Soaked in rain and salsa, Baltimore welcomed a 300-person delegation of Cuban construction workers, students, bureaucrats, old athletes and young ballplayers, and a little Havana flavor shined through the clouds.
The day culminated at Camden Yards, with an evening that was part ballgame, part protest, part intercultural exchange, part Marxist seminar, part slice of Americana.
At 12: 20 a.m., the team wearing red, white and blue won, 12-6. It was Cuba.
"This whole game is one hot tamale," said Manuel Alban of Harford County, publisher of a Spanish-language newspaper. "I don't think Baltimore has ever seen a day like this."
With fears of defections running high, and with the game interrupted twice in the early innings by protesters, the day and night had a strange "look but don't touch" quality. By the fifth inning, police surrounded the playing field.
Throughout the 40-hour visit, expected to conclude this morning, a buffer of Baltimore police kept the Cuban delegation from the general public.
People on both sides of the police force said they would have liked to have had more occasion to talk.
"I'm so interested in Baltimore," said Darielis Santana, 17, a member of the Cuban delegation who was representing a Havana federation of university-bound students.
"I would like very much to talk with young people here and at the schools, but the schedule doesn't allow this."
Inside the ballpark, the Orioles and their Cuban guests labored to give the stadium a foreign feel.
The 14-piece band Cubanismo -- on a tour stop between Atlanta and Switzerland -- entertained 300 dancing fans in the picnic area. They were expected to play "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" -- a song they learned yesterday -- during the seventh-inning stretch.
At the food courts, hungry visitors sampled pork sandwiches from two 200-pound hogs, and fans devoured black beans. Between the top and bottom of the third inning, Orioles showed a video tribute to Cuba, played Latin music and put Cuba trivia on the board.
"It's been very good. Big crowd. Happy crowd," said Orioles owner Peter G. Angelos. He said he did not mind the possibility of losing, and thanked police for their response to protesters who ran out onto the field and were arrested.
Echoes of dictatorship
But some fans said the game and the police presence reflected another Havana influence in Baltimore -- dictatorship.
From the beginning of plans for the game, Cuban officials were involved in security. Chief among these was the decision by Angelos to bar Immigration and Naturalization Service agents from the ballpark, on the grounds that their presence might encourage defections.
Fans approaching the third-base visitors dugout confronted seven rows of Cuban officials, seated there in part as a security buffer. A similar buffer kept non-Cubans from the bullpen.
Dr. Luis Queral, a Cuban-American doctor from Towson who helped organize protests, had complained about Oriole-enforced bans on banners and flags, though there were indications that the restrictions had been eased for some fans.
"I understand the need for a show of force," said Angelo Solera, a prominent Hispanic community liaison for the city health department. "But sometimes it feels like there are more police than people in here."
Yesterday, shortly after two Cuban players -- pitchers Jose Contreras and Jose Iban -- began signing autographs in the left field corner during batting practice, security officials put a quick end to what proved to be one of the team's few direct exchanges with the public.
"It was thrilling," said Trish Vesely, a TV producer from Bethesda, who was one of the lucky few to get autographs. In the seat next to her, Nicole Guyton, 13, of Elkridge, had Contreras' signature on a ball next to that of Oriole pitcher Scott Erickson. "With all the police outside the stadium, I didn't expect to get this close."
Noisy protests in streets
Outside the gates, in fact, noisy protests along Camden Street dominated the scene. On Camden Street, an anti-Fidel Castro demonstration of an estimated 300 people on Camden Street was fueled by exile groups from New Jersey and Miami.
These protesters initially outmaneuvered police, blocking part of Camden Street and moving around pre-established barricades. They chanted over bullhorns, listened to speeches from Cuban exile leaders and a Cuban-American congressman, and waved banners comparing Castro to historical figures from Judas Iscariot to Slobodan Milosevic.
"If you like Cuba so much, why don't you live there?" shouted one of the protesters, Miguel Boluda of Bowie, at a passer-by, Lauren Goodsmith, who was wearing a hat asking for an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Two engineers who run a popular Cuban exile Web site -- www.NoCastro.com -- in Laurel walked around with pictures showing Castro as a turkey.
On the south side of the stadium, outside Gate A, ticket-holders had to walk through a line of more than 50 anti-Castro protesters to get to their seats. Most Orioles fans just brushed past the hecklers, though Kim Gay of Baltimore stopped to talk.
"I'm celebrating baseball, not Castro," she explained.
"I protest for my brothers and sisters in Cuba," a protester, Florencio Amat of Union City, N.J., replied, firmly but politely.
A hundred yards away, at the end of a stretch of Camden Street that Baltimore police Maj. Elmer Dennis referred to as the "demilitarized zone," a smaller, quieter group held a protest against the U.S. embargo, wearing red hats to punctuate the point.
This crowd consisted of union activists, Cuban pastors and a man dressed as Uncle Sam.
"Get the name of the guy on the signs in the post offices," he said. "That guy is an impostor."
Sally Davies, president of AFSCME union local 1072, praised the Cuban government for, among other things, "providing free health insurance without co-payments!" Nearby, Oscar Milian, who took the bus in from New York for yesterday's game, held up a picture of Castro proudly. "He's done a good job."
The two groups came together only for media interviews. William Ross, 53, a member of a pro-Castro group in New York, talked to the Spanish-language network Univision, as Karen Baez of Annapolis and her grandfather, Orestes Padilla, visiting from Miami to protest the game, gave him hard stares.
A little capitalism
Caught between the two protesters, vendors improvised.
A peanut vendor offered a "protest special." Steve Kessler made his hot dog stand signs bilingual and offered two specials: a $1.50 Spanish dog with salsa and cheese, and a $2 Fiesta dog full of peppers.
"Perro caliente," he yelled, adding under his breath, "Cuba is good for business.
"We're only going to make about $500 from all this pain," said George Canales, a novelty store owner from the Bronx who sold nearly 300 Cuban flags yesterday. He and his wife spent Sunday night sleeping in their car in the Oriole Park lot and planned to drive back tonight. "But it was worth it for such a special day."
Much of the day's activity took place at the Cubans' hotel, the Sheraton Inner Harbor. A half-dozen undercover officials from Agenda Cuba, a Miami group, were sprinkled around the hotel.
"We are trying to help out people, the Cuban people, to defect," said Pedro Lopez, who was managing the operation from Miami. He complained that Cuban internal security and hotel staff had stymied his efforts by blocking incoming phone calls. "They want to live in freedom and democracy. And so we have people all over Baltimore."
The scene inside the hotel resembled a family reunion. University students played games. An enormous group of men who described themselves as construction workers mingled outside the front door, smoking and joking with passing officials and children.
On a pair of couches in the lobby, Cuban ballplayers long retired reminisced, with the discussion drifting back to the 1963 Pan American Games, when Cuba beat the United States.
"It is coming back to me. It's like it was yesterday," said the winning pitcher from that long-ago game, Modesto Verdura, 63, to his friend and and one-time teammate Erwin Walter. Both now make their livings teaching baseball to young Cuban players.
"Our talent is good," Verdura said. "I think we'll win today."
While security was heavy, some members of the Cuban party managed to explore the Inner Harbor.
Ernesto Polo, a 32-year-old civil engineer, wandered up and down Conway and Charles streets. He said he had been told the city was dangerous, but he was curious about everything he saw.
"Is there always so many police in Baltimore?" asked Polo, who has a wife and 2-year-old daughter in Cuba. "Or is that just for us?"
Another baseball game
The mix of host and visitor seemed to work best during a noontime game at Gilman School, between teams of Cuban and American children. With the Cuban youngsters wearing "Gilman Greyhound" hats and the teams drawn from both sides, it became difficult to tell the children apart.
The event took on the feel of a Little League game.
"Calm down," snapped Maria Estela Perez Rodriguez, a Cuban teacher, at a bench of rough-housing pre-teens. "Here, Lasaro, have a banana." Her son, 11-year-old Lasaro Miguel Carrera Perez, pitched an inning and, like any nervous youth baseball mom, she could hardly bear to watch.
"This whole thing is really amazing," said Chase Hoffberger, 14, a Gilman eighth-grader and Lasaro's teammate yesterday. "I didn't get to talk much to them, because of the Spanish difference, but a lot of the language is in the game."
A few conversations broke out during the post-game lunch. "I can't believe they don't eat cheese on their hot dogs," said Lasaro, who did not scrimp on his own queso.
Many Baltimoreans considered the Gilman players lucky. Jose Luaces, a seafood restaurant owner in Fells Point, had wanted to get an autograph and meet the players but was turned away at several points.
The Little Havana restaurant on Key Highway -- a short drive from the team hotel -- opened its doors to the delegation, but customers had to be content with big screen televisions and dollar drafts.
For some Baltimoreans, all the protests and exchanges were too much.
Radio talk show host "Nasty" Nestor Aparicio held a Fidel Castro look-alike contest at the Camden Club near the ballpark.
The winner, Joseph Reed of Towson, won two tickets to last night's game, dinner at Little Havana, a ball autographed by former Oriole first baseman Rafael Palmeiro (who is Cuban-American) and a "sort of Cuban cigar."
Like the flavor of the ballpark, "the seeds were Cuban," said radio station executive Steve Hennessey, explaining how the cigar was grown.
But last night, "the cigar was smoked in Baltimore."
Staff writers Peter Hermann, Kirsten Scharnberg, Melody Simmons, Peter Schmuck and Caitlin Francke contributed to this article.
Pub Date: 5/04/99