Ozzie Mesa scrawls his mother's pork roast recipe on a long yellow legal pad as the Inner Harbor sunset creeps into the Little Havana Restaurante y Cantina along Key Highway.
The bona fide "child" of the Cuban revolution -- carried in the arms of parents fleeing the Castro regime on a raft 36 years ago -- is preparing for a weekend that Cuban-Americans like himself view as historic to the fate of their homeland.
As the Orioles ready for tomorrow's exhibition game against a Cuban all-star team in Havana, Mesa and the Cuban natives throughout Maryland and the nation are wrestling their conscience over whether Baltimore's overture to a standing Caribbean Cold War enemy is warranted.
Even within the same family, the game stokes opposing views. Mesa's father, now in his 70s, lives in Miami unable to forget having to wrest his clan from their home in 1963 when his son was 3. Yet Ozzie, more American than Cuban, fails to understand the point of a political and economic isolation policy that has failed to attain its 40-year goal.
"My father's philosophy is that anything that acknowledges or lends legitimacy to the Cuban government supports Fidel Castro," the 39-year-old Maryland Institute painting graduate says. "But I'm not a typical Cuban-American. I think it's great. We have trade with Vietnam. How many Americans died in Vietnam?"
From Miami to Silver Spring, such angst will thrive tomorrow when the Orioles take the field in the first major-league game in Cuba since Castro's 1959 revolution. To the American envoys, such as Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and Orioles owner Peter Angelos, the trip will strive to establish "people to people" contact below the icy political surface that continues to thrive between the two nations.
"There is no communist way and no capitalist way to fill a pothole," Schmoke said.
But for Cuban-American exiles who, four decades later, can still envision the whitewashed Cuban buildings, mosaic tiles, lush foliage and tropical climate of their homeland, the exchange is no less complicated than cavorting with the enemy.
Without a large Cuban-American base in Baltimore, the protests of the game have come to City Hall through e-mail, fax and letters from Cuban-American exiles in Miami still unable to forgive and forget how they lost their families and property to Castro years ago. City officials count 32 letters of objection to the trip since the announcement of the game.
"From the very beginning, we see that there is no benefit to the Cuban people," said Ninoska Perez, spokeswoman for the Cuban American National Foundation, a Miami group that has led the opposition. "It is an event controlled by a dictator."
But Ray Donaldson does not see it that way. Six years ago, the retired IBM worker from Fulton, Md., toured Cuba with the Howard County Friends of Latin America, a volunteer organization with interest in U.S. Central American policy. Donaldson remembers a happy Cuban people.
"It is a government supported by the Cuban people," Donaldson said. "Castro is not the government; there are a lot of people in the U.S. that hate [Bill] Clinton's guts."
Pedro Sierra, the recreation director for the Upper County Community Center in Gaithersburg, looks beyond the political debate. He views the trip as nothing more than sharing a passion for baseball.
The man who once pitched in the Washington Senators' and Minnesota Twins' organizations remembers growing up in Havana, willing to walk the length of Baltimore each day just to play the game. Lucky enough to get a phone connection into the country two weeks ago, Sierra said his brother and sister -- still living in Havana -- express nothing but excitement for the impending game.
"I think it is very courageous that Mr. Angelos did this," Sierra said. "My take on this is that politics and sports don't mix. Baseball there is like apple pie and Coke here."
Baseball, though, has not been free of political controversy. The plight of Livan and Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, half-brothers who fled Cuba to become pitchers for the Florida Marlins and New York Yankees, respectively, in the last three years, shows that Castro controls Cuban baseball, too, Perez said.
Playing baseball on Cuban soil ignores those events, Perez said. "They risked their lives to get out of Cuba," she said.
Cardinal William H. Keeler toured Cuba just before Pope John Paul II's visit in January 1998 and celebrated Mass with his counterparts in Havana. Keeler says Cuba has taken steps to ease its oppressive policies, including relaxing rules on practicing religion.
So Keeler stood in a Baltimore-Washington International Airport hangar yesterday to see Angelos and his entourage off.
"Anytime we can reach out to see human beings as human beings and as brothers and sisters is a plus," Keeler said.
Pub Date: 3/27/99