Cuba's All-Stars

Natural History, April, 1999 by Tom Miller

The manager who called for the bunt was Emilio Sabourin, a Havanan schooled for a while in Washington, D.C., and an enthusiast of both American baseball and Cuban independence. Arrested for insurgency and sentenced to twenty years' incarceration, he died in 1897 after two years in a North African Spanish prison. Now, more than a century later, a bust of Sabourin sits forlorn and uncared for in the backyard of Havana's maternity hospital. As a couple of friends and I pay our respects, a woman in her seventies walks by. "It's good that someone remembers him," she volunteers through a chain-link fence. "He was a great patriot and a great person."

Following three decades of intermittent struggle for independence, Cuba, with a last-minute assist from the United States, rid itself of Spain in 1898. But Spain turned over control of the island to the United States, not to the Cubans. During its three-year dominion, the United States outlawed bullfighting and its military played baseball, both among themselves and against Cuban teams. "It can only be imagined," writes historian Perez, "what values and meanings were assigned to the outcome of games pitting the occupied against the occupiers."

After the turn of the century, professional leagues usually consisted of three or four teams that played in the winter months (accommodating the schedule of U.S. major league players), while amateur teams, profuse throughout the island, played year-round. U.S. players came to Cuba as part of barnstorming tours and to keep their skills up during the northern off-season. Among them were black athletes, who were not allowed into the major leagues but were accepted on Cuban professional teams. (Nevertheless, amateur teams on the island were all-white until the 1950s, since most Cuban blacks couldn't afford to play without being paid.)

Light-skinned Latin Americans, such as Cuban pitcher Adolfo Luque, played in the major leagues during this period. Luque, "the pride of Havana," began his big-league career with the Boston Braves in 1914 and wound it up twenty-one years later with the New York Giants. His best years were in the 1920s, with Cincinnati. Overall, he won almost two hundred major league games, with an earned run average of 3.24. What made Cubans particularly proud of Luque, however, was that while he starred and later coached in the States, he always came home for winter ball. In all, about eighty Cubans (more than the citizens of any other country) played in the major leagues between 1871 and 1959. But after Fidel Castro assumed power, the flow of players began to change dramatically.

Martin Dihigo, often referred to as the best player never to reach the major leagues, began his career in 1922. He played in his native Cuba but also in Mexico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and the Negro league in the United States. Although he played all nine positions during his twenty-five-year career, it was his pitching and batting that earned him a reputation as one of the truly great players of this century. When Dihigo died, Cuba's poet laureate, Nicolas Guillen, wrote an elegy to him, concluding: