1874.

Cubans returning home from the States between 1868 and 1898, during the various wars of independence from Spain, saw baseball as a "paradigm of progress," suggests University of North Carolina history professor Louis A. Perez Jr. in On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, add Culture, to be published this coming fall. "Baseball," he writes, "promised the possibility of civilization: harmony among competing classes, orderly competition between conflicting interests.... Simply by not being Spanish, baseball embodied a critique of the colonial regime."

"Baseball was exotic and decadent," observes Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, "diametrically opposed to Spanish prissiness, hypocrisy, and (literally) bullish savagery." In his new book, The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball, the Yale professor of Spanish maintains that the sport was "a powerful force in the democratization and secularization of Cuban culture." Bullfighting, Spain's most gory and traditional export, symbolized colonial rigidity and obtuseness; baseball, the United States' most benevolent and pacific export, hinted at Cuba's future free of Spain. Consider the affront suffered by the colonial powers as youthful Cubans gleefully swung for the outfield fences and conspired on double plays. In the eyes of the Spaniards, these were political acts, and for one year during Cuba's struggle for independence, Madrid banned baseball on the island.

Cuban literature and culture embraced the game as well. Nineteenth-century teams took on the names of Italian operas; Sunday afternoon competitions were followed by dinner dances; writers delighted in the game. Such was the early fervor for baseball that one sportswriter went on at length about Cuba's first bunt, in an 1890 game between Havana and Progreso. It was the bottom of the tenth inning, the score was tied 1 to 1, nobody out, and a man on first. The Havana manager "called his boys together, speaking to them in a low voice ... and laughed with malicious satisfaction. [Juan] Antigas stepped up to bat, and while everyone expected him to swing for the fences, he just touched the ball lightly, hurriedly reaching first base, leaving the Progreso team in a stupor."