Cuba's All-Stars

Natural History, April, 1999 by Tom Miller

   His face, ashen (death for black folks) and his eyes closed, chasing a
   white bail, this time the last one.

Between the two world wars, Cuban cigarette companies such as Billiken issued baseball cards. Today these rarities are sought not only by devotees of Cuban baseball but also by collectors looking for cards of Negro leaguers who played in Cuba. Many Negro league standouts, such as Hall of Famer John Henry "Pop" Lloyd, never appeared on cards issued in the States. As a result, a 1924 Billiken card of Lloyd recently fetched more than two thousand dollars at auction.

Between 1937 and 1959, Cuban fans got to see various major league teams conducting spring training on the island. Most notable were the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that included three black prospects: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe. The team selected Havana to avoid the racism of Florida towns, although the three black athletes were housed separately.

Before the Revolution, open betting was very much a part of Cuban baseball; it took place in parks, in private homes, and in the countryside, where a sack of beans or a pile of yuca might be the wager. At Havana's Gran Stadium, the stands behind the third-base dugout were the place to go, and one row became known as Wall Street. "I remember a game between Almendares and Cienfuegos in 1956 where the odds were 11 to 8," Ismael Sene, a rabid baseball fan in Havana, tells me. "One man waved eleven thousand pesos in the air, and another held up eight thousand. It got very intense at times." With the advent of the Castro years, betting was outlawed; still, in incidents in 1978 and 1982, a total of forty-two team members were suspended (and some of them jailed, along with some bookies) for betting on baseball. Havana's best team, people joked, was at the Combinado del Este, the prison just east of Havana.

If betting was integral to Cuban baseball, politics became so as well in the 1950s, just as it had sixty years earlier. Anti-Batista activists from the University of Havana on occasion carried their noisy protests to the games, especially if the country's number one fan, Fulgencio Batista, was there too. Once, in 1956, students took to the field shouting for freedom for their jailed comrades, and the police, instead of just clearing them off, clubbed them mercilessly. The whole country saw the incident on television, and this helped sway public opinion. The following year, Havana's mayor, a Batista sympathizer, was compelled to leave a game when fans booed him. "I was there that day," Sene recollects. "Everyone yelled, `Long live Fidel! Down with Batista!' To me, those two events at the stadium were the two most important events of the Revolution."

Sene also recalls the time that the Sugar Kings, a Cuban minor league team, played a series in Havana against the Rochester Red Wings in the summer of 1959. Admission to the July 25 game was free for all the country folk and military filling the capital to commemorate the Revolution the following day. "There must have been thirty-five thousand people there," Sene says excitedly. "More than half of them carried arms. The game started at nine P.M. and went into extra innings. The game was still going on at midnight when it turned July 26, and everyone took out their weapons and fired them in the air to celebrate. Miraculously no one was hurt." But wasn't Rochester coach Frank Verdi's plastic helmet grazed by a bullet? "No! That's not true!" The following year, by the way, the Sugar Kings of Havana, Cuba, moved to New Jersey, U.S.A., and became the Jersey City Jerseys. (A full account appears in the 1982 book Baseball and the Cold War, by Howard Senzel.)