SOME OF US remember pictures of bodies on a beach at the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Some of us never forgot the missiles of October 1962 and John F. Kennedy's death-mask visage on the television, bracing us for the end of the world.

In Cuba, they remember midnight knocks on the door and mass executions. These do not vanish from the mind. Nor have government purges, nor the crushing of civil liberties after Fidel Castro came out of the hills and began to write his terrible history.

But all of us of a certain age, in some corner of our minds, calculate how long ago it was and marvel at the passage of time. Peter Angelos was a struggling young attorney. Ray Miller was a teen-ager, and none of his current Baltimore Orioles, except for 41-year-old Jesse Orosco, had been born when Castro took power.

Those of us who were alive count the years and wonder how strange it is, all this time later, that the silence endures between the United States of America and the Cuba of Fidel Castro, when all else has changed so much.

And maybe this, too, begins to change by degrees today. Maybe the Orioles of Baltimore play a baseball game in Havana, and hits and runs matter not as a measurement of victory and loss but as a common denominator of emotion, a language in which everyone can begin to exchange words, and a tiny, tentative step is taken to re-establish relations between the two countries.

In Baltimore the other day, Orioles owner Peter Angelos sounded optimistic about the game and the simple diplomatic possibilities. Also, though, he sounded like a man who's been ducking political beanballs since negotiations between the State Department and Cuba became public.

This certainly isn't about helping Castro, Angelos said. And it's not an attempt to scout Cuban ballplayers who might help the Orioles. It's simply about opening people-to-people contact between two countries alienated and edgy with each other for 40 years.

In Cuba, they are said to adore the game of baseball. In this country, legends have persisted for years that Castro once wished to become a big leaguer and how such a turn in the road might have changed the course of Cold War my-missile-is-bigger-than- your-missile history.

On such notions is history writ whimsically. In the years after the revolution, Castro routinely pitched in Cuban exhibition games for Los Barbudos -- the Bearded Ones -- not only because he enjoyed it but because he understood the symbolism of the people's leader playing the game his people loved.

But, for all the persistent legends of Castro the ballplayer, in print and elsewhere, and all the subsequent debunking of those stories, and of Castro's true athletic abilities, the notion of baseball as a vehicle of current diplomacy angers many whose roots are in Cuba.

It's beyond international politics to the intense family pain inflicted on those who fled to America and those who were left behind. They've asked, why make any gesture that might help Castro? Why prop him up when, past 70, with his economy struggling and his old Russian benefactors having troubles of their own, he seems more vulnerable than ever?

To others, though, that's precisely the point. Castro's an afterthought. He's yesterday's news, not tomorrow's. Forty years ago, he was America's nightmare, 90 miles from home. And he was Cubans' worse reality, replacing one corrupt and brutal leader with crimes that sometimes dwarfed his predecessor's.

In the decades since Castro took power, the most powerful image is still the one that threatened to end all history, when Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev took the world to the edge of obliteration over Russian missiles in Cuba.

But the world has changed. Cuba's living standards have long since crumbled. The Berlin Wall has come down, and Russia struggles to feed its own people. And, in that grandest bastion of communism, where a billion Chinese reach for the 20th century while the rest of the world reaches for the 21st, nearly half of the banks and the factories are bankrupt.

The Cold War is over, Fidel Castro is an anachronism, and so is the wall of silence between the people of two countries. That's what today's game says. It's about bringing Cuba back into the community of nations and finding Castro an irrelevance on the brink of permanent past tense.