Havana

It's the one thing everyone thinks they know about Fidel Castro, baseball and politics.

One American scout, Joe Cambria of the Washington Senators, lived in Havana. Mr. Castro, who pitched (right-handed) at the University of Havana, had two tryouts with the Senators but was rejected -- good slider, mediocre fastball. Baseball will not bring Mr. Castro's regime to an end. But had Mr. Cambria been more patient with a developing prospect, baseball might have prevented it.

-- editorial in the New York Times, Jan. 11, 1999

Over 50 years ago, another Cuban baseball team came to Baltimore to play and the pitcher was none other than Fidel Castro. Too bad baseball didn't pay the kind of salaries it does today. If Mr. Castro received the right offer, diplomatic relations with Cuba may have been a lot better!

-- an e-mail sent to The Sun recently

It is an irresistible tale, that Cuba's Maximum Leader might have become a major league pitcher rather than a major league irritant to the United States. But for want of a little more heat on his fastball, the years of antagonism between the two countries -- the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination attempts, the embargo -- might never have happened.

At 72, Cuba's leader is long past playing anything but fantasy camp baseball. And yet the mental picture of Castro on the mound is an enduring one, emerging once again in the months before today's historic match-up at Estadio Latinoamericano. The Baltimore Orioles will become the first American professional team to play a Cuban squad since Castro took power 40 years ago.

Whether or not Castro himself throws out the ceremonial first pitch, the game will once again give new life to one of history's great might-have-beens: that the communist leader might have excelled at that most American of games.

But what if it's not true?

What if Castro's supposed pitching prowess is just another piece of invented history in the carefully crafted persona of this enigmatic leader? What if it is a mere prop, a style point along with the fatigues, the beard, the cigar?

The truth, of course, is hard to sort out now. Many old men were stellar athletes in their youth -- sheer longevity and outliving those who might speak to the contrary earns one the right to enhance the past.

And perhaps truth is not as important as myth after all -- in baseball or in politics.

Today's game is highly anticipated -- and highly controversial among those deathly opposed to Castro.

But once, American and Cuban baseball players regularly competed with and against one another. American players from Babe Ruth to Brooks Robinson played exhibitions here or joined Cuban teams to play winter ball; Cuban players like the Orioles' own Mike Cuellar became stars after joining U.S. major league teams.

The free flow of players across the Straits of Florida, though, stopped when Castro overthrew the U.S.-supported regime of Fulgencio Batista and began introducing socialism to the island nation. As part of his nationalization of Cuban industries, Castro banned the lively professional baseball league, and Cubans were no longer allowed to join U.S. teams if they hoped to return home in the off-season.

Now, any Cuban player who wants to play in the United States generally must come by raft -- as have such stars as Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez of the world champion New York Yankees.

It's truly an odd turn of events, given Castro's well-known love of baseball, both Cuban and American.

He once reportedly sought out, and received, a signed baseball from Joe DiMaggio, as well as a baseball card of his former countryman Minnie Minoso.

The nature of his own stint on the mound, then, seems like a missing piece of the puzzle that is Fidel. It is why the talk or the rumor or the myth of whether he could have been a baseball contender continues to intrigue.

Especially today, when the door to Cuban baseball cracks open ever so slightly.

It didn't take long after Castro's revolutionary seizure of the government on Jan. 1, 1959, for the new leader to wrap himself in the cloak of baseball. The Cuban League, made up of teams whose rosters carried both Cuban players and their wintering American counterparts, was in the midst of its regular season as the government changed hands.

"I was at a New Year's Eve party, and I saw these planes flying overhead," recalled Tommy Lasorda, the former Los Angeles Dodger manager who played winter ball in Cuba during the '50s. "That was Batista fleeing the country."

The upending of a government is one thing. Baseball is another. Only five days of Cuban League baseball were lost to the dis- ruption, and on Jan. 6, the schedule resumed.

Castro was soon throwing out ceremonial pitches and popping up in locker rooms across Cuba. In September of that year, for example, he made his presence known at what was called the Little World Series. The series pitted the Cuban Sugar Kings, a Triple-A team that played American and Canadian minor league teams, against a Minneapolis team, and, given the sorry state of Minnesota weather at the time, the final five games of the series were held in Havana. "He came to every game," recalled Preston Gomez, 76, who managed the Sugar Kings and ultimately joined the major leagues. "He was a big fan."

Like most Cuban boys, Castro grew up playing baseball and other sports. In fact, he was named the best athlete of his Jesuit boarding school, where his 1945 yearbook shows him in a basketball rather than baseball uniform.

Castro went on to the Univer-sity of Havana, and was said to have been a good enough pitcher to catch the eye of one or two scouts who scoured Cuba for major league talent.

"Oh yes, he played for Havana University," Juan Brejio says as if stating that, oh yes, the sky is blue.

Which it is today as Brejio, 68, a baseball trainer, spends an afternoon watching students practice on the storied Palmar del Junco field in a province east of Havana.

This is the spiritual home of baseball in Cuba, the very site where, as the commemorative plaque says, the "primer juego de pelota organizada efectuado en Cuba," the first organized game of baseball was played in Cuba. In 1874, Cuban history has it, a baseball club from Havana traveled here to Matanzas province to challenge another club.

Brejio can tell you that story, as well as the equally well-known one about Castro's own playing days.

"He was a good pitcher," Brejio says.

But this is where things start to get dicey.

On Nov. 28, 1946, the newspaper El Mundo printed a box score of an intramural game at the University of Havana, Law School vs. Business School. The future lawyers lost 5 to 4, and there is nothing interesting about this except for the one line in the box score that identifies the losing pitcher:

F. Castro.

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria unearthed this nugget of nearly lost history, but goes slightly crazy over the subject that it raises.

"To me, it's as if people were interested in Hitler's architectural drawings or paintings," declares the author of the new book "The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball" (Oxford University Press). "It's bull--. It's trivial. Who cares? It's not important. It's not true. Just drop it."

Gonzalez Echevarria is a professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale University. But like many an intellectual, his heart belongs to baseball. As George Will has his woebegone Chicago Cubs and Doris Kearns Goodwin her lost Brooklyn Dodgers, Gonzalez Echevarria is forever a Habanista, as the fans of the Habana Leones (Havana Lions) of his youth were known. His family were among the many who went into exile in the United States after the revolution, but Gonzalez Echevarria never forgot the baseball he left behind in Cuba.

It takes Gonzalez Echevarria just six pages into his 464-page history to raise -- and squash -- the issue of Fidel Castro's alleged pitching prowess. Castro indeed was a student at the University of Havana from 1945 to 1950, when he graduated with a law degree.

Gonzalez Echevarria says his extensive research for the book found nothing to document that Castro was a serious pitcher, only that sole box score of an unimportant intramural game. And who knows, he further speculates; that could have been some other F. Castro -- say a Felix, a Francisco or a Felipe.

"Believe me, Havana was a city with six major newspapers," Gonzalez Echevarria says. "No one has come up with a picture of Fidel Castro in a baseball uniform. There would be a picture, or box scores. There would be records."

Instead, there is lore.

The Fidel-on-the-mound stories take on several guises. There is the one of Castro as almost a Washington Senator rather than a Cuban dictator -- a tidy parallel, of course. But the scout who supposedly considered Castro, Joe Cambria, is long dead.

Then there is the story that the New York Giants in 1949 offered Fidel the then-grand sum of $4,000 or $5,000 to sign; he rejected the riches for the rebellion.

Both of these stories have been repeated so often they have become shiny with the veneer of something like truth. Often, they're printed with no attribution.

Livan Hernandez was a defector from Cuba who had played in the Cuban National League. This was a personal affront to Fidel Castro, who prided himself in the excellence of Cuban baseball and had almost pitched his way into the U.S. major leagues in 1956. Fidel had struck out Tommy Lasorda in an exhibition game attended by scouts from the Washington Senators in the days before they became the Twins.

-- From the book "Ay, Cuba!" (St. Martin's Press, 1999), by NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu

"That's not true," Lasorda says today.

Lasorda says his only meeting with Castro came in 1959 -- in a hotel rather than on a baseball diamond. Castro had just taken over and summoned Lasorda to a meeting to talk baseball.

"He was a great baseball fan, and he knew of me," Lasorda says. There is a picture of the young Lasorda in Gonzalez Echevarria's book, a cigar in his mouth and holding a rifle amid a group of rebels celebrating their triumph. Lasorda said he, like many others, initially thought Castro would be good for Cuba; later, Castro would introduce communism, losing former supporters like Lasorda.

Other former players like Minnie Minoso, Luis Tiant and Preston Gomez, all Cubans who unlike Castro indeed were scouted and went on to star in the majors, similarly have no recollections of a ball-playing Castro. Which, of course, doesn't prove anything either way.

"You will, though," says Gomez, who will join the Major League Baseball group attending today's game, "hear a lot of speculation about that once you get to Cuba."

I saw him play. He was very happy. Fidel laughed all the time," recalls Mario Menocal, 65, a smile playing through the cigar he has clamped in his mouth and his pale eyes rolling upward in fond memory.

Menocal is among the crowd of baseball aficionados who gather in Havana's Parque Central to talk -- loudly -- about their sport. On this particular morning, the talk is not of the coming arrival of the Orioles, liltingly called oh-ree-OH-leh here. Instead, the talk is of the Cuban playoffs, which will be interrupted briefly to gather up a sort of all-star Cuban team to face the Orioles.

On this day, streams of words are spewing at warp speed, hands are gesticulating madly, noses are nearly touching as some 60 men argue largely about the Havana Industriales team. The Industriales are something like Cuba's version of the New York Yankees, the big-city team with the most passionate fans, as well as the most passionate detractors. But today, the team is on the brink of elimination from the playoffs to determine who will play in the national championship.

Ergo, total hysteria.

And no talk, of course, of the match against the Orioles, or the distant history of Castro's own baseball days.

Menocal, however, is willing to break off from the madding crowd and talk about Fidel, as everyone here calls him.

"Camilo was there," Menocal says of the game he saw, referring to Fidel's fellow revolutionary, Camilo Cienfuegos. "And Che Guevara was playing, too. Che was the best hitter."

Whoa. Everyone was a baseball player? Batting practice was part of the guerrilla training at the rebel camp in the Sierra Maestra? The revolution was really won on the baseball diamond?

Apparently, Menocal is remembering not a serious game, but one of the exhibitions that Fidel and his merry band of rebels staged after the revolution. They called themselves Los Barbudos, or bearded ones, and they occasionally turned up to "play" a couple of innings against real teams.

Unlike Fidel's college play, his Los Barbudos career is amply documented. In fact, Cubans who say they remember seeing Castro play often are remembering seeing the photos of the Los Barbudos ace.

In the end, what does it matter? For Cubans, who have been cut off from their families in America and from needed food and medicine because of the U.S. embargo, wondering whether Castro could have pitched professionally all those decades ago is an absurdly meaningless mental puzzle.

In the United States, though, Americans have the luxury of trivialities. Spend a year dealing with President Clinton's monumentally minor dalliance, waste a few more brain cells wondering whether Fidel could have saved the Washington Senators or kept the Giants in New York.

"This is the first thing Americans tell me when I say I've written a book about baseball in Cuba," the exasperated Gonzalez Echevarria says of the persistent stories of that right-handed pitching prospect. "It's so good of a story, it's like candy to a journalist."

And yet, that is how it always goes with baseball and its many legends. They get passed down through the generations, a small bit of truth, perhaps, expanded with each retelling like a battered ball being taped over and over again.

They don't matter in the larger scheme of things, and yet, the telling of a story can be its own reward.

I talked once again with my dad tonight relative to the Castro story. He is certain that the year was 1934 or 1935 when he saw the Cuban All-stars play [in Baltimore]. He is also certain that the pitcher was named Castro. The obvious discrepancy is that Fidel Castro, the dictator of Cuba, would have only been 8 or 9 years old in 1934-1935. Unfortunately, what I hoped would be an interesting story for you appears to have turned into a case of mistaken identity involving an older Cuban pitcher of the same name.

-- a follow-up e-mail to The Sun

Fidel himself has addressed the stories of his past career opportunities in the world of sport. At least once, he has said that, yes, he was offered a major league contract. And he, too, sees the might-have-been. If a certain leader had gone into pro baseball rather than politics, Fidel agreed, the world would have been a different place.

Jim McKay: How good a baseball player were you?

Fidel Castro: Pretty good. I had a pretty good slider, but not a good fastball. I don't think I would have made it to the major leagues. ... What would my life have been? I might be shining shoes in New York.

McKay: You know, President Bush was a pretty good baseball player. Maybe there's a possibility of your playing against each other?

Castro: Maybe. Bush is tall. Probably he was a good first baseman. But did someone ever attempt to contract him for professional baseball?

McKay: I don't think so. No one ever offered him $4,000.

Castro: Well, I'm sorry about that. Because we would have preferred him as an important professional baseball player, since as president, he has not shown to be very friendly toward us.

-- from a 1991 interview on ABC-TV

Pub Date: 03/28/99