The Quality of Home Runs: The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball 9780822381426

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The Quality of Home Runs

T H O M A S F. C A RT E R

The Quality of Home Runs T H E PA S S I O N , P O L I T I C S , A N D L A N G UAG E O F C U BA N BA S E BA L L

Duke University Press Durham and London 2008

∫ 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Quadraat with Magma Compact display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

CO N T E N T S

Preface: Entering the Field Acknowledgments

vii

xv

Introduction. The Theoretical ‘‘Stretching’’ of Sport and the State

1

∞ Baseball and the Language of Contention

17

≤ Circling the Base Paths: Baseball, Migration, and the Cuban Nation

36

≥ The Spectacle of and for Cuba

63

∂ The State in Play: The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport ∑ Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∏ Talking a Good Game

111

136

π The Qualities of Cubanidad: Calidad and Lucha in Baseball

159

Conclusion: Touching ’Em All: Recalling and Recounting Home Runs Notes

203

Works Cited Index

231

213

183

89

P R E FAC E

Entering the Field

I stood on the pitcher’s mound staring toward home plate. Home had never looked farther away from me that it did on that bright afternoon. Victor, a former baseball player himself, stood next to me as we took in the empty surroundings of Estadio Latinoamericano. It was odd, really. I had stood on mounds like this thousands of times, but had never before noticed how distant home plate was. From the stands, sixty feet, six inches appear almost negligible; a pitched ball covers the distance in a couple of seconds, at most. Standing here now, it was as if I were staring across a canyon. I told him how far away it looked. ‘‘That’s how you know when it’s time to leave’’ was his sage reply. I have, for better or worse, spent my life in a love a√air with baseball. I was taught the game by my father. From him, I learned not just the physical motions but the emotions inherent in the game. He was my first teacher. I have had many more since those boyhood days. I have had many teachers throughout this project instruct me on various aspects of baseball, Cuba, Cuban baseball, and the qualities of home runs. Often, I did not appreciate the lessons until after the fact, much later after the fact. I doubt that I am unusual in this regard. That this book is so long in coming is tantamount to my own stubbornness and ability to only appreciate lessons long after they were first taught to me. The Quality of Home Runs is about baseball as it is experienced in Cuba. This book examines facets of Cuban baseball that embody and express the very sense of what it means to be Cuban. In trying to address these issues, various other questions arose that made it clear that baseball is complexly interwoven into the rest of the fabric of Cuban society and imagination. This book, then, is an ethnography about and situated in Cuba. Broadly speaking, ethnographers attempt to understand events by assuming that what is experienced and observed cannot be judged as an isolated incident but takes place within a system of meaning generally recognized as culture. Each event that is lived through, whether experi-

enced as either direct participant or as observer seen, is examined for what it means and how it fits, changes, amplifies, or confirms the ethnographer’s understanding. Experience is played o√ against other experiences, against models in the literature, against social theories, and against the ethnographer’s own models of explanation. It is this constant attempt to use experiences as elements of understanding, while simultaneously acknowledging the incomplete and impossible-to-complete nature of those experiences, that makes ethnographic experience di√erent from just experience and turns those experiences into doing ethnography. Ethnography has had to be conceptually redefined as more attention is paid to the transnational circulation of people, ideas, objects, and practices. Indeed, ethnographers no longer conduct research ‘‘with the sense that the cultural object of study is fully accessible within a particular site’’ (Marcus 1999: 97). In a similar vein, ethnographers also no longer approach the object of study as if it exists solely in one specific site. Research for this book has taken me to varied and far-flung places to watch, talk about, and generally experience Cuban baseball. Neighborhoods, parks, cafés, and various other public spaces throughout Cuba were the primary locales, but in pursuing Cuban baseball I also ended up venturing farther afield. Places such as the Czech Republic, Ireland, Mexico, and the Bahamas (among others), as well as several cities throughout the United States and Canada, all informed one aspect or another in this study. Yet despite the disparate locations in which I found myself pursuing Cuban baseball, ultimately I ended up ‘‘circling the bases and heading for home,’’ turning back to Cuba. The time I spent in Cuba was among the most intense and pleasurable I have spent on or around the diamond. This book draws on several sites throughout Cuba, although it is primarily based on ethnographic fieldwork in several places around Havana. The reader will quickly identify at least two places that are relatively well known both in Havana and in the international press when Cuban baseball is discussed. Those two sites are the Latin American Stadium and Central Park, although I prefer to use the Spanish names Estadio Latinoamericano and Parque Central. There was no point in obscuring these two sites, for there is only one major stadium in the capital in which the Serie Nacional (Cuban national league) plays. Similarly, if a foreigner expresses any interest in Cuban baseball to other Cubans, then invariably the subject of Parque Central and La Peña comes up. The group of men who meet there daily and their location in Parque Central are known throughout viii preface

Cuba. It is no secret. For those reasons, these two sites are identified, although individuals’ identities within each site are pseudonyms for reasons explained below. A further note must be made in regard to team names and the use of Cuban terminology in this book. Team and division names in the Serie Nacional along with all foreign words are italicized. Teams are italicized because many have the same name as the region they represent. In order to avoid confusion, I italicize team names, Pinar del Río, for instance, when discussing the team but leave the respective place-names unitalicized. Cuban terms are also italicized because, while a translation is provided for each of these terms where appropriate, the actual term loses some of its nuances in being translated into English. Thus, I have found it preferable to use Spanish terms throughout for many concepts in order to convey the subtlety involved in using cultural metaphors. Taking these concerns into consideration, all translations are my own. In no way was any translation conducted in isolation, though. Colleagues in the United States, United Kingdom, and Cuba all provided assistance, ensuring intended nuances were captured with the translations provided here. A particular concern was the two poems discussed in chapter 6, where translations were corroborated with professors of Spanish and bilingual Cuban journalists, and their assistance is gratefully acknowledged. That this book is situated in Cuba is one reason why it has taken so long to be produced. The political situation between the United States and Cuba has fluctuated in its degree of hostility over the past couple of decades. Yet the ongoing impasse still turns seemingly simple questions into epic quests. Another reason I have been somewhat slow in producing this text is a concern over the potential ramifications of publishing this material. The first time I went to Cuba to propose my study to Cuban baseball o≈cials, they were very interested but explained that, alas, they could not provide o≈cial approval for my study. The reasons for any o≈cial unwillingness to publicly sponsor my project, I later discovered, was that there was an ongoing political struggle within Cuban sport at this time and no one knew which faction would emerge victorious. Any bureaucrat who o≈cially put his name to my project could lose his career if the opposing side was victorious. Yet without any exceptions, every single individual I met and spoke with, having already said that they could preface ix

not provide o≈cial approval for my work, then told me that so-and-so is who you should go talk to if you really want to know about Cuban baseball. So in a manner of speaking, I had an uno≈cial ‘‘o≈cial’’ approval for my presence in the bowels of stadiums, in o≈ces, and working with various individuals in the Cuban media, in the National Commission of Baseball, and in the stands. As long as I worked quietly yet openly it was fine. And that is exactly what I did. Another reason is that the Cuban state has a reputation for treating harshly those it feels has betrayed it. The current Cuban government is not unique in this regard, but people placed their trust and, in some cases, their careers in me. Most Cubans I spoke with did not express any fear of retribution or concern when I explained the study and why I was doing it. Most expressed disdain for any concerns I expressed, and a handful even insisted that I use their real names. Acutely aware of this trust, I do not specifically identify Cubans with whom I consulted and, as is standard ethnographic practice, I have provided pseudonyms for all of them irrespective of their expressed wishes to be identified. The only actual individuals’ names used are those athletes mentioned during the descriptions of game events and/or those individuals who are internationally recognized public figures, such as Omar Linares or Fidel Castro. Even then, those athletes identified in this manner may or may not have also been interviewed, but if they were, they were given a pseudonym for any information they may have provided outside of their actions on the diamonds of the Serie Nacional. My sensitivity toward individuals’ identities was not restricted solely to Cuban athletes. During my research, the story of several Cuban baseball players who had surreptitiously left the country caught the foreign media’s attention. Several di√erent foreign journalists descended upon Havana searching for stories. A couple of foreign television crews filmed groups of fans who regularly engage in debates. One crew produced a documentary piece that was broadcast on the bbc, which Cubans in London saw, taped, and sent back to their friends in Havana. The fans saw this tape and were enraged. From their perspective, the journalists had made them out to be anti-Castro, which they insisted they were not. For this and the reasons above, I use pseudonyms for all fans as well, even ones that are rather well known. The British and American media (mis)representations of Cuban fans provided the first hint at the enormous reach of what I had initially x preface

imagined to be a subject circumscribed by the island’s shores. What became more and more apparent as I proceeded was that Cuban baseball extended far beyond Cuba itself. Traditionally, the classical study of cultural specificity has been identified with the study of small, enclosed places: the diverse ‘‘cultures’’ of an imagined, contemporaneous, premodern world. That is no longer the case, and the current challenge of cultural analysis is to address both the spreading interconnections and the ‘‘locatedness’’ of culture in all its energizing connections to the world and all its exotic distinctiveness. In essence, the analysis involves tracing the manners in which the global is situated in the local. Attentiveness to these connections results in the inextricability of interconnection and location in what is called multi-sited ethnography. What most multi-sited ethnographies have in common is that they draw on some problem, such as globalization or migration, that cannot be confined to a single place (Hannerz 2003). Thus, multi-sited ethnography emerges from putting questions to an object of study whose contours, sites, and relationships are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making an account that has di√erent, complexly connected real-world sites of investigation. Usually, multi-sited ethnographies tend to focus on mobile people (see, e.g., Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001; Olwig 1993; Ong 1999), whose increasing mobility has resulted in ‘‘a deconstruction of a placefocused concept of culture’’ (Hastrup and Olwig 1997: 4), thereby allowing the emergence of a more contingent relationship between collective identity, geographic location, social relations, and culture. This shift away from a bounded site of cultural production to a free-floating signifier allows ethnographers to be more cognizant of people whose social networks and frames of reference are likely to be dispersed multiply and discontinuous rather that fixed in one space. The Quality of Home Runs turns this characteristic of multi-sited ethnographies on its head. Rather than focusing on mobile people and social networks that are multiply dispersed and discontinuous, it is the actual frames of cultural reference that are mobile and fragmentary. Migration and exile are extremely important themes in the discourses of cubanidad. The Cuban experience is filled with the ebb and flow of Cubans and their actual and desired leaving and returning to Cuba (Pérez Firmat 1997; Rie√ 1993). And yet, the people with whom I conducted this study are not especially mobile. The majority of Cubans involved in Cuban baseball never leave Cuba. While a handful athletes, coaches, and journalpreface xi

ists do travel as members of the Cuban contingent in international competitions, the majority of athletes, coaches, journalists, and fans certainly never leave. Many never leave the town or province in which they are born. Despite baseball being a game that encapsulates migratory experience, most of the individuals in this book are not migrants. Instead, what travels is the spectacle of Cuban baseball, and what is focused upon are Cubans’ experiences of and discourses about those spectacles. These spectacles aid in the overall creation of a location that is contested over: a place called Cuba. Yet despite the apparent fixity of Cubans’ frame of reference, Cuba and their notions of themselves as being Cuban do not have any fixed boundaries, but instead travel with the national team when it competes internationally. The elasticity of Cuban baseball should be apparent from the first section of the introduction. It begins by describing related encounters of various baseball fields that would, at first glance, appear to have little in common with each other. The discussion that follows that first ethnographic vignette leads into a theoretical discussion that situates the rest of the book. The chapters that follow gradually become more and more intimate in analysis as they progress, until the conclusion pulls back from intimate cultural minutiae to reconsider the larger issues introduced at the beginning of the book. Chapter 1 provides the analytical framework for the analysis in Home Runs. It sets forth the argument that baseball is an embodied performance of a language of contention that revolves around two core tenets, Cuba and cubanidad, central to the social formation of Cuban society and culture. Chapter 2 presents the historical underpinnings to the contemporary situation. In it, the constant movement of Cubans to and from home reflects the core acts of the game of baseball itself—a risky journey undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning to one’s ‘‘home.’’ The third chapter introduces the importance of spectacle to Cuban baseball and baseball’s importance as a spectacle to Cuba. It argues that Cubans produce these spectacles for no one’s benefit other than their own. That these spectacles are nonetheless contested, fought over, hotly debated, and passionate only reinforces both their centrality to Cubans’ notions of themselves and their country. The fourth chapter considers one of the most important entities in Cuban baseball—the state—and its role in Cuban baseball. The legitimate role(s) of the Cuban state is a particularly sensitive issue among Cubans xii preface

and is itself a hotly argued point within the language of contention. It is these varying views that are contrasted here. The fifth chapter moves from outside Cuba to considering the spectators’ constructions of and struggles over The Quality of Home Runs inside Cuba. Portions of this chapter were presented at the American Anthropological Association’s annual conference in 2003 and benefited from Stephan Palmié’s critical reading of that paper. Arguing that the fans are actually essential participants and not simply passive consumers of the spectacle, the chapter explores thoroughly the contests over which, why, and how fans contribute to the spectacle. This analysis considers the di√erent ways Cuba and being Cuban are envisioned by the multitude of passionate supporters. Narrowing the focus even more, chapter 6 looks at how Cubans create and engage in specific narrative practices found within baseball. Two important performative aspects are identified and analyzed, both of which contribute to the overall spectacle of Cuba. The first involves an exploration of the social and narrative dynamics of arguing about baseball. The second considers the poetic(s) found within fans’ commentaries about baseball and how those poetic performances are linked to contemporary events. These aspects were initially examined in two earlier articles, published in the International Journal for the History of Sport in 2001 and 2005 respectively (Carter 2001, 2005). Taylor and Francis have graciously allowed me to reproduce material from each of those articles, which can be accessed at www.informaworld.com. The material presented there has been amalgamated, reinterpreted, and reanalyzed here. By looking at how fans talk baseball, it becomes clear that specific forms of talking a good game are vital to the constructions of cubanidad. Chapter 7 considers the athletes themselves and the qualities of cubanidad they come to embody through their actions on the diamond. Finally, how these hotly contested qualities produce sentiments of belonging raises further questions on the relationship between people’s identities, the roles of the state, and transnational processes. The Quality of Home Runs concludes by returning to the question of how Cuban identity and Cuba itself are contested. Baseball provides the cultural intimacy that informs the politics of passion that so infuses public life in Cuba. That intimate passion informs notions held by Cubans about themselves as a nation and as individuals and their narratives, which shape who they are. The conclusion recaps these points and ties them together, showing how the actions on the diamond extend far beyond any stadium’s walls. They preface xiii

extend beyond the country’s shores. They extend to wherever and whenever Cuban identity is invoked and imagined. The expectation is that the reader may not agree with what is set out here. This would hardly be surprising because The Quality of Home Runs examines core aspects of the language of contention that informs what it means to be Cuban. These accepted terms remain unquestioned but they draw upon and produce passionate sentiments. When one provokes emotions, it is likely to produce strong debate. It is hoped that is exactly what The Quality of Home Runs does. Baseball engenders passionate arguments over these key ideas, and it is firmly located within the culture of debate that exists in Cuba (García Ronda et al. 2004). Hopefully that culture of debate will goad students and other readers alike to argue over the material presented here, ideally leading to other aspects involving the politics of passion. Play Ball!

xiv preface

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

Like athletes whose performances are the result of concerted e√orts of many people working away from the bright lights, this book is the product of a multitude of individuals who have provided assistance at various points throughout its development. My initial interest in Cuba was fostered by Nelson Valdés at the University of New Mexico, who provided my first opportunity to visit Havana. The Anthropology Department and the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico provided my initial support for beginning to understand sport as a social phenomenon. Two individuals in particular stood out: Karl Schwerin—for his willingness to give a doctoral student su≈cient space to take risks into the unknown, as there was no one in the anthropology department with expertise on Cuba nor was there anyone known to any of us with expertise on sport; and Keith Basso—for his initial suggestion for doing an ethnography of baseball and his subsequent conversations on the art of pitching. Rob Lavenda brought me briefly to St. Cloud State University, where he provided the creative space for starting the initial draft of this book. A postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Anthropological Studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast was central to this book’s formation. The School provided the necessary space and environment to reformulate and develop ideas further. Hastings Donnan, Tom Wilson, and Tracey Heatherington, in particular, all commented and provided invaluable advice on drafts of various earlier sections. A stint at the University of Wales, Newport, prior to my arrival at the University of Brighton also allowed time for reformulating certain aspects of the book. In Brighton, I found an environment that provided su≈cient space and support to finalize this book. The librarians at all of the above institutions, especially Martin Edwards in Newport, were extremely helpful and patient in obtaining what must have seemed to them to be obscure and somewhat bizarre publications. There are many others who have provided timely advice and support, but those who stand out in my memory include Paul Ryer, Laurie Frederik, Nancy

Burke, Stephan Palmíe, Susan Brownell, and Eriberto Lozada. I’m sure I’ve missed someone, for which I apologize. Lastly, I want to thank Valerie, her team, and the other editors at Duke for seeing this project through to its final form. Of equal importance are numerous Cubans who deserve to be thanked. I will not name them individually, not because I don’t care or know who they are but because of the still lingering potential of retribution by a pernicious state. There’s been absolutely no evidence of any such activity by any o≈cial over the past ten years, but because many of those who assisted me are still in politically sensitive positions, I insist that they remain anonymous for now. Nonetheless, individuals at Granma, Bohemia, Radio Rebelde, Radio coco, Juventud Rebelde, CubaDeportes, the Comisión Nacional de Béisbol, and numerous peñas—groups of aficionados, scattered across Havana and Cuba—all made this study possible with gracious assistance, advice, and time. Without them, this book would never have happened. I did not always learn what they wanted to teach me; nor did I always learn what I wanted to know. Nonetheless I learned a great deal from all of them. As in baseball, though my ‘‘coaches’’ taught me, I am the one who is responsible for any errors made. I am unabashedly grateful to my family/clan for their constant support. Unwavering belief and support o√ered by the Carters, Flocks, FlockJohnsons, Gabriellis, Janssens, and Smiths for what must have seemed dubious decisions on my part have been absolutely essential. Most important, my gratitude goes to Jane, without whom none of this would have been possible.

xvi acknowledgments

I N T RO D U C T I O N

The Theoretical ‘‘Stretching’’ of Sport and the State

Two teenage boys enter a small plaza. One strips o√ his shirt and places it on the ground, while the other takes a worn, well-loved baseball glove out of a canvas bag. Placing the glove and ball on the bench, he then paces o√ a distance from his friend’s shirt and drops the sack. The shirtless youth picks up the glove and tosses it and the ball to the other boy. The gloved youth positions himself between the two markers on the ground, and the shirtless youth moves to the other side of the small plaza. The ‘‘batter,’’ the shirtless youth, begins their game by bouncing the ball and striking with a closed hand, trying to drive the ball past the ‘‘fielder’’ while remaining ‘‘fair,’’ that is, between the two markers. After several minutes of play, they stop. The shirtless youth currently batting is unhappy because of the ease with which the other can defend the space. They renegotiate the rules and after they argue about the distance between the two markers, the canvas bag is moved about three feet farther out. The game then resumes. Having watched the game for some time from the panadería (bakery) across the street, where Fulano and I sat in the shade, Fulano stood up and announced, ‘‘Oye, Tomás. It’s time to go.’’ He calls into the dark, musty interior of his small bakery and Fidel comes out to haul us on his motorcycle and sidecar to Cerro. Fulano knows someone with an illegal satellite dish and we are going to watch the final game of the 1997 World Series between Florida and Cleveland. This Series has piqued many Cubans’ interest because, for the first time since before the Revolution, a Cuban athlete is playing a significant role in Major League Baseball.∞ Arriving in Cerro, the splendor of the crumbling architecture still evident, we dismount on Carlos III Avenue and Fulano leads me on foot along the covered, marble promenades. Stopping between two magnificent former mansions, he looks both ways before ushering me into a narrow passage. The sudden darkness is disconcerting. ‘‘Keep going,’’ he cajoles, pushing on my shoulder, ‘‘keep going.’’ We pass several open doorways and duck under a couple of clotheslines full of drying clothes.

‘‘In here.’’ A small, cramped room with several men sitting on and around a couch look up at Fulano and myself as we insert ourselves into the group to watch the grainy picture. The game itself is a tense, fraught a√air as Florida is on the verge of losing only to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth. In the eleventh inning, Florida scores to win the game and the Series, and the room erupts in celebration. As we watch the celebrations in Miami, the Cuban pitcher, Liván Hernández, is named the Most Valuable Player of the World Series. Hernández shouts in euphoric glee as he is handed the World Series trophy, ‘‘I love you! I love you Miami! I love you all!’’ Three years earlier, Hernández had snuck away from the Cuban national squad while it was in Mexico. He was one of the first of what would turn out to be a steady trickle of Cuban athletes abandoning the island for the siren call of million-dollar contracts. From the moment of his clandestine departure, he no longer existed in the Cuban media’s coverage of sport. But Cuban fans had not forgotten about him and eagerly followed his career in the United States. His disappearance from the o≈cial narrative of Cuban baseball, produced and disseminated by the Cuban media, jars with aficionados’ nearly daily discussions of how Hernández and others like him were doing professionally in the United States. Hernández’s performance and isleños’ (islanders’) e√orts at getting access to U.S. media broadcasts of the World Series to follow his exploits suggest an important aspect of the struggle over cubanidad and, ultimately, Cuba. The island’s shores neither contain nor demarcate the edges or reach of either Cuba or cubanidad. That both ideas are not tied to a specific location is suggested by the importance of Cuban athletes’ endeavors, even (or perhaps especially) those who act without the permission of government o≈cials. At the same time, the production of the locality ‘‘Cuba’’ is vital to the struggles over what it means to be Cuban. Even then, the production of a locality’s boundaries is not a cartographic certainty, but is dubious and ephemeral. The two boys playing batea, an informal version of baseball played throughout Cuba, provide a microscopic example of how the cultural manipulation of space involves several processes. Batea is a version of pitén, informally organized games of baseball, or pelota, widely played in various civic spaces around Havana. They bodily illustrated that sports are much more than mere ephemeral competitions; the boys also demonstrated the negotiability of the social spaces that form localities. They unintentionally yet clearly demonstrated the imaginary, ≤ introduction

arbitrary, negotiable, and mutable qualities involved in the production of localities. Having participated in numerous neighborhood games of batea where I lived, and having watched many more in the urban spaces of Havana, it became clear that baseball embodies and projects a specific version of what it means to be Cuban, not only through swinging a bat or throwing a ball but through its delineation of social space and the everyday talk informed by such spaces. Baseball embodies Cubans’ notions of themselves, but it does little to explain what baseball is or how experiencing baseball games reflect cultural values. As a specific form of bodily practice that carries with it specific values of cultural capital, it is devoid of any inherent cultural meaning until it is inscribed by and upon its participants. Like all sports, baseball is all about the increasingly refined and controlled movement of bodies—a concern of all state-building projects as well. Throughout The Quality of Home Runs, a variety of positions are taken in order to elicit greater analytic depth of Cubans’ senses of themselves even as forces beyond their direct experience or control increasingly a√ect their localized experiences. The individual Cubans who kindly invited me into their homes, lives, and families all understood themselves to be connected to local, neighborhood concerns as well as to more global issues. They recognize and readily admit that powerful ‘‘outside,’’ global, and state-level forces all a√ect their everyday lives, permeating their local relations and a√ecting their long-distance relationships with family and friends. Physically near or not, their relations are maintained through cultural intimacy—those aspects of a cultural identity that provide insiders with an assurance of common sociality (Herzfeld 1997). Headily familiar, cultural intimacy may at one moment assure a degree of creative irreverence and at the next reinforce strict adherence to a disciplinary regime. When its display becomes a sign of collective confidence, cultural intimacy may also reinforce the hand of power. Frequently consisting of alleged national traits, cultural intimacy o√ers citizens both a sense of defiant pride in light of a formalized state-based morality or o≈cial disapproval, and a sense of unity in the face of foreign threats to national selfhood. A particularly e√ective means of creating sentiments of cultural intimacy is the bodily experience of sport spectatorship, which often includes invocations of the nation before, after and, occasionally, during the actual contest. This reification is especially evident in international introduction ≥

sporting competitions that are organized on the basis of competing nations, but other local sports events also make use of nationalist iconography. The cultural intimacy experienced during baseball games at the Estadio Latinoamericano serves as a most prevalent embodiment of ‘‘the politics of passion’’ (Fernández 2000). The politics of passion, defined by intense a√ectivity and personal engagement, generally emerge from ‘‘foundational’’ issues that establish the nature of the community—who belongs and what its core values should be—and embrace the individual’s and the collective’s sense of self-worth, honor, and dignity. These emotive politics are fueled by the pursuit of moral absolutes, imbued with idealism and intensity, whether this is revolutionary zeal to resist imperialism or cheering the home team on to victory. Modern projects such as nationalism do not exclusively rely upon reason or logic for justification but are, ironically, most powerful when invoked on the basis of feelings. Emotional attachments to a place, its symbols and myths, and the sense of solidarity with strangers (i.e., citizens) are cornerstones of nationalist discourses. And for Cubans, the Revolution required more than a rational cost-benefit calculation to spread its fire; it demanded a√ection and affiliation. Nowhere do these loyalties become more apparent then in the embodied passions of baseball fans exhorting their heroes to claim victory over their rivals. The irony is that, as in the Revolution, the majority of these victories are Cubans defeating other Cubans. Much of the data collected for this book are based on observations, comments, and analyses made by Cuban baseball fans. At first glance, fanatics could be considered suspect informants because of their emotional biases, the implication being that fans are overemotional and, thus, suspected of having irrational minds. While passionate loyalties to a particular team can appear irrational, these passionate attachments are no di√erent than rampant patriotism. Emotions are culturally defined and experienced within social structures of power in specific ways (Lutz 1988). Instead of displaying apparent irrationality in their emotional outbursts, Cuban baseball fanatics are highly articulate, thoughtful, rational individuals who observe and critique everything that goes on around them using their passion for the sport as an analytical device. In my experience, this is not unusual among baseball fans in general. Much of baseball entails observation. Learning to appreciate baseball involves the same practices that anthropologists use in their serious studies of cultures. Furthermore, baseball fans create their own ‘‘communities of ∂ introduction

memory’’ (Malkki 1997a) through their explicit reflections of events, observations, and interpretations. These communities of memory can reinforce state discourses by legitimating their own nationalist constructions but can also highlight, if not actually challenge, those same discursive strategies, resulting in the emergence of a ‘‘language of contention’’ (Roseberry 1994). It is precisely because baseball fans form their own discursive communities of memory through their own introspection that makes them ideal study consultants. As primary producers of the meanings found in Cuban baseball, they are integral players in the struggles over the language of contention. They are the creators, chroniclers, and preservers of the Cuban national sport, what is taken to be an elemental part of what it means to be Cuban. Like the Cuban nation itself, these communities transcend the borders of the state, fracturing containment by both external boundaries and internal categorizations via power struggles over the concept of cubanidad.

Sport, the State, and Civilization Baseball, like all sport, is commonly assumed to be a microcosm of life in general that teaches and distills life’s lessons for its participants. The ambiguities of everyday social life are allegedly removed from its competitive arenas even as it provides lessons about social life for its participants. Sport provides a moralistic spectacle in which life’s troubling ambiguities are swept away.≤ It does so by clearly defining its participants and the rules of engagement. Athletes, particularly athletes in groups (i.e., teams), compete against one another dressed in colorful uniform clothing that clearly distinguishes one from another. Eventually, one defeats another in a contest. After a series of contests, it quickly becomes apparent which is more skilled. A champion is crowned and opponents are vanquished. These Manichean discourses simplify di≈cult social questions, making it clear, at least temporarily, who ‘‘we’’ are and who the hated enemy is. Such symbolic constructs allow for the obfuscation of social issues, both within sport and within society as a whole. Despite its ephemeral nature, the actions within a given contest continue to matter long after the final out has been made or the final whistle has been blown precisely because sport is never separate from the rest of society. Commentaries explaining the outcomes, debates over umpires’ decisions, coaches’ strategies, and athletes’ performances all create interpretations and reinterpretations of a introduction ∑

game’s events. Also, events far away from the field of athletic endeavor constantly a√ect the state of play on the field. So if sport can be considered a microcosm of society, it can only be in the sense that the complexities and ambiguities of everyday life are just as prevalent and powerful away from the field of competition as they are within it. A social phenomenon of enormous importance and global reach to millions of people around the world (Dunning 1999), sport is still treated as marginal to the core matter of anthropology, if not all of social science. Historically specific, shifting in space and time, sport currently refers to those activities that have developed into, and are most highly prized as, competitive physical contests between teams or individuals. At its most basic level, sport is the institutionally organized practice of a game. The distinction between sport and game leads to enormous confusion and has troubled scholars. Confusion arises because the playful elements of these games have not been removed in sport, yet the context of athletes’ participation in sport as opposed to a game is distinctly di√erent. For English-speaking scholars, at least, this di≈culty lies in the discourse of modern sport. Despite being embedded within a value system based on Weber’s hegemonic capitalist-based Protestant work ethic (Weber 2001 [1930]), sports are not talked about in terms of work or labor, but in terms of play. As it is typically understood, play is not serious activity; it is for children and is therefore removed from the harsh realities of adults’ worlds of work.≥ Yet, even though athletes are engaged in a sports contest, they are clearly not playing but involved in highly serious activity. As sport became an increasingly popular activity, scholars began to concern themselves with the e√ects of play and leisure on society. Two of the earliest modern social thinkers on play and sport were Thorstein Veblen and Johan Huizinga. Each considered sport to be detrimental to society for di√erent yet related reasons. Veblen (1992 [1899]) saw sport as an anachronistic survival of militarism with no obvious utilitarian purpose. At the time of his writing, just before the turn of the twentieth century, most sport practices were the parvenu of the elite. Thus, sport and sporting clubs were organizations that promoted and promulgated the conspicuous consumption that Veblen considered a parasitic drain on society. Huizinga, in contrast, equated sport with the rationalization of modern society. Primarily concerned with the playful element that makes humans what they are and its cumulative erosion from society, Huizinga considered sportlike activities as a manifestation ∏ introduction

of human nature. Play was the creative element of culture embedded in the ‘‘timelessness’’ of games. Play was an ‘‘activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly’’ (Huizinga 1971 [1950]: 13). For Huizinga, playful activity provides a vision of how life can be lived and allows people to forge relationships that can mirror, sustain, endure, and adapt to changes in society. Sport—with its institutions, regulations, and restrictions of where, when, and how a game can be played—constricts play and, consequently, constrains the creative force of humanity. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, games were frequently tied to religious festivals (Baker 1982; Guttmann 1983) as part of celebrations of community and people’s place in the cosmos. Emphasizing the importance of play as the creative generator of broader social norms and rules, Huizinga argues that Roman society ‘‘could not live without games’’ and that the fabric of medieval life was ‘‘brimful of play’’ (1971 [1950]: 203, 205). The creative power of play was abundantly evident in fourteenthcentury courtly manners (Elias 1978). Social life in the European royal courts was, for all intents and purposes, a social contest, and a deadly serious one at that, in which individuals had to monitor their own appearance and impressions while simultaneously reacting to and taking account of others in an attempt to maximize their own status within the court. The stakes of this competition were high, yet the creativity in courtly life, implicated in the symbolic struggle embodied in participants’ commitment to common yet shifting rules of etiquette and pursuit of distinction, clearly shows the powerful impetus play has upon society. The emergence of this courtly etiquette gradually and unintentionally led to increasingly greater control over the body and its presentation in society, what Norbert Elias terms ‘‘civilizing processes.’’ These civilizing processes reach from the Middle Ages to the present day in a structured yet unplanned development toward greater selfcontrol of bodily functions and presentation. There are two interrelated facets of civilizing processes that are of concern here. The first is the state’s role in these civilizing processes. The greater constraints on bodily freedom Elias and Eric Dunning discuss (1986) in terms of the development of sport are at least partially overseen by the emergence of the modern state. In reflecting how individuals are disciplined so that violent behavior is reduced throughout society, the role of the state in these civilizing processes must be thoroughly considered. The section that introduction π

follows does just that by looking at how the state and civilizing processes are related within the development of sport. The second is sport’s position in these civilizing processes as both sport and civilization spread across the world. These dual processes have significant implications on our understandings of the globalization of sport. Accepting these processes without thoughtfully considering their implications in transnational power relations reduces these macroscale processes to a fait accompli of historical determinism based on colonial relations. The latter section here probes the assumptions of the global civilization and how they are evident in sport.

State and Civilization An important aspect of Elias’s theoretical work is the notion that these civilizing processes involve an increasing control of violence, primarily made manifest through the emergence of the state. Unfortunately, Elias’s framework falls short because the state is essentially treated as a neutral entity that does not directly control social institutions such as sport. There is little to suggest that various factions attempt to determine the direction of state policy. To what purpose and in whose interests are sports organized, practiced, and controlled? Who determines sporting needs and participation? There is no recognition of the state as a focal point of struggle itself. ‘‘Nothing is said about which groups in society might play the major role in forming the state and filling its positions: nothing is said about the state being structurally or politically beholden to one group or another’’ (Wilson 1992: 82). In addition, nothing is said about the contexts in which the state might actually condone violence rather than condemn it (Carter 2003). Rather, the state exercises its civilizing role indirectly by claiming and attempting to maintain a monopoly on the right to use physical force. It is this question—the legitimate use and control of violence—that led Elias and Dunning (1986) to propose that sport emerged as a ‘‘quest for excitement’’ in an increasingly mundane and routinized society. Their argument is that as the state restricted the possibilities of violent conduct, sport provided a vehicle for a controlled outlet of social and emotional tensions within society. This ‘‘quest for excitement’’ made an increasingly rationalized and disciplined society more tolerable by providing a space removed from the mundane routine of everyday life in which liberating, transcendent expressions of passionate release could safely be expressed. However, it is the nature and frequency of violence, and not the outcome ∫ introduction

of violence in everyday life to which Elias and Dunning refer, that is of utmost importance. In contrast to the violence and lack of prohibitions on such behavior which characterized the Middle Ages, since the fourteenth century greater and greater demands have been placed on individuals to manage their bodies and emotional displays (Elias 1978). The problem is that these restraints are portrayed solely as unintended consequences of individuals’ sum total of actions. Elias allows little room for intended outcomes resulting from individuals’ or institutions’ deliberate actions. Modern states quickly assumed the role of the populace’s caretaker, adopting discursive threads of logic promoting and linking the health of its citizens with the well-being and stability of the state. Conventional theories of the state objectify and endow the state with lawmaking and enforcing capabilities. These capabilities may or may not be democratic or more or less violent (Nagengast 1994). On the one hand, the state has been seen as the stabilizing force needed for increasing social complexity and presumed beneficial social growth and development. On the other, the state has also been understood as an emergent set of repressive institutions that allows an elite class to obtain and maintain power over subordinates through the strategic use of force and ideological control. From either perspective (beneficial or oppressive), the state is commonly viewed as the political management of a delineated geographic space and its inhabitants through the mechanisms of centralized governmental institutions sta√ed and controlled by a proportionally small number of specialists. These bureaucratic structures are the cumulative e√ect of a social contract in which the public has ostensibly agreed that the state has a monopoly on force, and that therefore only it can legitimately constrain and coerce individuals. However viewed, the state is seen as a separate entity that acts upon the rest of society instead of being a part of society. This ideological separation reinforces the appearance that the state exists and acts as if it had a life of its own discrete from the rest of society. It is a political mirage that has become increasingly problematized over the last decade (Alonso 1994; Borneman 1998; Gupta 2006). Emerging from the ongoing critique of colonialism and its imperial projections (e.g., Benítez-Rojo 1996; Puri 2004), the interrogation of the state has turned from a consideration of its separation from society to its interwoven indeterminacy within society. What this investigative turn emphasizes is the illusionary physicality of the state, revealing its inherent inintroduction Ω

substantiality that acts as a mask (Abrams 1988) or a fetish (Aretxaga 2003; Taussig 1997), or that is inherently fragile or ‘‘nervous’’ (Taussig 1992) precisely because it is an exercise in legitimation, which would be illegitimate if seen directly and as it actually is (Abrams 1988: 76). Indeed, a measure of its pervasive deceptiveness is, as Phillip Abrams notes (1988: 63), the state’s ability to thwart attempts to unmask this illusionary separation for the visible fiction it is.∂ The deliberate, conscious construction of a state involves the strategic creation and employment of discourses that mask the state’s inherently contradictory position as the sole, legitimate implementer of the illegitimate. The fictive discourses that legitimize the state are created in a dialectic process between o≈cial ideological and popular discourse. Both divisions and commonalities within these discourses are naturalized so that they become part of taken-for-granted daily life yet remain su≈ciently flexible to respond to changing political and economic circumstances—what William Roseberry (1996) terms ‘‘languages of contention.’’ This discursive process is part of what the state masks: to make this a transparent process would render the state seemingly inept at best and impotent at worst. Rather, the opaque dynamics of these discourses accumulate in such a way that their ability to classify the world for others acquires not only the constraining power of dominance over other modes of thought but also the calcifying authority of habit and ‘‘instinct’’ (Hall 1988). Ironically, these discourses are not ordinarily contested within the hallowed halls of government but in everyday social life where consensus is built (Comaro√ 1996; Williams 1991). Despite the state’s insubstantiality, it nonetheless remains an autonomous and extraordinarily powerful entity that comprises much more than a set of institutions sta√ed by bureaucrats. For all practical purposes, this arbitrary system becomes what the world is and how it works. It incorporates cultural and political forms, representations, discourses, practices and activities, and specific technologies and organizations of power that, as a whole greater than its individual parts, establish meaning and define social interests and categories, most especially categories of persons. It sets the limits of what can be considered rational, reasonable, credible, or even thinkable. It establishes history and, in a circular process, then demonstrates the longevity and even timelessness of the very state that creates it. The reality of the state, then, is produced through discourses and practices of power produced in local encounters at the everyday level ∞≠ introduction

and in the discourses of public culture, rituals of celebration and remembrance, and the organization of space. Yet much of the excellent work on the Cuban state presumes that just such a divide exists (Azicri 2000; Fernández 2000; Pérez-Stable 1993). The preeminent flaw in all these and other similar analyses is that they completely discount everyday experience. Instead, it is assumed partystate institutions controlled and continue to control all ‘‘relevant’’ aspects of life. Despite having their own qualities and dynamics, questions of moral order, of culture, and of beliefs—if they are even deemed worthy of notice—remain ancillary to the analysis of state-level politics and economic practice. Yet Cuban leaders’ justifications for the implementation of reforms make these same concerns centrally paramount. The Cuban state is embedded in social processes and discourses instead of being separate from them. The Cuban populace itself provides the foundation for the maintenance of Cuban statecraft in the face of extremely challenging circumstances. Sport is so important that most governments have bureaucratic departments to specifically oversee, organize, and supervise sport activities within that country. In this regard, the Revolutionary state was not unique. When the Revolutionary state first assumed power, one of the items on its initial agenda was the organization and institutionalization of all sporting activities on the island. To conceptually limit sport to part of a civilizing process reduces its significance to a singular set of discourses and obfuscatingly embeds sport within Western ideological discourses. It ignores the temporal and cultural specificity of modern sport by failing to recognize that important relationships exist between people’s games and their forms of cooperation and conflict resolution, concepts of space and time, and, in essence, how people organize and view their social worlds.

Globalization and Civilizing Processes As part of modern nation- and statebuilding projects, civilization acts as shorthand for scientific rationalization, bureaucratization, and standardization. This discursive logic constrains people in a kind of Manichean bind in which one either is or is not ‘‘civilized,’’ complete with racial, class, and nationalistic overtones and without recognizing the specificity of modernity. Therein lies one of the problems encountered by Elias’s interpreters and defenders in regards to sport and civilizing processes. As his principle defender in terms of the role of sport in civilizing processes, Dunning notes that civilization is introduction ∞∞

a concept that expresses the self-consciousness of the West (Dunning 1992: 260). It is a term which sums up everything in which Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or ‘‘more primitive’’ contemporary ones. By this term, Western society seeks to describe what constitutes its special character and what it is proud of: the level of its technology, the nature of its manners, the development of its scientific knowledge or view of the world, and much more. (Elias 1978: 3–4)

The term civilization itself conveys a contextualization of orderliness, rationality, and forward planning despite any desire to use the term in a di√erent context, and readers will nonetheless continue to understand its usual meaning. Furthermore, Elias attempts to decouple civilization from the modern meanings associated with European imperialist projects— with their explicit discourses of biological and cultural superiority—by recognizing that such processes were not unilinear, but instead ‘‘moves [sic] along in a long sequence of spurts and counter spurts’’ (Elias 1982: 251). In short, there are ‘‘decivilizing processes’’ as well civilizing ones of both shorter- and longer-term durations. ‘‘Within the overall movement there are repeatedly greater or lesser counter-movements in which the contrasts in society and the fluctuations in the behaviour of individuals, their a√ective outbreaks, increase again’’ (Elias 1978: 253). These countermovements are not any manner of return to earlier forms of social organization but a fragmentation of existing structures. These fragments would then recombine in new ways within civilizing processes. Consequently, Elias cannot be accused of any sort of straightforward functionalist theorization of society; nor can any accusation of essentialist evolutionary thinking be applied to him. Nonetheless, his notion of civilization and the civilizing processes that inform it ultimately fails precisely because Elias remains convinced that civilizing processes are nonetheless cumulative and because the connotations of civilization center upon Western ideals of morality and modernity. Civilizing processes therefore involve a progressive socialization that reflects the promotion of specific cultural values. Embedded Victorian ideas of civilized modern behavior were embodied in the institutionalization of sport, which often fell under the rubric of either educational or state-level bureaucracies or both. Sport was a tool for the training of future colonial administrators within the British education system, first ∞≤ introduction

in England, then in other locations throughout the British empire. As part of various modernizing projects, sport was an educational tool to instruct indigenous elites in the nuances of modernity, thereby allowing indirect rule to be established in various far-flung colonies (Mangan 1985). Adapting sport-linked discourses allowed social reformers, nationalist ideologues, and others to claim that sport contributed to the overall health and fitness of the populace and, by extension, national well-being. It is the colonial spread of sport as a tool of empire building that first led to the globalization of sport. Unfortunately, the primary scholars that focus on the globalization of sport, intentionally or otherwise, draw upon these notions of civilizing processes to explain the spread of sport. They conclude that sport is best understood as a balance of diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties: that is, the di√usion of sport practices and an increase in the diversity of sporting cultures (Bairner 2001; Guttmann 1996; Maguire 1999) that are historically tied to European and American colonial projects. It is undeniable that the predominant sports played around the world originated in Western societies. However, the implication is that these diminishing contrasts associated with the global di√usion of sport are emblematic of a ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ (Huntington 1996), in which the dominant form of post–Cold War tension will be neither ideological nor economic but cultural. Ultimately, it once again invokes a Manichean, binary form of conflict. Such an ideological framework is, admittedly, embodied in the practices and discourses of many sports in western Europe and North America—the ‘‘Us v. Them’’ mentality—but the ‘‘us’’ in this instance is Western civilization and the ‘‘them’’ is everyone else. From this perspective, the adoption of Western sports over other forms of sport can be construed to be a form of cultural imperialism, methodically and invariably destroying local value systems. Such a theoretical position equates the di√usion of an institutional practice with a form of Orientalism (Said 1978) and removes any semblance of local agency from the globalization of sport. To say, as noted sport historian Joseph Arbena does, that ‘‘even the Cubans, for all their nationalistic and ideological rhetoric, prove the success of their Revolution, if only to themselves, by playing Anglo sport better than the Anglos’’ (Arbena 1990: 325) misses the point completely. Baseball, like any other game played around the world, is no more an Anglo sport in Latin America than Catholicism is an introduction ∞≥

Italian religion. Institutional practices are modified, adapted, and incorporated into local practice and sensibilities.∑ As will become apparent throughout this work, baseball does not carry the same symbolic discourses in the United States or Cuba; nor has its meanings remained static from the nineteenth century to the present in either society. Cross-cultural approaches to sport are perfectly valid—indeed, the lack of such approaches is one of the glaring weaknesses of the majority of work on the globalization of sport. In recognizing the ‘‘diminishing contrasts and increasing varieties’’ of sport (Maguire 1994a), great attention is paid to the apparent domination of a handful of sports across the globe, all of which are of European or North American in origin. This globalization of sport, historically tied to the expansion of empires and the accompanying colonial discourses justifying the subjugation of nonEuropean peoples, cannot be imposed a priori upon colonized peoples. To do so, as much of the work on globalization of sport does, despite protestations to the contrary, eliminates the very elements of sport that makes it so incredibly powerful: people. Joseph Maguire (1994b, 1996, 1999, 2005; Maguire and Pearton 2000; Maguire and Stead 1996), in particular, provides a theoretical framework and various examples of how sports spread across the globe, yet throughout this body of work no people actually do anything; only institutions act. Maguire is not alone is this aspect, Allen Guttmann (1983, 1996), Eric Dunning (1999), John Bale (2001, 2003), and other major writers on sport discuss the dynamics and intricacies of sport’s structures from a variety of theoretical perspectives yet somehow lose sight of actual people. The very essence of sport, its most vital aspect, consists of the bodily actions and the emotional responses among all participants: athletes, o≈cials, and spectators. The significance of sport cannot be understood in any given place at any given time without considering these actualities. This has been made abundantly clear in the relatively few ethnographies that focus on sport (Armstrong 1998; Robidoux 2001; Robson 2000; Springwood 1996). Unfortunately, the majority of sport-related, ethnographically based studies remain situated in English-speaking centers of power. The few that move beyond these centers of power clearly illustrate the dynamic and varied ways that sport informs people’s lives (Archetti 1999; Brownell 1995; MacClancy 1996) and how transnational encounters are negotiated (Finn and Giulianotti 2000; Klein 1991, 1997). Klein’s work on the transnational aspects of professional baseball in particular is the best of a sparse crop ∞∂ introduction

of work that has been conducted on sport in Latin America and the Caribbean (Arbena and LaFrance 2002; Malec 1995; Mangan and DaCosta 2002). As much as colonizers viewed sport as part of the civilizing processes associated with modernity, colonized peoples certainly did not passively accept these new games. Colonized peoples throughout the Caribbean demonstrated their own claims to national sovereignty and symbolically reversed power relationships, at least on the playing field (Beckles and Stoddard 1995; James 1993; Klein 1995a). The colonized and the colonizers both used sport as physically expressive critiques of each other. Indeed, the global prevalence of modern sport can be seen as an important aspect of the historical colonization of much of the world by Western forms of logic.∏ The expansion of Western sports into the societies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America at the cost of national and native games is a historical reflection of the institutional inequality resulting from economic dominance and neocolonialism (Eichberg 1998; cf. Guttmann 1996).π Sport’s ability to invoke powerful emotions in people—to give an appearance, if not create an actuality, of possibly forging one’s own future— is extremely potent precisely because Manichean ethics are so easily attached to competing teams: good versus evil, wrong versus right, black versus white, and us versus them. Therefore, the cultural meanings of any sport, even ones as pervasive as soccer and baseball, must emerge from the social frameworks and categories of meaning created by individuals’ actions. It is not su≈cient to discuss the diminishing contrasts of sporting practices around the world while acknowledging the increasing varieties of those sports’ meanings that Maguire and others invoke unless ethnographic fieldwork is conducted with the express purpose of learning how the local contexts, meanings, and struggles within any given sport are played out and how these productions of locality are produced and contested. The production of a locality is, at its core, an exercise of power. It invariably involves a moment in which there is a formal recognition of a deliberately conscious, risky, even violent action that may be remembered later as being relatively routine (de Certeau 1984). Inherently colonizing, it involves the assertion of power over settings that are viewed as potentially chaotic or rebellious. Consequently, the production of locality is intimately tied to the production of reliable subjects embodied and emintroduction ∞∑

bedded in specific forms of knowledge (Geertz 1973, 1983). This production of local knowledge creates not only subjects that can be recognized and organized but creates and organizes the very localities around which such local knowledge is generated. In short, locality-producing activities are not only context driven but also are context generative, and are produced and reproduced through the implementation and manipulation of the language of contention. States often figure in the active creation of ‘‘imagined (national) communities’’ (Anderson 1991) through the pursuance of cultural intimacies via narrative, media, ritual, pageantry, and public performances linking the public sphere to local scenes (Herzfeld 1997). ‘‘Locality for the modern nation-state is either a site of nationally appropriated nostalgias, celebrations, and commemorations or a necessary condition of the production of nationals’’ (Appadurai 1996: 190). Sport plays a key role in the establishment of such sites, for it is through sport that emotions such as nostalgia are evoked and provide a grounding for the struggles over the languages of contention that form specific places. It is through these processes that the sites where such contests occur that vital, socially vibrant, and powerfully imbued places appear: ones that fire imaginations, cause powerful emotional responses, and create entirely new economies. In short, sport is central to the symbolic creation of community and place. Ultimately, the actual games played and social debates that follow those contests have to be analyzed, considered, and understood within their local social contexts while acknowledging that they are informed by transnational processes in which the sport is played. The Quality of Home Runs, then, looks at these languages of contention that inform Cuban identity as they are expressed and experienced in baseball. These contested practices serve to inform the experiences and perceptions of Cubans not only on the island but around the world. It is the production of localities and identity that fully informs this study’s vital languages of contention. More fully introduced in chapter 1, two core symbols within the language of contention that informs this study are carefully examined. The first of these is the concept of Cuba itself and the second is cubanidad, or what is often simply called Cuban identity. How Cubans create and interpret the cultural meanings of the actions on the baseball diamond shapes the narrative discourses of Cuba and cubanidad.

∞∏ introduction

CHAPTER

∞

Baseball and the Language of Contention In a tight game, Industriales have a runner on second with two outs. The more popular of the two teams that represent the capital in the Serie Nacional, the elite Cuban national league, Industriales need this victory as they strive to make the playo√s in the spring of 1998. They are two games out of the last spot with four games to play. Carlos Tabares, the team’s emotional leader, leads o√ of second. He is fast and rather reckless when he plays. He loves dramatic gestures, and sometimes his desire for such gestures backfires. Juan Padilla, the second baseman, is jammed on the pitch and he hits a little flare of a fly ball over the third baseman’s head, directly behind third base. Tabares takes o√ running with the crack of the bat; the third base coach gesticulates wildly, apparently sending Tabares home. The shortstop desperately races over to try and catch the flare, but it is just out of his reach. The ball bounces in front of the shortstop, who fields the ball on the hop just down the third base line, turns, and fires to the waiting catcher at home plate. The fans all along the third base line, where the majority of Industriales’ supporters usually congregate, rise up, their voices crescendoing as the runner and throw converge at the plate. Tabares slides into home plate, violently colliding with the catcher, who is barring easy access to Tabares’s safe arrival. The umpire sees that the catcher has hung onto the ball even as Tabares’s barreling body has sent him sprawling. The umpire’s arm comes up, signaling that Tabares is out. The crowd erupts, howling in shared agony. Tabares leaps up and screams at the umpire. Industriales’ manager races out of the dugout and begins to argue with the umpire. It is as sharp and short a confrontation as the play at the plate. In the stands, the fans are mirroring the confrontation on the field. Even as Industriales’ players warm up for the next half an inning, the buzz of emotional voices continues unabated behind the home team’s bench. Some are arguing about whether or not the umpire made the correct call. Everything, from the position of the umpire in relation to the collision to

1 Almendares’ manager, Ralph Bragan, and Amado Maestri discussing recent events circa 1955. Source: Author’s collection.

the supposed bias of the umpire as anti-Industrialista, informs the swiftly moving debates. Others argue over the finer strategic points of whether or not the third base coach meant to send Tabares, and if he did, what the devil was he thinking when the ball was so close to the infield? The verbal confrontation between athlete or manager and umpire is not new, nor are the fans’ emotional reactions to events and their ensuing debates. The contexts in which such confrontations occur are always the most tense, passionate games. When elimination is a potential outcome, when real or imagined expectations—such as Industriales’ assumed place in the playo√s—heighten the tension of the spectacle, those are the moments when Cuban managers and players challenge the authority figure that determines reality on the diamond. A Cuban manager does not argue with an umpire to ‘‘defend one’s players’’ as professional managers in Major League Baseball do during the course of a season. Cuban managers challenge an umpire’s call only when it appears that a particular umpire may have had an obstructed or partial view of the total play. Fans, however, question nearly everything—from umpires’ calls, to pitch selection, to overall strategy. It is all grist for their verbal mill. Their arguments reflect di√ering versions of an event, whether a player was safe or out, whether an umpire is biased, whether a manager employed the ‘‘right’’ strategy. Industriales’ manager explained the di≈culty of his job: ‘‘After every game, there are twenty, thirty, forty thousand managers waiting outside the stadium’s exit to explain to me what I did wrong.’’ Arguments like these are microcosmic examples of the languages of contention that exist, not just in baseball but in broader society. Wherever fans congregate, they discuss the decisions made and the actions of not just athletes, but coaches and umpires, and the correctness of their decisions. This discourse remains nearly constant; the next game only adds additional information to the continuing arguments in which Cuban fans engage. These debates do not end with the final out; they continue the next morning in various sites around Havana. Their viewpoints and the arguments that ensue from their di√ering positions are struggles over the definition of ‘‘what just happened.’’ In short, they are arguments over social reality. Their passion feeds social constructions of Cuban reality and, at the same time, their language, the metaphors of the game, percolates into social discourse, creating images unique to Cuban understandings of the game and themselves. Similarly, baseball fields, appearing identical to those found elsewhere throughout the Americas, Baseball and the Language of Contention ∞Ω

configure Cuban notions of themselves and their place in the world. It is these notions of themselves and their place in the world that inform and fuel the struggles inherent in identity politics. The central paradox of identity politics is that such localized struggles are no longer tied to specific geographic locations, if they ever were (cf. Sharp 1996 with Comaro√ 1996). Identities’ supposed primordial natures have become transcendent, crossing political, social, economic, spatial, and temporal divides. Sentiments, whose greatest force is their ability to ignite intimacy into political awareness and turn locality into a staging ground for identity, are now spread over vast and irregular spaces. It is through the disjunctive interplay of commerce, media, and national politics that identity, once a genie contained in the spatial bottle of locality, has now become a global force forever slipping in, between, and through Aladdin’s lamp. These artificial encapsulations simply did not and do not reflect the ambiguous intangibility of identities’ locations, for, like the locations of cultures (Bhabha 1994), they are not only lived in material, daily interactions but are also imagined, multiple, and mobile. The difficulties with such enclosed, ‘‘spatialized’’ localities are that they obscure the lived realities faced by any transnational person.∞ Perhaps now more than ever, people are chronically mobile and routinely displaced. They invent homes and homelands not in situ but through memories of and claims on places that they can or will no longer corporeally occupy (Malkki 1997a). Such processes transform places from being mere containers of people, things to be assimilated as known categories, to being social events in which people create and perform place and self. As events, places become social performances that are continuously negotiated and repeatedly performed by people engaged in these interactive processes. Each place, then, is unique, taking on the qualities of its occupants and reflecting those qualities in its own constitution and description and expressing them in its occurrence: places not only are, they happen (Casey 1996: 26–27). Keith Basso’s exquisite study on the places the Western Apache inhabit (1996) deftly and passionately demonstrates that their landscape is not a static piece of mountainous desert that they occupy but consists of continuous, vibrant interactive occurrences that constantly remind them who they are as Apache. Although others occupy the same space in Arizona, that is, Anglos and Latinos, they do not exist within the same places as the Apache. Basso’s open frustration of learning place-names and the stories associated with them while traversing ≤≠ chapter one

the range pursuing cattle with Apache mentors makes this all too clear. The rootedness the Apache experience through their stories embedded in the landscape powerfully illustrates the imaginary saliency place has amongst people, yet the imaginary power of places is not limited to the occupiers of a particular parcel of land. By comprehending places as events, not everyone present is necessarily part of that place—they do not participate in the event that constitutes that place making. This disjuncture, the separation of people from an imagined parcel of land, challenges the assumptions that ‘‘ground’’ people to a territory; assumptions that are prevalent not only among international aid agencies, governments, and other ngos working with refugees and other migrants but among scholars as well (Malkki 1997b). The grounding of peoples in static locations limits the kinds of understandings scholars can have of societies and cultures. The decoupling of culture and location proves to be powerfully vibrant, as Dick Hebdige shows. Rather than tracing back the roots . . . to their source, I’ve tried to show how the roots themselves are in a constant state of flux and change. The roots don’t stay in one place. They change shape. They change colour. And they grow. There is no such thing as a pure point of origin . . . but that doesn’t mean there isn’t history (Hebdige 1987: 10).

Hebdige’s refusal to be limited to fixed territorial concepts in tracing the cultural evolution of expressive forms insightfully shows the liberating analytical flexibility separating specific territorially defined localities and places from culture and identity. Such separation provides greater clarity and creativity in ethnographic enquiry, demonstrating that just as places are more frequently understood as cultural events than as static locations, anthropological investigations should be envisioned more as a multiplicity of events than a discrete period of time a researcher spends occupying a supposedly discrete space. Critiques of anthropological writing (Behar and Gordon 1995; Cli√ord and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986) point out that the nature of the ethnographic enterprise is one that is increasingly similar to other transnational forms. While the initial e√orts of anthropologists adopted a perspective in their works that located them outside and/or above their respective fields, the disciplinary turn in the late twentieth century that located the investigative self within ‘‘the field,’’ as a discretely bounded space that one could enter and exit, also became increasingly problematic. Places are, like all symbols, essentially empty of Baseball and the Language of Contention ≤∞

meaning until a group of people imbues them with meaning. These meanings are hardly uncontested and are constantly struggled over. The history of particular concepts, and how they come to mean what they do at particular moments and particular times, can never be divorced from larger historical contexts. It is important to look carefully at why it is seen as necessary, at those moments and those times, that this particular aspect of social reality should be named. Concepts, especially those relating to social life, emerge out of debate, contestation, and generally as in some sense answers to perceived problems; a concept’s history shapes it in various ways. On the one hand, the meanings a concept acquires are never completely fixed, rather they tend to evolve continuously; on the other hand, earlier meanings may cling to it and a√ect its later usage. In other words, there is a continual reciprocal interaction between the context that calls concepts into being and within which they come to be used, and the relatively stable meanings that they acquire over time, which have their own power. This power derives from the fact that human beings necessarily perceive their world as defined, not totally but to an important extent, by the names or concepts they have inherited (Crehan 2002: 39).

These struggles over the meanings of concepts that define social experience constitute what William Roseberry calls ‘‘languages of contention’’ (Roseberry 1994, 1996). A language of contention is a tacitly agreed upon symbolic framework that connects discursive and social fields of force through which contestations for power are articulated. In such frameworks, the concept itself is not questioned but its significance, its meaning, becomes the point of struggle. Such languages are a uniquely privileged concept for the exploration of the dynamic tension evident in, but not limited to, ethnic and national identities as well as state legitimacy; each of which can serve as interrelated languages of contention (Roseberry 1996: 77). Furthermore, these languages are a central aspect of hegemonic processes that form the common discursive frameworks in which domination and struggle can occur. What is especially significant about languages of contention is that they are not tied to any geographic location; nor are individuals required to be physically proximate to one another for them to engage in such language. In this manner, languages of contention are indicative of the ebb and flow of power within complex interrelated social relationships. As a preeminent language of contention, sport should not be under≤≤ chapter one

stood as a stable, monolithic cultural institution but rather ‘‘as sites where creative resistances are practiced, bringing the processes of struggle to the forefront’’ (Springwood 1996: 183). As a discursive arena within the context of power that serves to circulate, control, and represent knowledge, making it uniquely e√ective for inculcating national feelings, sport has been harnessed to specific ideological discourses across the political spectrum (Hoberman 1984). Political leaders have made use of sport symbolism to convey position, strength, resoluteness, and other meanings throughout the ages. U.S. presidents throw out the ritual first pitch, and routinely telephone to congratulate the champions of a prominent professional league. Socialist leaders made sport one of several tools used to mobilize the masses and was perceived as completely inseparable from education, culture, health, defense, happiness, and the development of a new society (Riordan 1999). Socialist leaders used sport as part of their revolutionary platforms precisely because it was one way to incur prestige in international arenas in which the prominence and strength of socialist states could be trumpeted (Riordan 1978) as well as inculcate specific bodily ideals in the populace (Brownell 1995). When Castro’s Revolutionaries swarmed into Havana, one of their first activities was to engage in a series of exhibition baseball games to demonstrate the Cubanness of the Revolution’s leaders. It is clear, then, that sport can be implemented to convey a variety of meanings. The ease with which even the least political individual can identify a team of nine, eleven, or fifteen young persons physically excelling with the nation makes an imagined community of millions all the more real. That individual, even one who merely cheers, becomes an embodied symbol of one’s nation as well (Hobsbawm 1990: 139–42). Even at a more localized level, involvement in a sport easily makes other, smaller imagined communities just as real, and through participation— whether by cheering, playing, or o≈ciating—individuals become embodied iconic symbols of those respective communities, whether this is an ethnic, geographic, religious or other a≈liation. It must not be forgotten for a moment that individuals constitute collective groupings, and it is individuals who are the vehicles of power within said groups. Power must be analyzed as something that circulates. It is never a geographic location. Never here nor there, and never, ever, in anybody’s hands; it is not a commodity or item of wealth. Rather, power is a force employed and exercised through networks in which individuals Baseball and the Language of Contention ≤≥

are the vehicles of this circulation of power, not its points of application. The individual embodies power but is not the manifestation of power. Rather, the individual is an e√ect of power and the element of its articulation (Foucault 1980: 98). That the individual is the embodiment of social power becomes apparent in studying sport, especially team sports. Individuals on one team may exert power by ‘‘controlling’’ a game, that is, not just creating a desired outcome (victory) but dictating the flow of play. Yet at no moment is a game truly controlled by an individual. Rather, a game is a set of actions within a specific social context in which various individuals or groups compete to create a desired outcome. Even the o≈cials overseeing such contests do not control them. Although a referee on the field has formal authority, his or her ability to adjudicate is dependent upon his or her constant communication and negotiation with the athletes competing against one another. Sporting practices are, at their core, all about individuals acting in concert or in conflict with one another in an e√ort to achieve goals. Clearly, then, power circulates as continuously negotiated relations between individuals. Conceptualizing power in this manner underscores the dynamic interdependence of social life. Power is not organized along binary oppositions but rather amorphously retreats, reorganizes, and reasserts itself elsewhere (Foucault 1980: 56–59). These movements form the various currents that connect localities to each other. Baseball’s currents illuminate linkages between seemingly disconnected localities, demonstrating hidden or, at the very least, less obvious relationships, such as that between the professional leagues in Japan and Italy with Cuban o≈cials located in their o≈ces in Ciudad Deportiva (Sport City) in Havana, as well the apparently ideological paradox of transnational capitalist corporations such as Mizuno Corporation forging alliances with baseball o≈cials of the socialist government of Cuba (Carter 2008). It is within this field that two particular powerful languages of contention come to the forefront. The first revolves around the concept of Cuba itself. Far more than a singular island, the discursive struggle over Cuba constitutes a central struggle evident in the disjuncture of localities. At the core of this language of contention over how Cuba is to be understood are questions revolving around what Cuba is. What are its boundaries? What does Cuba signify? Where is it located? Concerns such as these inform the language of contention and are discussed in the section below. Immediately following the section exploring the language of contention that is Cuba, a ≤∂ chapter one

second language of contention is discussed that concentrates on what it means to be Cuban. Cuban identity itself is a particularly strident and evocative language of contention: the struggles over what it means to be Cuban are often understood as a moralistic attack on one’s own notion of one’s self. In this regard, to question an individual’s cubanidad is to challenge the very notion of that person as a valid social being. It is within the fields of Cuban baseball that both languages of contention are informed. Baseball serves as an embodied, passionate spectacle in which the vital qualities of cubanidad and of Cuba become apparent yet still contested, like baseball, on a nearly nightly basis.

On Cuba Cuba itself is something of an enigma. From Alejo Carpentier’s first characterization of Cuba as lo real maravilloso (wondrous reality; Carpentier 2003 [1949]) to the myths and misunderstandings of contemporary Cuba that dominate popular understanding of the island and its people, a sense of the surreal often seeps into any discussion about Cuba. Lo real maravilloso refers to a specific form of being, a specific type of reality, in which the Caribbean’s hurricanes, the Amazon’s floods, and the Central American eruptions and earthquakes all embody the same destructive beauty inherent in Latin American state oppression, in the enlightened brutishness of Latin American dictators, and in the creative syncretic redemption of Latin American religion, art, and culture. Lo real maravilloso is the embodiment of the heroic and the horrific in one individual, in the natural world, and, simultaneously, in society. Contradictory and celebratory, even within academia, Cuba appears and disappears like some ethereal entity, having a tangible presence in some disciplines, such as political science, yet fading to invisibility when many scholars discuss the Caribbean. Similarly, in imaginations across the world, Cubans’ athletic prowess is legendary, especially in baseball and boxing, throughout international circles even as Cuba itself is becoming infamous for another kind of athleticism: Cuba’s growing reputation as a ‘‘hot spot’’ for sex tourism. Despite reemerging, overt bodily connections linking Cuba to the rest of the globe, Cuba is widely perceived as completely isolated and somehow outside the rest of the increasingly interconnected world as is evidenced with its rapidly disappearing political cachet. Indeed, part of Cuba’s appeal is the sense that it is about to disappear forever when that Baseball and the Language of Contention ≤∑

particular version only ever existed in the imaginations of the foreigners in the first place (Carter 2007). Nominally centered on a dimly remembered memory of a Cuba of days-gone-by when Cuba was a hedonistic playground for American tourists, such nostalgic discourse has become more explicit in the struggle over an imagined post-socialist Cuba (Prieto González 2003). Nothing could be further from the historical reality. The island of Cuba has been a crossroads between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres since before Columbus’s arrival (Rogozinski 1992: 13–17). After the Spanish conquest, Cuba’s geographic location served to bridge transatlantic tra≈c. Despite the island’s central location in maritime tra≈c flows, the Spanish virtually ignored it after conquering its inhabitants. Only in the latter part of the eighteenth century did Cuba begin to figure prominently in the Spanish Empire. The collapse of the Spanish Empire and nominal independence only a≈rmed the already strong relationships between the United States and Cuba—links that contemporary Cubans are acutely aware of and readily recognize, as Cuban scholar Rafael Hernández commented at a 1994 symposium in Havana. Cuba has always been close to the us, more so than Latin American countries. There are a group of definitive embodied elements in the manner of being, in the culture, and in the consciousness of the Cuban, that are not necessarily negative, in the sense of a social project not in that of the proper socialist revolution. Cuba became one of the societies of this hemisphere most close to that of the us in cultural terms (Bolívar et al. 1995: 105).

Yet Cuba remains somewhat phantasmal because most discussions on issues a√ecting the Caribbean do not include the region’s largest island in their considerations. Historians of the region certainly include the island until the 1960s, and then the island’s physical presence and socioeconomic preeminence disappear unless it is a scholar who specifically concentrates upon the Cuban Revolution. There are notable exceptions, most especially Eric Williams (1970) and Franklin Knight (1990); however, when contemporary trends, such as circular migration or tourism, are analyzed, Cuba disappears. It is clear then that history, like all academic discourses, is a discursive practice that presupposes a particular temporal organization, assumes a specific sociopolitical positioning, and bears a particular symbolic weight. Although history can serve as an authentic reference point, whose artifice has been denied, in dialogues ≤∏ chapter one

within a culture or across cultures it is clearly subject to change. When there is a failure in hegemony, history can no longer serve as a reference point, for each of the parties to an encounter has its own ‘‘legitimate’’ position, its own history (Crapanzano 1992). In short, under such contexts, history becomes yet another language of contention, a contested narrative that a≈rms, among other things, its own perspective. Cuba faded because the specific historical circumstances of the Cuban Revolution altered the discourses on and about the island. Many of these discourses are based on Cold War ideologies that dominated how the world was perceived in the last half of the twentieth century. The Cold War fundamentally shaped scholarship, particularly scholarship on socialist systems and especially such scholarship in the United States (Chomsky et al. 1997).≤ Dividing the world into two camps that vied for global domination in a third camp while simultaneously hunting for internal conspirators threatening to undermine each camp’s power and legitimacy, rampant political paranoia dominated cultural life in both the Soviet bloc and in the United States (Englehardt 1995; Whitfield 1996). This ideological discourse created a division in which rival states did not engage in any form of interaction other than hostile ones, yet their economies remained inextricably intertwined. Throughout the 1980s the Soviets were among the highest-ranking trading partners of the United States (Pockney 1991: 246–330); all the while American rhetoric maintained a hostile stance toward the ussr . The collapse of the Soviet Union accelerated Cuba’s changing relationships across the globe—reconstituting some existing relationships, destroying others, and renewing some historical ones that had waned—and consequently a√ected local social relations as well. To characterize these changes as ‘‘islands of capitalism’’ in a socialist sea (Pérez-López 1994) presupposes capitalist and socialist systems are somehow incompatible and separate when they are interconnected systems. Such a characterization also downplays Cuba’s preexisting global relationships and promotes a misleading illusion that isleños (islanders) do not interact with certain other isleños because some are involved in capitalist relations and others in socialist ones. It would be more informative to consider socioeconomic relations on the island as the pursuance of related, compatible, di√use strategies for procuring basic needs. Remnants of Cold War ideological frameworks continue to shape analyses of Cuba even as various theorists construct a world inextricably Baseball and the Language of Contention ≤π

interconnected and intertwined in relations of power (Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson 1995; Friedman 1994; Hardt and Negri 2000). These remnant frameworks contain virtually the same strategic maneuver that anthropologists used to make in their representations of non-Western peoples (Kuper 1988; Rosaldo 1989). Anthropology has operated through an album or anthology of images (changing over time, to be sure) whereby some feature of a group is seen as quintessential to the group and is especially true of that group in contrast with other groups (Appadurai 1986). For example, the concept of ‘‘hierarchy’’ in anthropological discourse historically has been what is most true of India and truer of India than of any other place. In similar fashion, academic discourse, especially U.S.-based discourse on Cuba, has been one of isleño ‘‘Cubans’’ caught lockstep in socialist ideology unable to e√ect any agency in their own right within or beyond the island’s shores.≥ What they know, feel, and believe confines them. They are prisoners of their ‘‘mode of thought.’’ Two assumptions underpin the links equating intellectual and spatial confinement. The first is the notion that cultures are discrete ‘‘wholes’’ that occupy specific geographically demarcated spaces and that each culture has its specific location. The second is the notion that the intellectual operations of natives are somehow tied to their ecological, technological, and other material circumstances in those spaces (Appadurai 1992: 36). The subtle assumption behind this attribution of immobility is not so much physical as ecological. Natives are those who are somehow confined to places by their connection to what the place permits. Thus, all the discourse of niches, of foraging, of material skill, of slowly evolved technologies, is actually also a language of incarceration. In this instance confinement is not simply a function of the mysterious, even metaphysical, attachment to physical places, but a function of their adaptations to their environments (Appadurai 1992: 35).

Cold War ideology applied just such a model to citizens of socialist states, analytically locking them into ‘‘brainwashed’’ or ‘‘controlled’’ populaces unable to express any opinions independent of state control. ‘‘Natives,’’ however they are actually termed (e.g., Cubans), are somehow assumed to represent their selves and their history without distortion or residue. They are viewed as existing in one place and one place only, a place which Western authorities (explorers, administrators, missionaries, and eventually anthropologists) eventually visit, and the critical ≤∫ chapter one

aspect of such attributions is a sense that socialist populations’ incarceration has a moral and intellectual dimension. Social evolutionary in character—such explication is strongly reminiscent of colonial (and anthropological) writings on the Other in its perspective and its agenda— these assumptions result in the Othering of the inhabitants of rival states that do not organize their economies or political systems in the manner of the United States, thereby removing any sense of agency from the peoples that inhabit those geopolitical spaces. This denies the very history of Cuba as one of constant flows of ideas, practices, and people. Instead, it freezes both the idea of the place, ‘‘Cuba,’’ and the people, ‘‘Cubans,’’ into a snapshot in which neither can move. These shortcomings do not, nonetheless, lessen the merits of the intellectual work done about Cuba. Many scholars, adopting a variety of ideological perspectives, not only critiqued the shortcomings of what has occurred in Cuba over the past four decades but also contributed to the sum total of knowledge about Cuban issues. In keeping with these diverse resources, I suggest our notions of Cuba shift on these various ideological currents, resulting in changing understandings of both place and people. Indeed, the Cuban scholar Graziella Pogolotti has suggested that the island ‘‘floats’’: This country has never had clear cut boundaries. I think that islands have ports and the ports are communication routes. Cuba is a country that floats. The great interchange of here with there and there with here. And one of things that has characterized us is the capacity to synthesize, to take a little of all parts and give it form, to produce a certain eclecticism in agreement with our concrete conditions (Bolívar et al. 1995: 109).

Pogolotti directly challenges the Cold War intellectual assumptions that lock Cuba into one specific location that is somehow removed from the rest of the Caribbean and world. Her comments draw upon the ideas of the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz, who many years before the Cuban Revolution argued for an understanding of Cuba and all things Cuban, lo cubano, as malleable, changing, inventive, and flowing. ‘‘Cuba is not merely an island or an archipelago. It is also an expression of international meaning that has not always been accepted as coinciding with its geographic meaning’’ (Ortiz 1993a: 1). Ortiz’s ‘‘Cuba’’ was not a bounded localized community but multistranded, transatlantic movements of people, commodities, and ideas that shaped Cuban experience (1991), and Baseball and the Language of Contention ≤Ω

‘‘not only in the transplantation from many foreign environments to a singular Cuba’’ (Ortiz 1993a: 4). Rather, Cuba ‘‘shaped their local transformations’’ wherever Cubans may have experienced those movements (ibid.). Following Ortiz’s line of thought, examining how transnational movements embedded in the practice of baseball inform how Cubans playing and watching baseball animate their own conceptions of themselves is one of many potential means of probing the negotiated formations of cubanidad.

On Cubanidad In trying to unshackle Cuba from ideological fetters, it becomes apparent that being Cuban is more than some compartmentalized vision of a certain people. Those fetters render discourses about Cuban culture or identity — one primarily produced on the island and another produced in ‘‘la colonia usano-cubana’’ (the U.S.-Cuban colony)∂ —anachronistic, wholly incomplete, and inaccurate. Every time I return across time and space, between cultures and economic systems, I am more convinced that I do not want or need to accept the either/or definition of my identity which demands that you choose sides. My identity is far more complex than this . . . [and] I now understand that I do not have to accept categories which split who I am (de los Angeles Torres 1995: 36).

The rejection of this Cold War binary formation has emerged as both the Revolution and its exiles have matured. The denial of hard-line either/or positions in reference to the validity of a particular kind of Cubanness linked to political ideology is particularly evident in the younger generation of Cubans born away from the island, a generation who grew up on their parents’ and grandparents’ stories about Cuba but decided to see for themselves what it is truly like. Indeed, in this instance, Cubans are similar to many other Caribbean migrants who identify with an island while living abroad, possibly having never been to that island for more than occasional visits (Olwig 1993). Thus, the importance of Cuba as a place is more powerful and evocative as an imagined place than a geographic location. During a 1995 conference on national identity and Cuban culture held in Havana, Virgilio López Lemus, a Cuban intellectual, discussed how transnational migration a√ects individuals’ conceptions ≥≠ chapter one

of Cuban identity, noting how Cuban identity is di√erent for those who live some place other than Cuba. The identity of a Cuban in Cuba isn’t the same as the identity of a Cuban in Spain, in Miami, nor does it include the same identity of a Cuban from Miami who resides in another part of the world, let’s say, in Ecuador, or wherever . . . For me, it seems that this is so, because it is not a problem of merely living in the territory, without having the territory as a reference. Let’s say, [I am] living in Switzerland, but yet [I] think about Cuba continuously, and use Cuba as a reference because I have family in Cuba, because I send things to my family, because I have to work not only for myself but for my family in Cuba, this, too, is a form of living in Cuba (uneac 1995: 50).

In López Lemus’s view, it is apparent that cubanidad can be maintained and claimed despite one’s possible position as a migrant, exile or not. While these di√erent versions of Cuban identity may not be the same, they are nonetheless still Cuban. As long as Cuba is the imagined homeland, la patria, then a Cuban identity can be claimed. While having a geographic referent point is important, the truly essential element for the construction and preservation of cubanidad is continual reference to that imagined place, often via familial contact with relatives who reside on the island. The preservation of familial ties, in particular, is an important aspect of the maintenance of cubanidad, even when that kinship relation is entirely fictive. An illustrative point is my own experience in Havana and my many trips between my home and the island. During one portion of my extended fieldwork, a young couple graciously allowed me to live with them. While staying with Robinson, ‘‘Robi,’’ and his wife, Lisa, they both insisted that I tell anyone who asked that I was a cousin of Lisa’s sister. As a member of the household, I was included in various family events, nieces’ birthdays, parents’ anniversaries, and other festive occasions where family and neighbors gathered, gossiped, and maintained social connections. On one particular evening, Robi took me to task as I tried to leave a family to-do early to attend a game at the Estadio Latinoamericano. He, several of his neighbors, and a couple of cousins surrounded three circular tables overburdened with plastic cups and half-empty bottles of rum in one corner. Women had gathered around several other tables lining the opposite wall from the mirrorball-dominated dance floor. ‘‘Tomás, you go there almost every night. What’s so important that you have to go tonight? This is family. You are a part of this.’’ Baseball and the Language of Contention ≥∞

The creation of fictive kin is by no means unique to Cubans. Wherever these events occur, they reinforce the formation of cultural intimacy that links people together, even ones who would not otherwise have readily evident social connections. Nonetheless, it is these fictive connections that help legitimate any claims of cubanidad. Having kinship relations to someone on the island, even though an individual could claim to be Cuban without ever actually having been to the island, is one of many forms of cultural spectacle that create sentiments of intimacy.∑ As my own experience makes clear, one does not have to be actually related (‘‘real’’ kin relations) to someone on the island or have Cuban ancestry; belonging to a family can be but yet one more means to foster cultural intimacy. Cubanidad, then, is a culturally based identity predicated upon the establishment of a degree of cultural intimacy, often through claims of kinship to a person residing on the island, but also structured upon an individual’s involvement in cultural performances, such as music, dance, and sport. Baseball, then, acts as a social milieu in which cultural intimacy can be forged and renewed. In so doing, one can be Cuban as long as one has a specific worldview that maintains a cultural connection to the island. Cubanidad does not have political boundaries; nor does it end at the isle’s shores. Rather, cubanidad draws on historical constructions based on cultural values and norms, making it problematic, fluid, and constantly contested. Ortiz makes just such a point in defining cubanidad. Cubanidad is ‘‘the quality of lo cubano,’’ or, if you will, one’s manner of being, one’s character, one’s nature, one’s distinctive condition, one’s individualism in relation to the universal. . . . Cubanidad is found in each individual, not in their blood, nor in their career, nor in their residence. Cubanidad is principally the peculiar quality of a culture, that of Cuba. Cubanidad is the condition of the soul, in the complex of emotions, ideas, and attitudes (Ortiz 1993a: 2–3).

Ortiz’s definition marks the di√erence between conceptualizations of cubanidad based on cultural constructs and the popular use of biological markers for determining cubanidad. He denies that any specific claim of racial categorization belongs in cubanidad, all the while recognizing that people make biological claims to cubanidad through race and birth (Ortiz 1993b, 1997). His denial of biology’s salience in cubanidad reaches back to earlier intellectuals’ considerations of Cubanness. In arguing for the le≥≤ chapter one

gitimacy of the Cuban nation, José Martí, widely regarded as the father of Cuban independence, insisted that being Cuban was a cultural fact. Racial distinctions were not merely subsumed under the more important national independence movement, but were denied any legitimacy at all through Martí’s insistence that, white or black, all Cubans were human and, hence, ‘‘brothers’’ (Martí 1977: 306–22). Both Martí’s insistence that racial considerations were not valid and Ortiz’s comments above indicate Cuban identity constructions revolved around cultural issues and not biologically based racial constructs. The Cuban state advocates a similar point: race is considered to be a class-based issue that was resolved with the elimination of institutionalized racial practices of the previous preRevolutionary state.∏ State-based discourses of identification invariably project a unique, usually homogenous, national identity onto a specific geographical space with well-marked, stable borders. Everyone within those borders is presumed to be one nationality, and everyone outside those borders is not. Displacements, border crossings, and discontinuities all tear loose the tenuous anchoring of a national identity within a geographical space and a linear history. ‘‘Being Cuban’’ consists of multiple fragmented experiences and practices that transgress constructed discourses and, although practically operative and normative, boundaries of place and space. Therefore, ‘‘being Cuban’’ cannot be reduced to monolithic or geographic anchors, thereby suggesting how inadequate the historiographical modernist categorizations of nation-states are. Understanding Cuba depends on an individual’s position within various currents of global forces. Cubans have di√erent perspectives and understandings of themselves, and their island. These di√erences cannot be reduced solely to their geographic position. At no time have Cubans been completely disconnected from each other. They were and continue to be united by an idea of Cuba even if they did and do not agree on exactly how that imagined Cuba should be coalesced. Contrary to Cold War rhetoric, Cuba has always been entangled with the rest of the world. Modern Cuba has always had diasporic populations. Thousands of Cubans have lived and do live in Florida, along the East Coast of the United States, and across the Caribbean. Many have never set foot on the island, yet they are intimately and passionately involved in contesting cubanidad. These struggles—which involve understandings of Cuba, what it means to be Cuban, and what is ‘‘authentic’’ Cuban culture—are deadly Baseball and the Language of Contention ≥≥

serious, for they directly a√ect how being Cuban is not just imagined but actualized. As the grounds for and the stakes of active struggle, with real outcomes in real worlds powerfully represented in ritual, literature, the arts, drama, and sport, these languages of contention must be understood as the contested ‘‘webs of meaning’’ (Geertz 1973) people make and within which they live. Meanings are not equivalent to culture, however. A culture is not something one can grasp with both hands or point to and declare, ‘‘There! That’s culture.’’ This apparition-like quality is similar to the ghosts of alternative or subaltern histories that Stephan Palmié uses to introduce his argument for contemporaneous Cuban modernities (2002: 3–14). By eliminating the temporal separation between ‘‘civilized’’ Western selves and ‘‘traditional’’ non-Western Others in earlier ethnographic representations, Palmié shifts culture from being static characteristics of people to active discourses about how people perceive themselves and their current position in the present based on their histories of a contested past that they project onto aspired futures. These contemporaneous modernities are founded on positioned histories deemed relevant, or ‘‘in the field of play,’’ while others are pushed to the margins or in ‘‘foul territory.’’ Such histories are themselves culturally specific constructions tied to spatial and temporal positions for viewing what has already occurred and how it may or may not a√ect current social contexts. Instead of taking an inadequate, atomistic approach toward culture that splits culture and its meanings into separate levels of analysis, which are usually understood as being independent of each other, meaning is conferred in the relationships between social actors rather than as characteristics of individuals. In e√ect, Palmié demonstrates how two versions of cubanidad act as a language of contention. His elucidations of Cuban modernities change the notion of meaning from a passive object of study to a dynamic, evolving, hegemonic process. Meaning becomes the result of dialectical processes and interactions rather than a static one-to-one correspondence of symbol with the object it represents. The ability to delineate the terms of a language of contention reflects how power is implemented and, consequently, how Cubanness will be defined. These languages of contention composed of unifying symbols that serve as points of struggle allow factions to tacitly agree on a common symbolic vocabulary while simultaneously contesting the meanings of those symbols. At the heart of the Cuban language of contention are the contested meanings over cubanidad. The struggle over how to view and imagine Cuba is similar to a ≥∂ chapter one

baseball game. The existence of the contest’s rules—not the actual rules but the existence of rules—frustratingly ambiguous and contradictory as they appear, may be the only agreed-upon aspect to this contest. In this particular kind of game, the teams are not necessarily as clearly defined as they might appear; nor is this game limited to a binary contest solely between two teams. Instead, there are multiple competitors. Players can and do switch sides without warning. The very lines separating fair territory from foul ground shift without warning as well. The rest of this book, then, focuses on how the politics of passion and cultural intimacy inform the languages of contention that are cubanidad and Cuba. It does so by first discussing the historical shifts within baseball that inform these languages, and then second, examining the use of spectacle to inform such languages. It then moves to the contemporary struggles over what it means to be Cuban as embodied in Cuban baseball.

Baseball and the Language of Contention ≥∑

CHAPTER

≤

Circling the Base Paths: Baseball, Migration, and the Cuban Nation Industriales’ left fielder, Javier Méndez, steps up to the plate in the bottom of the seventh inning with two men already on base. The crowd is barely paying attention to the events on the field as the majority of the spectators are Industriales’ supporters, and their team is comfortably ahead 9–1. Méndez takes a couple of pitches, and then fouls one o√. On the next pitch, Méndez swings and sends the ball racing into the depths of the empty right-field seats. Distracted, unengaged fans suddenly leap out of their seats with the crack of the bat, and an ensuing roar increases in volume as the ball soars farther and farther. ‘‘Qué bomba! Tira una bomba!’’ (What a bomb! He launched a bomb!) Méndez circles the bases, and fans begin streaming out of the seats and head for the exits. The game ends with the final score Industriales 12 Guantanamo 1 after seven innings. Cuban baseball enforces a ten-run mercy rule: if a team is ahead after seven innings by ten or more runs the game ends. When this happens, the game itself is classified as a nocout (knockout), drawing on boxing terminology for ending a contest prematurely via the complete dominance of one antagonist by another. Talking excitedly as they proceed out of the cement tunnels under the grandstand, fans comment on Méndez’s nocout jonrón (knockout home run). Like Japanese baseball, which has a specific name for a gameending home run (a sayonara), Cuban baseball has a specific name for a game-ending home run, el nocout. The context here is not that Méndez knocked the ball out of the field of play but that he delivered the knockout blow that ended the contest. It was, according to the fans’ aesthetics, an especially good home run. The game itself was not one of calidad (quality), something that Cubans aspire to encounter in their baseball; Méndez’s blast did, however, provide a singular moment of calidad. The calidad of Méndez’s act was not in how far he hit the ball or how powerfully he sent it through the night air, but the moment at which he hit the ball. Not all home runs are created equal. They have varying value and meaning, varying calidad.

A jonrón (home run) is the most impassioned moment in baseball. It is, as the esteemed sports writer George Plimpton calls it, a defining instant (2002: 256). It is a monumental event that ensures a player’s sojourn around the diamond is secure; this particular journey will culminate in the athlete’s safe return to his starting point. At any other time, a batter could be cut down by forces conspiring against him (the opposition), forces outside his ability to influence, that would prevent his successful return. But a jonrón negates those possibilities, denies those forces any power to act upon him. In short, a jonrón guarantees that he will get home. When a home run happens, it is the one certainty in a contest filled with uncertainty. Having previously introduced the open-ended realities of Cuba in the preceding chapter, in this chapter I examine a central dialogue from which much of Cuban identity is defined: the twin discourses of nation and place expressed in the metaphoric sentiments of home and migration. This dialectic helps us understand how Cuban identity is made manifest in the embodied practices of baseball. The idea of home, the name given to the central point around which all action in a game revolves, underlies all action on the baseball diamond. Athletes venture forth in attempts to avoid being tagged ‘‘out,’’ an event that metaphorically kills the player/migrant. Other times, players/migrants venture forth only to be ‘‘stranded,’’ unable to return home. Only occasionally do those who venture out in that hostile world, which conspires against their successful return, return safely. Baseball is a game that plays out and reenacts both the anxieties and triumphs that these movements of migration engender. Virtually impossible to translate from English, home creates associations, mixtures of memory and longing, and senses of security, autonomy, accessibility, and inclusiveness that are absent from house or dwelling. Home can refer to house, land, village, city, district, country, or indeed world, and, thus, can transpose sentimental associations from one scale to another. As a concept it signifies and invokes origins—of time, place, and environment. Conjoining a myriad of a√ective realms and containing a wealth of transposable imagery, home is where self-definition begins. Home is where a person first realizes that one is an original, perhaps similar to others, especially loved ones, yet is distinctly discrete. The centrality of home testifies to the desire to achieve fixity amid ceaseless flow, and is used metaphorically to pro√er a unified, identifiable culture Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ≥π

within a specific imagined space. Most a√ectively charged through the way it is sensually apprehended, constructs of home produce an aesthetic experience of place embedded in memory (Bachelard 1994 [1969]). As a way of making spatial sense of the world, home links various spatial levels together, from the small-scale domestic to the large-scale national space. Being ‘‘at home,’’ however, does much more than link sliding scales of spatial worlds. Home emotionally ‘‘grounds’’ individuals to a place via specific practices, particular ways of doing things (Gray 2003), even if one does not occupy that particular space. Contrary to the stationary, grounded notions implicit within home, Paul Gilroy shows how a mobile sense of home is possible where the focus is on ‘‘routes’’ rather than ‘‘roots’’ (1994). In this more mobile context, home becomes less rooted to a single location and more constituted by the connections between places. The ways in which people set up home in di√erent places over a lifetime do not necessarily mean that a sense of home becomes dissipated with distance. Rather, a form of serial domiciliation is achieved, in which familiar routines are reintegrated, familiar references are sought, and well-known networks are reconfigured in new locales. These processes are not linear progressions or a hierarchy of periods that were lived and somehow ‘‘completed,’’ like chapters in a book. Instead, one locale does not fully replace another, but each location adds or reconfigures the interconnections between the others in an accumulation of life worlds. Such a progressive sense of home does much to decenter essentialist notions of place (Massey 1993). Home, then, can be considered as ‘‘bases on the basepaths’’ through which a host of cultural, economic, social, and material influences ceaselessly flow. Whether conceived as an evocative singular place or as a series of locations through which people move, home often becomes conflated with places through emotive invocation. Because places are integral to our experience, thoughts, and emotions, homes appear to be particular locations when, in fact, they are a complex mix of emotions, forces, aesthetics, and experiences a≈liated in a memory of a place. The problem is that people cannot live placelessly although they may feel, or be seen by others as being, out of place. The categorization of certain persons, such as refugees and exiles, is especially problematic and has many political, emotional, and theoretical implications because it is commonly built on the assumption of ‘‘rootedness.’’ The vision of being rooted in the soil, ≥∫ chapter two

this territorialization of identities, renders displacement a pathological condition of personhood (Malkki 1997b: 63–64). The framing of displacement as disease transforms placelessness into a negative characteristic of individual persons, rather than a consequence of individually and collectively negotiable political and historical situations. As an attempt to publicly and collectively impose home as a social fact and cultural norm in which some belong and others must be excluded, ‘‘exiles’’ and ‘‘refugees’’—as well as ‘‘tramps,’’ ‘‘the homeless,’’ and ‘‘travelers’’— are expelled from the ranks of those who deserve to combine home and house (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 8–9). Such classificatory processes exclude the unwelcome at an o≈cial, state level. On an informal scale, communal prejudices are mobilized in housing markets and rented accommodation, in employment, in social services, and by routine insults to ensure that ‘‘outsiders’’ are not welcome. Home(land)s are thus protected against those who are unable to ‘‘pass’’ as national and often are consigned to special areas by edict or for safety in numbers. These places on the margin—ethnic enclaves, asylum centers, and other spatially circumscribed confinements—are usually distinguished from other spaces within the nation as spaces in which di√erence can be contained and controlled. The processes of displacement and exile are part of ‘‘the dislocating mechanisms of modernity’’ (Giddens 1990) in which social relations and identities are separated from local contexts of interaction and restructured across larger space-time distances (Eastmond 1996). Migration across national borders, often depicted as ‘‘uprooting,’’ often implies an automatic cuto√ from a homeland accompanied with a distressing loss of identity and culture. Underlying this essentialization is what Liisa Malkki refers to as ‘‘the national order of things’’ (1995), that is, the idea that the nation as homeland is a person’s ‘‘natural’’ place of belonging. Yet the burgeoning literature on transnationalism clearly illustrates the way in which migration does not necessitate an emotional or material severing of ties with home but, rather, can form the basis for a multi-sited community (e.g., Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Olwig 1993; Rouse 1991; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001) that draws not just on locations but the routes one takes (Duany 2000; Gilroy 1994; Flores 1999; Ong 1999) to formulate senses of home. As a contested and evolving notion, the concept of home for many is mobile and nomadic, more synonymous with social relations, particularly kin relations (i.e., ‘‘family’’) than with a particular place. Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ≥Ω

The experience of place, whether current or known through memory, is always about people and their relationships as well as their physical surroundings. Cuban migration involves the polemic ‘‘exile.’’ Cubans have been forced away from their country throughout its modern history of nationalist struggles. Both home and exile are shaped by the personal memories and experiences, ambitions and hopes of people at particular times and by the desires and plans (and varying degrees of success of these plans) of intellectuals, teachers, priests, and political leaders. The question of return is equally ambiguous, as people have been haunted by memories of the smells and sights of their former abode while gradually becoming more at home in their new locale. Miami is a place in which Cubans can sometimes feel ‘‘at home,’’ the space from which they can develop what Edward Said calls a ‘‘plurality of vision’’ (1984: 172), while still being haunted by the question of return. As contested, evolving notions of cubanidad, exile serves to signal the apotheosis of home. If the nation as ‘‘home(land)’’ is an imagined space that one occupies in an aspirational sense, rather than social relations that one embodies, then being forced to abandon one’s home results in the apparent loss of one’s Self. This is the insidious logic of ‘‘the national order of things’’ that is challenged not just by Cuban exiles but by all kinds of migrants around the world, most especially those traveling from, to, and through the Caribbean, for it is that region that has been the world’s major intersection of human tra≈c for the last five hundred years. Thus, narratives of home, exile, and the moral and ideological separation from Cuba converge in the cultural politics of the model minority constituting Cuban ethnic identity in the United States (Croucher 1996). In these narratives, claims to the spaces of the nation are asserted, but it is the exiles and not the isleños who must validate, recognize, and acknowledge the legitimacy of their own claims to cubanidad. This is because cubanidad is an assertion of exiles’ claims to national space on ideological grounds that both asserts and rejects attributes of cubanidad. On the one hand, exiles’ judgment authenticates Cuba as the legitimate patria (homeland).∞ On the other, the state’s socialist ideology has polluted and contaminated the space of patria. Yet, despite this tension, the longing for and desire to return home remain powerful; the caveat is whether certain other conditions will be met. Baseball acts as a passion play of these anxiously lived experiences ∂≠ chapter two

embedded within the desire to return home. The former President of Yale University and Commissioner of Major League Baseball (mlb), A. Bartlett Giamatti, likened baseball to epic odysseys, dramatic tales of circular migration. The journey begins at home, negotiates the twists and turns at first [base], and often founders far out at the edges of the ordered world at rocky second —the farthest point from home. Whoever remains out there is said to ‘‘die’’ on base. Home is finally beyond reach in a hostile world full of quirks and tricks and hostile folk. There are no dragons in baseball, only shortstops, but they can emerge from nowhere to cut one down. And when it is given one to round third, a long journey seemingly over, the end in sight, the hunger for home, the drive to rejoin one’s earlier self and one’s fellows, is a pressing, growing, screaming in the blood. Often the e√ort fails, the hunger is unsatisfied as the catcher bars fulfillment, as the umpire-father is too strong in his denial, as the impossibility of going home again is reenacted in what is often baseball’s most violent physical confrontation, swift, savage, down in the dirt, nothing availing. . . . Or if the attempt, long in the planning and execution works, then the reunion and all it means is total—the runner is a returned hero, and the teammates are for an instant all true family. Until the attempt is tried again (Giamatti 1989: 93–94).

Many stories revolve around baseball, but the game itself is an enactment of attempts to go home after having left home (Giamatti 1989: 90). Experiences of circular migration are not only represented in baseball; baseball’s very social fabric in Cuba is intimately tied to these circular journeys. From the sport’s earliest beginnings on the island, the migratory journeys of Cubans, exile and voluntary, out, away from their beloved island and their aspired return were embedded in baseball. In this manner, baseball embodies strong ideals of being Cuban via parallels tied to exodus and return that predominate Cuban experience. These journeys, metaphoric and experienced, serve to ground Cuba as ‘‘home’’ while extending the island’s imaginary limits. The arrival of the sport itself was the result of just these kinds of journeys. The rest of this chapter explores the ways in which Cuban circular migration and its embedded meanings within baseball inform cubanidad. It begins by examining baseball’s arrival, and the explicit nationalist discourses made manifest in the practice of baseball during the initial decades when Cuba was still a Spanish colony. From this initial connotation Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∂∞

of being Cuban within the sport, the chapter shifts to look at the how Cubans and Americans interacted in the circle of seasonal migration between the United States and Cuba during the middle decades of the twentieth century. It was a period when notions of Self and Other became intertwined with ideas of race and nation, as both Americans and Cubans played in foreign leagues. The development of a strong nationalist identity that began in the nineteenth century continued up to and beyond the heady moments of Revolution. Similarly, the circular journeys of Cuban baseball players around the Americas did not cease. Only those attempting to leave Cuba for the United States and return were metaphorically ‘‘out.’’ Rather, alternative routes were taken even as Revolutionary leaders shifted the symbolic discourse of baseball once more to conjoin new Revolutionary ideals with older, more established discourses of cubanidad. The shift in discourse was a means of legitimating both the social changes and the new leaders’ position through the physical demonstrations of their own cubanidad.

Beginning at the End: The Arrival of Cuban Baseball at Home Using the idea of home as the overarching theme throughout this chapter, I will begin by discussing the initial journey home for Cuban baseball. It is a story in which Cuban youths returning from abroad bring a new sport that embodies radical ideas to a home riven by strife. The returning youths formed their own ‘‘team.’’ They were members of one group of Cubans who had distinct ideas of what it meant to be Cuban that did not necessarily agree with others’ ideas of being Cuban. Baseball represented one of several modern practices Cubans used to distinguish their own modernity from the colonial Spanish identity. These practices provided a way for Cubans to appropriate certain aspects of North American society while rejecting other aspects, such as the rigid, American racial categories,≤ in favor of more fluid social categories. Through baseball, Tampa, Havana, Key West, and Matanzas became part of a cultural system that could bypass the Spanish colonial system. Cuban entrepreneurs transferred their cigar factories from Cuba to Tampa and Key West because of the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), further tightening the new socioeconomic circle (González Echevarría 1995: 67). Cubans played on university teams, in their neighborhoods, and with work colleagues in the United States. Cuban exiles returned to the island after the Pact of Zanjón with new ideas, ∂≤ chapter two

values, a strong sense of identity, and knowledge of baseball.≥ Baseball was not simply a popular sport but was also closely identified with the whole prevailing paradigm of progress in post–Civil War America. As a distinctive practice, baseball also provided youthful Cuban elites with a symbolic discourse for an independent Cuba. Baseball was brought to Cuba by university students returning from the United States sometime in 1865 or 1866. Nemesio Guilló, Carlos and Teodoro Zaldo, and Francisco Saavedra, among others, are credited with bringing the first bat and ball to Cuba as they organized a team, taught some of their friends, and practiced in the Havana neighborhood, Vedado. In 1874, Guilló and others contacted a group of baseball players in Matanzas for a game. The first game was then played on 27 December 1874. An account of this event, published in El Artista (The Artist) on 31 December 1874, reinforces these early U.S-Cuban connections in at least two di√erent ways. There is a preponderance of English words in the account, most of which are associated with baseball. These terms are mostly colloquialisms and not formal terms, such as home run, which later became jonrón, but more colloquial English, such as skun (skunk), meaning a loss without scoring against the opposition, thereby suggesting familiarity not only with baseball but the culture of the game.∂ Second, the presence of Esteban Bellán on the Havana club also indicates strong U.S.-Cuban cultural connections as well as a developed skill level on the part of the Cubans. Bellán played at Fordham University and then turned professional, playing first with the Troy Haymakers in 1871 and then with the New York Mutuals in 1874 (Oleksak and Oleksak 1991: 3–4). Bellán’s presence demonstrates that Cuban elites possessed su≈cient skills that they could play on equal footing with U.S. professionals (Casas, Alfonso, and Pestana 1986: 6–26; Ealo de la Herrán 1984: 2–14). El Artista was one of many periodicals routinely published by cosmopolitan Cubans in Havana concerned with Paris fashions, London mercantile prices, French literature, and American recreational activities. These early baseball players were part of the elite social clubs, such as the Vedado Tennis Club, and members could lay down a bunt as easily as discuss current philosophers such as Baudelaire. Many of these periodicals were a≈liated with specific social clubs. Thus, each baseball club had a specific periodical that promoted the club’s interests and touted individual members’ accomplishments on and o√ the diamond (Gálvez y Delmonte 1889). Sporting clubs in Cuba remained the provenance of the urban elite Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∂≥

unlike in the United States, where sporting clubs quickly became the venue of the middle classes by the early twentieth century (Riess 1991). Criollo elites certainly enjoyed various leisurely diversions, and baseball was one that epitomized the notion of the modern, ‘‘civilized’’ Cuban in comparison with more base entertainments. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Cuban academics and other prominent social critics, such as Fernando Ortiz, railed against the propensity of Cubans to engage in blood sports, such as bullfighting, cockfighting, dog baiting, and the like (Ortiz 1997: 47–49), even though cockfights, in particular, were a prime pastime of the masses and gentlemen intermingled with the masses. Slaves, free Negroes, poor whites and gentlemen crowded into the tiny spaces for the fights, which took place in an atmosphere of cacophonous frenzy. The scrawny, balding cockerels were matched al cotejo, according to the length of their natural spurs, or al peso, by weight, and they often fought de cuchilla, when their owners tied artificial spurs to their charges’ legs for a more flamboyantly bloody display. After being teased into a rage, the cockerels were released into the ring where they flew ferociously at each other, pecking, stabbing, and clawing. The spectators went wild, stamping their feet, fighting each other for a better view, roaring, howling and shrieking ‘‘Mata! Mata!’’ The air filled with dust, bets were exchanged by a system of hand signals (it was impossible for anything to be heard in the din), and eventually the fight would reach a gruesome conclusion of bloodstained feathers and pecked-out eyes. The victor was parted from his opponent and wiped down. His owner squirted a mouthful of aguardiente over his head to clean his wounds and blew a little alum into his eyes through a straw to staunch the bleeding (Barclay 1993: 162–64).∑

Against these more ‘‘barbaric’’ proclivities, criollo elite presented baseball as a more ‘‘civilized’’ pastime to spend with one’s peers. The contrast of baseball’s ‘‘gentility’’ to the various blood sports present in Cuba during the colonial period, most especially the Spanish corrida, became one of heartfelt symbolic significance. By simply not being Spanish, baseball embodied a symbolic critique of the colonial relationship between Spain and Cuba. The contrast between the New and Old Worlds was articulated potently in a symbolic discourse about the two pastimes. Notions of civilization were subsumed into baseball, while notions of barbarism were equated with bullfighting. Parallels drawn between moder∂∂ chapter two

nity and progress associated with baseball and the inhumanity, bloodlust, and backwardness associated with bullfighting became emblematic discourses between American ‘‘civilization’’ and Spanish ‘‘barbarism’’ within Cuban society. To support baseball implied an alternative moral order derived from new normative structures, an order for which Cubans proclaimed their preference on the basis of a superior morality and a higher level of civilization (Pérez 1999: 78–83). Baseball became an outlet where such passions could be expressed freely. Teams’ and individual players’ style of play took on political meanings. Thus, the very act of playing baseball or attending a game became a political statement of disa√ection with Spanish rule. The aforementioned Zaldo brothers exemplify the bourgeois position these ballplayers enjoyed. Carlos Zaldo was one of the founders of the conciliatory Liberal Party organized after the Ten Years’ War; it promoted the same rights for Cubans that the Spaniards enjoyed in Spain, but not independence (Thomas 1998: 267–68).∏ Later, after independence, he used his family’s sugar-based wealth to acquire the position of president of the Banco de la Habana during ‘‘the Dance of the Millions,’’ an economic boom during World War I and the 1920s based on escalating global prices of sugar (Thomas 1998: 545–46). Carlos’s brother, Teodoro, also was heavily involved in international commerce, working with American investors during the turn of the twentieth century to construct a railway that would benefit the United Fruit Company. He traveled along the proposed rail route, assuring other landowners that the American corporation’s acquisition of over nine hundred thousand acres of prime agricultural land was not a first step toward U.S. annexation, which was a grave concern of many wealthy Cubans (Thomas 1998: 467–69). Many, if not all, of these young criollos playing in these first recorded games were from the upper classes of Cuba and attended U.S. universities. Among the Habana Base Ball Club’s members, the Guilló brothers, Ernesto and Nemesio, and Francisco Saavedra studied at U.S. universities. Emilio Sabourín, one of organizers of the Habana Base Ball Club and the first Cuban professional league formed in 1878, attended a business college in Washington. The Almendares Base Ball Club also had members who attended U.S. institutions. Carlos and Teodoro Zaldo studied at Fordham University, probably with Bellán as a classmate. Almost all of the Matanzas team members also studied in the United States, with Federico Sánchez studying at Georgetown University (Gálvez y Delmonte Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∂∑

1889: 68–69). Attending a university in the mid-nineteenth century was not the province of the working classes; therefore, the importers of the game came from the upper classes of colonial island society. Unlike the Zaldo brothers, several other criollo peleteros passionately promoted Cuban independence by explicitly unifying Cuban nationalism with baseball. The most well-known individual who did this was Emilio Sabourín. Baseball’s martyr for Cuban independence, he was arrested, exiled, and died while in prison for organizing and raising funds through baseball to purchase arms for anti-Spanish movements. Other baseball players certainly died in the struggle against the Spanish, but Sabourín embodied both the Cuban struggle for independence and their love of baseball. Born in Havana on 5 September 1853, Sabourín quickly became involved in the ongoing conspiratorial activities of criollos taking place during his adolescence. With other young men, he purchased damaged arms and munitions from the Spanish in order to repair and send them to the insurrectionists. Cubans in Florida followed his example. Young Cubans on Cayo Hueso (a Florida Key) formed a baseball club called Cuba, with the express and sole purpose of raising funds destined for Martí’s forces, who would start the War of Independence. Sabourín maintained his activities until the end of 1895 when on 15 December the Spanish accused him of conspiracy and incarcerated him in the military fortress, La Cabaña, located at the entrance to Havana’s harbor. After a few months, the Spanish deported Sabourín to the Castillo del Hacho in Cueta, Africa, where he subsequently died of pneumonia on 5 July 1897. In an interview, a prominent Cuban journalist recounted the 1918 recollections of Juan Gualberto Gómez, in which Dr. Gómez attempted to ease Sabourín’s agony twenty years after the fact. Emilio Sabourín deserves the a√ection of his compatriots. He was not only an enthusiastic supporter of this regenerative ‘‘sport’’ of humanity, but also a passionate lover of his homeland’s liberty. For defending these he su√ered and died. And what a death. . . . I attended his agony, and it will never fade from my mind—the sad but virile spectacle of the end of this man with the stoic soul and tender heart. I saw him for the first time in the Presidio de Cueta. . . . It was unforgettable, its exactness and completeness; but it is certain that he gave me the impression of a man of clean soul, of jovial character, inclined towards the sweetness of life, but at the same time very capable of throwing around his shoulders the most grave, serious, and aus-

∂∏ chapter two

tere calamities of existence. And more than that, he showed me his convictions contained three intimately dear and almost equal things [in his life]: baseball, his family, and his homeland.

Sabourín was not alone in connecting nationalist fervor with baseball fever. Baseball became an emblematic practice used to contrast its participants (including spectators) with the Spanish practices of the corrida (bullfighting) and pelota vasca ( jai alai). Current Cuban historians did not create this particular association; the association was consciously constructed by nineteenth-century elites desiring independence. Writing to his friend, Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte, in 1889, Benjamín de Céspedes noted that ‘‘the game of baseball has the same meaning as all popular fiestas: it brings into close and harmonious commingling the most humble classes with the highest ones, and out of solidarity created by supporters of each team emerges a rehearsal for democracy in its most gratifying and basic form’’ (Gálvez y Delmonte 1889: 8). Céspedes’s comments reveal an awareness of sport’s power to cross class divisions and the possibility of elites harnessing such power to form a ‘‘democracy’’: a not-so-veiled reference to Cuba’s subordinate position as a Spanish colony and criollo elite desires for either equality or independence or both. Baseball attracted large crowds, ten to twenty thousand spectators, yet the classes were clearly separate (González Echevarría 1995), unlike the ‘‘popular fiestas’’ Céspedes mentions or the blood sports such as cockfighting, in which the classes were not in separate enclosures. Baseball allowed a sense of community to be projected onto the athletes while clearly keeping social hierarchy visible with its varied seating enclosures. Such projections insinuate that the team represents the nation. A team’s loss is equated with a nation’s loss. Throughout the twentieth century, nationalist yearnings have been projected onto sports teams. Nineteenth-century Cubans, however, took such metaphoric steps further, explicitly equating a team’s loss with the loss of the nation. Aurelio Miranda, one of the founding members of the Havana Base Ball Club, insisted, The baseball player must learn to wait for his pitch, his play, his moment. An untimely move, a base taken prematurely, a ground ball fielded hastily leads to a game lost. The same impatience, the absence of the virtue of knowing how to wait, leads to a loss and often leads to the loss of the nation (Miranda 1908: 27).

Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∂π

The di√erence between nineteenth-century Cuban projections and twentieth-century projections is twofold. First, twentieth-century projections are made in the context of international competition between nationstates. There were no international sporting events prior to the first modern Olympiad held in Athens in 1896, which attracted little attention.π Second, twentieth-century projections are placed upon a national team representing a given state in competition with another state’s national team. There was no Cuban state in the nineteenth century. Nineteenthcentury Cuban baseball teams were competing against other Cuban teams in preparation for armed struggle against Spain. Nonetheless, nationalist goals were projected onto baseball teams, such as the ascription of a national mission to the Fé Baseball Club: ‘‘We sought by all possible means to promote the moral education of our compatriots, to instill in them the love of manly exercise which, removing from them frivolous pastimes and refined their habits, prepared them for the redeeming endeavor that was postponed by the military capitulation of Zanjón’’ (Ayala 1949 [1907]: 27). Criollo elite made a clear emotive connection between baseball and the struggle for an independent Cuban nation. Such constructions, however, obscure the existence of conflicting nationalist interests within baseball’s popularity. The ‘‘o≈cial’’ history of Cuban baseball claims that on 27 December 1874, the first baseball game was played between the Habana Base Ball Club and the Matanzas Base Ball Club at a place called Palmar de Junco in Matanzas. However, it is possible to surmise that baseball was known prior to the university students’ return with equipment to Havana. Baseball games were likely played before then in numerous locales across the western half of the island. An 1847 document records the prohibition of playing with any type of ball in Matanzas’s streets and other public places, under the penalty of losing the ball because of the danger of breaking gaslights. Enrique Capetillo, a writer in Havana writing after Castro’s Revolution, claims that the first game happened in Matanzas eight years before that first ‘‘o≈cial’’ game (cited in Wagner 1988: 118). Supposedly, a ship from the United States docked in Matanzas, and its crew invited the dockworkers to an exhibition game. According to Capetillo, it was this initial game and others like it from which baseball colonized the island, apparently spreading like wildfire as baseball fever swept Cuba. However baseball arrived, its popularity was clearly evident across the

∂∫ chapter two

island at the turn of the twentieth century. Gálvez y Delmonte calculated that there were more than two hundred clubes de verano (summer clubs) by 1890 (1889: 82–84). Clubes de verano were baseball teams that played following the sugar harvest (an economically idle period known as tiempo muerte [dead time]), which meant the game was actively pursued by Cuba’s poor as well as its elite. Plantation owners built diamonds, supplied equipment, and organized teams in hopes of creating a loyal labor force, since Cuba had a worker shortage during the early twentieth century (Carr 1998). These clubs quickly developed into popular local recreation. The rapid proliferation of clubes de verano suggests widespread knowledge about and practice of baseball across the island. Plantation laborers’ and dockworkers’ participation in baseball confuses the issue of baseball’s national origins, muddles nationalist symbolism, and reveals power relations. On the one hand, Capetillo’s story contains all the ethnocentric assumptions of European superiority. Baseball represents the ‘‘modern’’ world that the less civilized masses yearn for, though they do not know what it is for which they yearn. The ‘‘natives’’ love it so much that it spreads throughout the island in a matter of weeks, despite the fact that dockworkers in Matanzas would, in all probability, not have had the means to travel to Santiago de Cuba, Cárdenas, or even Havana. On the other hand, Capetillo’s account acknowledges the agency of Cubans other than criollo elites. Yet, these other Cubans and their teams remain anonymous because of their geographic and economic position vis-à-vis the criollo elite of Havana. The chroniclers of early baseball, such as Gálvez y Delmonte, were themselves part of the urban elite and thus paid little attention to working-class activities unless such activities related directly to their interests. No matter how baseball arrived in Cuba, it clearly acquired specific nationalist meanings and provided a way for Cubans to negotiate their place in the world. The hostilities of both the Ten Years’ War and the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98) forced many Cubans into exile. Other criollo families fled after the cessation of hostilities because of political concerns on the island between the two struggles for independence. Some of those who left took baseball with them and used it to mediate cultural encounters with the United States to the north. Jose Martí, in exile in New York during the 1880s, remarked on the proliferation of Cuban youth playing baseball in the streets. ‘‘In every neighbor-

Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∂Ω

hood there is a baseball game. . . . They [children] go into the streets and hide from the police to play baseball in the courtyards’’ (quoted in Pérez 1994: 499). Cubans did not just head north; they followed other paths throughout the Caribbean. Whatever their reasons for leaving their homes, Cubans were instrumental in the spread of baseball throughout the Caribbean. Pedro Julio Santana, a former sportswriter from the Dominican Republic, painted the phenomenon as a religion being proselytized: It is much the same as that which happened with Christianity. Jesus could be compared to the North Americans, but the apostles were the ones that spread the faith, and the apostles of baseball were Cubans. They went out into the world to preach the gospel of baseball. Even though the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico were occupied by the North Americans, the Cubans brought baseball here first, and to Mexico and Venezuela, too (quoted in Ruck 1991: 1–2).

Cuban elites who fled to the Dominican Republic introduced both mechanized sugar mills and baseball. The Aloma brothers brought baseball to the Dominican Republic in the twilight of 1891, and as they and other Cubans taught the game to the Dominicans, two teams formed named Cervecería (the brewery) and Cauto (a river in Cuba) that played each other throughout Santo Domingo (Klein 1991: 16). The name Cauto provides more indirect evidence that Cubans imported the game as they fled the violence occurring on their island. There simply would be no reason to name a team after a feature of Cuba unless the organizers themselves had an attachment to that place. Another Cuban, Dr. Samuel Mendoza y Ponce de León, brought baseball to the interior of the Dominican Republic around the same time that the Aloma brothers introduced the game in Santo Domingo (Pettavino and Pye 1994: 41). Other Cuban elites fled to the Yucatan peninsula, bringing baseball with them. Local historical memory traces baseball’s arrival back to June 1890, when three Cuban teenagers—Juan Francisco, Fernando Urzáiz Rodríguez, and Urzáiz’s brother, Eduardo—introduced the game in Mérida. Several local oligarchs sponsored teams in Mérida and Progreso in the early 1890s. Local team names suggest the origins of the organizers: Cuba Baseball Club, Habana Baseball Club, and Matanzas Baseball Club (Joseph 1988). As in the Dominican Republic, the names of the local

∑≠ chapter two

teams imply a direct Cuban influence; otherwise there would be no reason for these teams to adopt monikers that did not have local significance. Cuban elites fled to other areas of the Caribbean as well. Emilio Cramer, a Cuban cigar manufacturer, fled to Venezuela in 1895 (Ealo de la Herrán 1984: 12; Pettavino and Pye 1994: 41). He, along with other Cuban émigrés, organized a five-team league in Caracas (Pérez 1994: 514). Baseball was brought to Puerto Rico by a Spanish diplomat who was transferred from Cuba according to one account, while in other accounts Cubans brought the game to the island in 1897 (Oleksak and Oleksak 1991: 9; Ealo de la Herrán 1984: 12). It caught on as quickly there as it had where other Cubans had fled. The first organized game in Puerto Rico was played in January 1898 (Oleksak and Oleksak 1991: 9). Cubans introduced baseball to the Atlantic side of Colombia in 1903, and practiced the game with U.S. soldiers in Panama in 1904 (Ealo de la Herrán 1984: 12).

Circling the Bases: The So-Called ‘‘Golden Era,’’ 1910s–50s For the sport to spread so rapidly, many Cubans had to have knowledge of and passion for the game. Although numerous criollo elites spent the latter part of the nineteenth century in exile, many others stayed in Cuba despite the tense relations between the criollos and the Spanish. Expanding economic influence from the United States and its imperialistic policies furthered the tensions between criollos and Spaniards. That significant U.S. influence also promulgated interest in baseball, particularly through numerous tours—Cuban professional teams barnstormed throughout the eastern United States, and American professional teams took winter tours to Cuba. Abel Linares, a Cuban baseball promoter who was simultaneously the secretary of the Martí Society, a patriotic organization dedicated to the removal of Spanish rule (Ruiz n.d.: 8), took the first Cuban team to the U.S. to tour in 1897 while he was the secretary of the baseball league in Cayo Hueso. The Philadelphia Athletics were the first U.S. professional team to play a series of exhibition games against Cuban professional teams in 1886. Four years later, the New York Giants played winter ball in Havana. These exhibitions provided many more Cubans a chance to draw on varying cultural values that could be altered into a discourse against the hated Spanish overlords. Those early exhibition series and subsequent spectacles throughout the

Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∑∞

first quarter of the twentieth century provided Cubans with a chance to measure cubanidad and the Cuban nation, that is, their own modernity, against the model upon which they were based. The winter exhibition games between U.S. Major Leaguers and Cuban ballplayers provided a telling spectacle of Cuban modernity at a time when Cuba was not yet independent but remained a U.S. protectorate. Celebrations in Cuba revolved around local baseball squads defeating American touring professionals in the early twentieth century. Baseball games between American and Cuban teams frequently drew five thousand fans or more. Writing in 1914, José Sixto de Sola ruminated on baseball’s importance in Cuba in light of American occupation. What Cuban who has attended a game between Almendares and one of the great North American major league teams that has visited us in recent years has not felt linked to our players and the rest of the fans by a powerful bond? . . . A multitude of ten, twelve or fourteen thousand souls, overcome, waiting breathlessly, for a Cuban triumph. And after having obtained the sensational victory, this same multitude, on its feet and acclaiming the players with a frenzied clamor, subsequently pouring like torrents throughout the city, carrying joy to all parts of the city, a joy that passes from the city to the rest of the island, becoming unanimous from Maísi to San Antonio [from one end of the island to the other]. What is it that produces such intense enthusiasm, so delirious, so unanimous? Ah! It is the national sentiment. All are Cubans and they feel Cuban (Sixto de Sola 1914: 121).

The defeat of any U.S. baseball squad lent itself to symbolic discourses regarding the equality, if not superiority, of the Cuban team. It provided a symbolic reversal of the power relations between the two countries. The U.S. military occupied Cuba during the early parts of the twentieth century, and those stationed in Cuba certainly played baseball. North American military posts organized baseball competitions between Cuban and U.S. soldiers and with local Cuban clubs. Some historically known matches took place between the U.S. Seventh Calvary and a team called simply Los Cubanos, U.S. Troop L and Matanzas, and the U.S. Battery K and a club called Fin del Siglo. In addition, the all-black Twenty-fifth Infantry, a unit famed for its baseball skills during the occupations of Hawaii and the Philippines, was also stationed in Cuba for some time. It would be highly likely they played against Cuban clubs as well (Brock and Bayne 1998: 181). Baseball games against U.S. military personnel took on neo∑≤ chapter two

colonial meanings of resistance by the colonized. A defeat on the diamond represented a momentary reversal of fortune that could not be found in any form of armed resistance. Beating the U.S. military at baseball served as a symbolic victory, but even more powerful symbolic proof of the vitality and modernity of the Cuban nation would be a victory over a Major League club. Part of Major Leaguers’ appeal to the Cuban crowds was the opportunity to see famous baseball players. But Cubans could do this without having to wait for a touring Major League club. The real intrigue centered on how Cuban stars would compare against only American professionals. Could the Cuban players measure up and, by extension, how did Cuba measure up to the United States? The U.S. professionals who came to Cuba during the winter months were more than marginal professionals attempting to earn some extra income. Some of the most well-known ballplayers sojourned to Cuba. The most famous baseball player of all time was one of them. Cuban promoter, Abel Linares, reached an agreement with mlb’s New York Giants to play an exhibition series in Havana in 1920. The Giants, managed by John McGraw, had come to Cuba several times prior to 1920 because McGraw had ties to Cuba. McGraw spent several winters in Havana betting on the horses at the track where he was a shareholder— the Oriental Horse Racing Track, in Marianao, a borough of Havana. During the winter months, players often played for other ‘‘All-Star’’ teams formed especially for barnstorming the southern states or parts of the Caribbean or, in some cases, Major League–a≈liated clubs with, usually, one or two of the sport’s celebrities who may or may not actually be contracted to that club. These athletes would continue to play during the ‘‘o√-season’’ because it was a chance to earn some extra money, since salaries at this time, with a select few exceptions, were not the exorbitant amounts of present-day Major Leaguers. Linares’s coup, though, was not attracting a mlb club to come to Havana; several clubs had come to the island in the past two decades for lucrative supplemental winter exhibitions. Instead, Linares’s accomplishment was that he convinced Babe Ruth, the sporting celebrity of professional baseball, to join the Giants in Havana for the exhibition series. Playing for the New York Yankees in 1920, Ruth earned $100,000, far and away the highest salary. Consequently Linares had to provide Ruth with a significant amount of money to journey to Cuba. Linares paid $20,000 Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∑≥

plus expenses for Ruth, his wife, and his agent while in Cuba (Ruiz n.d.). Treating the trip as a vacation, Ruth spent much of his time gambling on pelota vasca clubs, reportedly losing the majority of the money he made on his Cuban ‘‘vacation’’ (Méndez Muñiz 1990: 67–69). Ruth’s economic power was such, though, that he could and did use his celebrity to alter the original contract. The first eight games consisted of the Giants facing Habana or Almendares in alternating games. In the ninth game, however, the Giants faced a team of Cuban select players, the ‘‘All-Cubans.’’ Ruth then refused to take the field for the tenth game, because Linares refused to pay Ruth the final installment of $2,000. Inclement weather, however, prevented the final game anyway and thus cleared the way for Linares to discreetly pay the Babe without su√ering any public backlash. Linares reportedly made $40,000 for his e√orts at bringing Ruth to the island. Throughout the ten game series, Ruth demonstrated his prodigious skills. Yet, a Cuban player, Cristóbal Torriente, who had been playing in the Negro Leagues, upstaged Ruth by hitting more home runs and to greater acclaim in the first eight games. Upset at being outshone by Torriente, Ruth angrily rejected the a≈liation the Cuban press applied to Torriente, the ‘‘Cuban Babe Ruth,’’ calling the Cuban ‘‘black as a ton and a half of coal in a dark cellar’’ (Ruiz n.d.: 20). Ruth’s outburst is particularly telling, since Ruth was often the target of racist jibes, for example, ‘‘nigger lips,’’ by opposing players and fans in the United States (Creamer 1992). Professional baseball in the United States was racially segregated at this time, and notions of white athletic superiority were only beginning to be challenged. Baseball in Cuba, on the diamond at least, was not racially segregated, as numerous team photographs make clear.∫ While Cuba was also a racially segregated society, the lines demarcating the races were much less distinct than in the United States. Cuban ideas about race clearly di√ered from American notions. Nonetheless, race remained a topic of serious social debate regarding race relations, cubanidad, and the idea of the Cuban nationalism. A central question of cubanidad revolved around whether or not black Cubans should be considered part of the nation and whether they should be accorded equal status as Cuban citizens (Fernández Robaina 1990; Helg 1995; Moore 1997). This debate reverberated throughout political halls, in the Cuban press, in Cuban music, and in the stadiums and was played out for all to see on the diamonds. By the time Ruth visited Cuba, Cuba was rapidly becoming established ∑∂ chapter two

as a sports entertainment center. The heavyweight championship bout between Jack Johnson and Jesse Willard was fought in Havana because cultural sensibilities in the United States precluded a white man and a black man competing in the same boxing ring. Such racial overtones were decidedly lessened in Cuba. American ballplayers, especially black ones toiling in the Negro Leagues, were acutely aware of the less stringent racial divide. Although the circulation of North American and Cuban baseball players was less personal choice than economic necessity, particularly for African American baseball players, African American ballplayers had long graced the diamonds of the Caribbean, where their skills were appreciated by fans whose sense of color di√ered than that of whitecontrolled mlb. In Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, Mexico, and Venezuela, a black athlete could receive higher pay than he would playing in the United States. Furthermore, he usually encountered far less racial antagonism and discrimination on and o√ the field. George Giles, an American Negro League player in the 1930s recounted his experiences in Cuba: A lot of Negro ball players used to play in Cuba during the winter. We’d get roundtrip tickets, all expenses, salary. That way we could make ends meet. Send your salary back home, and your family could live fairly decently. We’d take the train down to Key West and then a boat to the island. It was only about 90 miles to Havana. Bell, Wells, Suttles, Frank Duncan, and I all played on the same team down there. Mike [Miguel] González and Dolph [Adolfo] Luque of the Major Leagues were down every year to manage. Those Cubans took their baseball seriously too. The policemen wore soldiers’ uniforms, and they were around that ball park all the time. You didn’t have those problems like riding on the train or the bus, none of those kind of things. It was di√erent than in the United States. But American tourists is [sic] what messed up things. They saw how those people treated us. Then the American tourists come and say, ‘‘We don’t treat ’em like that in the United States.’’ After that, black Cubans sat on one side of the park, white Cubans on the other side of the park (quoted in Holway 1991: 64).

The North American influence on Cuban segregational practices became evident in the Cuban discourse of cultura (culture), which was equated with civilized behavior. In the racist discourse of that day, Indians seem to su√er more from a ‘‘lack of civilization’’ and not from ‘‘bad civilization,’’ as blacks did; thus Native Americans might benefit from becoming embroiled in the civilizing processes of modern sport, whereas blacks Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∑∑

presumably would not.Ω Despite rampant racial segregation in both the United States and Cuba, black athletes still had greater room for maneuverability in Cuban society. Negro League baseball players actually enjoyed greater freedoms in Cuba and Mexico, where the color of a ballplayer’s skin was less important than his ability to throw and hit hard. Max Manning, a Negro League player, recalled the hardships of the journey south to Cuba and the palpable relief felt upon arriving in Havana. I remember one trip we made from Philadelphia to Havana. We got on the train in Philadelphia and we had to stay in a colored only compartment. We couldn’t even leave to get some food. When we finally arrived in Cuba, we were treated as heroes. We could stay at any hotel, eat at any restaurant. The winter of ’46 I played in Cienfuegos, Cuba. Carl Erskine and Max Surkont were on that team—Danny Gardella, Solly Hemus, Chuck Connors, ‘‘the Rifleman.’’ Martín Dihigo was manager. In terms of personality, Dihigo reminded me a lot of Pop Lloyd. He was a marvelous specimen—height, weight, broad shoulders. You should see the power this man had. One regret I have is that I never saw Martín Dihigo play in his prime (quoted in Holway 1991: 127).

American baseball players were not the only ones on the move. Cubans also migrated north in the spring to play in the United States. Among the Cubans who migrated with the seasons was probably the best player to ever put on spikes. Martín Dihigo, known as El Maestro (The Master) and El Inmortal (The Immortal), played for twenty-five years (1922–47). His career spanned four di√erent countries, and he is the only baseball player in the world to have been elected to four di√erent country’s Halls of Fame: those of the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela.∞≠ He played in six countries in all, including the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico as well as the four previously mentioned. In his lengthy career, he was simultaneous batting champion and leading pitcher in the same season twice, once in Mexico and once in Cuba. For the first eleven years of his career, he followed the circuitous route between Cuba and the United States. During that time, he earned widespread acclaim and respect amongst his peers for his power, speed, coordination, grace, intelligence, soft hands, and good eye. In the first half of his career, he ventured to the United States in the spring, played until the autumn in the U.S. Negro Leagues, and then returned to Cuba during the winter months to play in Cuba’s professional league. However, Dihigo did not return to ∑∏ chapter two

Cuba in the autumn of 1932 and remained in exile, choosing to play in Venezuela for two years. The political situation in Cuba had deteriorated during the Gerardo Machado regime and a full-blown rebellion exploded in 1933. Street violence precluded interest in baseball, although the Cuban leagues continued. Dihigo played out the 1931–32 Cuban season while political violence increased, with university students and others protesting the increasingly draconian repression of the Machado dictatorship. According to Santana Alonso, Dihigo left Cuba immediately after the last game of that campaign because he was publicly opposed to Machado and his life was under constant threat (Santana Alonso 1997: 36–37). He only returned to Cuba three years later, for the 1935–36 season. Something clearly happened to Dihigo during his time away from his beloved island; he returned to the United States one more time after that first year back in Cuba, and never returned to play in the United States again. Dihigo did eventually resume playing in the professional Cuban league during the winter months. However, due to increasing U.S. influence and control—not only within Cuban politics but also in baseball, as more and more American athletes took places on Cuban teams that Dihigo felt belonged to Cubans—he no longer migrated to the United States. Yet he continued playing overseas, predominantly in Mexico but also spending time in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Staying away from the United States held particular attractions to Dihigo. Migrating to Mexico and elsewhere throughout the greater Caribbean region, he remained within Spanish-speaking societies. The ability to continue to use his native language a√orded a greater degree of comfort, which, when combined with the manner in which racial lines were drawn in Spanishspeaking countries, made playing in Mexico all the more enjoyable. The best black players throughout the Caribbean, including black U.S. players, knew that racial lines were less stringently drawn in Mexico and throughout the Spanish-speaking Caribbean than they were in the United States (Brock and Bayne 1998; Holway 1991; Kelley 1997, 2000). The violence inherent in segregationist policies did not become as manifest for black players south of the United States, as seen in George Giles’s remark earlier in the chapter. Mexico, in particular, was a popular destination for black ballplayers, whatever their nationality, because U.S. tourists did not play the influential role in Mexican race relations that they had in Havana. Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∑π

2 Martín Dihigo working as a radio journalist in El Gran Estadio de Cerro (Estadio Latinoamericano) circa 1953. Source: Author’s collection.

Dihigo’s playing days ended in 1947, but that did not stop his annual migrations. Dihigo continued to work in baseball as a manager. He remained an astute outspoken man, which in all likelihood contributed to his initial exile during the Machado dictatorship and 1933 Revolution. He was also forced to leave Cuba in the mid-1950s because of his outspoken criticisms, while working as a sports journalist, of the political corruption and repression perpetrated by the Batista dictatorship. Managing in Venezuela and Mexico during the 1950s, he openly welcomed the Cuban Revolution. Although I could find no evidence of his having worked with Castro’s guerrillas while they were in Mexico prior to initiating their Cuban uprising in 1957, he returned to Cuba in 1959 to resume his work as a sports journalist and accepted a position with the newly formed Instituto Nacional de Deportes, Educación Física y Recreación (inder) when it was formed in 1960.

Revolutionary Ball: New Rules to the Old Ball Game The Revolution altered the rules of the game. The annual migration and the close relationships between the United States and Cuba were sundered. It was not inevitable that this would be the result of Castro’s Revolution. Although Castro’s guerrillas rode into Havana and assumed power on 1 January 1959, there was no immediate rupture between the United States and Cuba. Professional baseball, while strained, remained one of the connecting forces between the two countries. The summer of 1959 saw the Minneapolis Millers play the Havana Sugar Kings for the International League championship. The International League was the league just below Major League in terms of skill and spectacle. Castro was a vocal and frequent spectator at Estadio Latinoamericano (then called El Gran Stadium del Cerro). At the culminating series in Havana, Castro threw out the ceremonial first pitch and despite the exultations from the crowd for a speech, he insisted that he was like any other fan here to watch the game (González Echevarría 1999: 341). The Sugar Kings won the championship three games later, and Cubans celebrated a ‘‘national’’ victory. The Sugar Kings, it should be noted, had American as well as Cuban players on the squad. Thus, celebratory expressions were not antiAmerican sentiment but nationalist euphoria, drawing upon both the Revolutionary excitement and the emotion of the Sugar Kings’ victory. The situation changed rapidly in 1960, as the last Cuban professional Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∑Ω

league drew to a close in March of that year. The political relationship between the United States and Cuba had been deteriorating over the previous months and this made baseball owners nervous, particularly the Sugar Kings’ owners. They unceremoniously pulled the team from Cuba, relocating it in New Jersey despite assurances from Guevara and Castro that professional baseball would continue even as the government nationalized other industries. By 1961, Cold War politics had riven the two states. Baseball was also radically a√ected as the migratory circle was severed. Cuban professional players in the United States that summer had to decide whether or not to return to Cuba, even as many middleclass Cubans were fleeing the island. Players such as Tony Oliva, Orestes Minoso, and other Major Leaguers decided to stay in the United States and became permanently separated from the families (Oliva 1973; Minoso, Fernández, Kleinfleder 1983). The Cuban government restructured the professional league, since U.S. players would no longer be migrating south in the winter and many Cuban players who had been forced to find employment in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Panama, stayed in Cuba to fill the newly created teams. Even as the newly minted Serie Nacional formed, Cuban athletes continued to tread well-worn paths throughout the Caribbean. Initially, this was to be a professional league, but as the Revolution became a publicly acknowledged socialist regime, the entire sport structure was reorganized and professionalism abolished. Cuban leaders created a government body to oversee the development and reorganization of sport, inder, under which a newly minted Comisión Nacional de Béisbol (National Baseball Commission) was formed. Like all socialist regimes, Cuba emphasized the power of sport as a motivating factor in social change. Sport became a vital aspect of the state’s legitimacy, both domestically—through the elimination of segregated sports facilities and the construction of many new ones (inder 1991)— and internationally—with Cuba’s burgeoning emergence and increasingly powerful presence in international tournaments. Because socialist states began with sociopolitical revolutions that broke with historically based nationalist discourses, these peculiar forms of twentieth-century states had to find other means of legitimating their place in the global community of nation-states. Sport provided one means of justifying and even legitimating their existence. International sporting success was vital to their legitimating discourses not only to their own populaces but to the ∏≠ chapter two

rest of the world (Riordan 1993, 1999). Furthermore, the use of sport was vital for the remaking of socialist persons (Brownell 1995; Kharkhordin 1995; Roubal 2003). The Cuban Revolution faced similar problems, and it was through its sporting successes in the 1960s that the socialist Cuban state was able to demonstrate the vitality, ‘‘progress,’’ and revolutionary character of its political manifesto. Even though Cuba increasingly became politically isolated in the Western Hemisphere due to pressure from the United States, its athletes continued to ply their trade in various countries throughout the Hispanic Caribbean. Cuban athletes remained part of the global circular migration of athletic talent that had been prevalent throughout the twentieth century. This became apparent to me one late afternoon while visiting with one of my many Cuban friends. While we were sitting in Victor’s apartment in Cerro, one of Havana’s boroughs, and waiting for his colleague to join us, his daughter brought us lemonade. After thanking her, I got up to look more closely at the fading framed photographs hanging on his white living room wall. The lemonade sweated, as did I, as I peered intently at the black-and-white photographs of a much younger Victor in uniform. Currently a minor o≈cial at inder, Victor explained that he played professional baseball in the 1950s and 1960s. Before the Revolution, Victor played professionally in the United States in the Minor Leagues. Each summer, he would travel to the United States and play in small towns, such as Raton, New Mexico, and Helena, Montana. Then, he would return each winter and play with a Cuban professional team in Havana. After the Revolution triumphed in 1959, Victor chose to stay in Cuba. He continued to play professionally, but instead of going to the United States once political ties were severed, he went to Mexico, playing in the professional leagues there for several seasons. Pointing to a small pennant covering one corner of a framed certificate, he talked about his years coaching for a professional Mexican team after his playing days were done in the 1970s. He beamed while reminiscing about coaching one of the same teams he played for when he was even younger, and his eyes lost those subsequent decades as he recalled what his body could no longer do. Victor’s experiences throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when he coached in the Mexican League, are not unique among his compatriots. Many others continued to spend their summers with foreign teams. The majority shifted their annual migrations to Mexico, since that was the only Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∏∞

remaining country to maintain political relations throughout those two Cold War–dominated decades. Despite the political divide between Cuba and other baseball-playing countries, Cubans also migrated to Nicaragua, especially after Daniel Ortega’s Sandinistas assumed power, forming a socialist state in the 1980s, and to Venezuela. The isolation of Cuba was more of a rupture of U.S.-Cuban relations than Cubans’ becoming fully isolated on their island. During the height of the Cold War, Cuban sports personnel, athletes, coaches, and others spent time in allied countries as well as many countries that maintained their nonaligned position in a bipolar world. The termination of the seasonal ‘‘base paths’’ between Cuba and the United States did not end the migrations of Cuban players. Although many of the star Cubans that played in the Major Leagues elected to stay in the United States, numerous others of those who played in the U.S. Minor Leagues returned to the island. Their annual routes north and south changed, but they continued their annual sojourns on the Caribbean ‘‘base paths’’ to and from home. The political termination of the route north a√ected not only the athletes but the constructions of Cuban identity as well. Cuban discourse on nationality was often complicated by the understanding that to challenge the terms of the North American presence also implied the necessity to confront the role of Cuban complicity. So intertwined were the layers of Cuban-U.S. participation, so structural was North American integration into Cuban normative systems, that to challenge the U.S. presence e√ectively risked eviscerating Cuban society. Yet that is what Castro dared to do, which is why his coup d’état was such a stunning and audacious blow. What seemed inconceivable, a reordering of Cuban society, became a reality. With his Revolution, sport was yet another aspect of Cuban society that was restructured. The base paths connecting Cuba and the United States were cut. It would be another forty years before a Major League team played against a Cuban team.

∏≤ chapter two

CHAPTER

≥

The Spectacle of and for Cuba In the seventh inning of a critical game during Industriales’ 1997–98 season, Industriales lead Cienfuegos 2–1. Industriales have men on first and second with one out. A left-handed batter is up with a full count, 3–2. On the pitch, the runner on second tries to steal third. In a blink of an eye, the batter checks his swing, and the catcher fires the ball to third base. The home plate umpire does not say anything, does not make a call. The third base umpire calls the runner out for trying to steal third. All the players assume that is the third out and the end of the inning. Cienfuegos’ players run o√ the field. Industriales’ base runners leave the field to prepare for the next half inning while the batter, disgusted, begins to return to the dugout. Industriales’ manager and on-deck batter yell at the home plate umpire, ‘‘What is the call at home?’’ The home plate umpire calls the pitch a ball. This means that the batter walked. It also means the runner thrown out trying to steal third base was not out but was forced to third base on the base on balls. Play is dead on ball four, which occurred before the catcher’s throw and tag at third. Upon hearing this call, an Industriales coach cajoles his three players to go back to their bases. Meanwhile the entire Cienfuegos team has sat down in the dugout and is preparing for their turn at bat. Becoming aware of the home plate umpire’s call, the manager of Cienfuegos races out to argue with the umpires. His team remains seated in the dugout as he and a couple of other coaches all gather around home plate yelling at the home plate umpire. The manager arguing with the home plate umpire repeatedly points toward the third base umpire, appealing to the third base umpire as to whether the Industriales batter checked his swing on the final pitch in time or not. The two umpires walk toward each other, talk briefly, and then the third base umpire signals out again. The third base umpire has decided the Industriales batter did not check his swing, thereby making the last pitch Strike Three instead of Ball Four.∞ The third strike made the batter the second out of the inning. Thus, the throw to third and the tag of the

runner at third made three outs. Satisfied, Cienfuegos’ coaches run back to their dugout. This decision, made after a good ten-minute debate that ground play to a halt, provoked an immediate and strong reaction from Industriales’ players, coaches, and fans. Suddenly aware of the reversal of fortune as the fans roared in confused anger, Industriales’ coaches literally leapt out of the dugout to argue anew. At that moment, it was not entirely clear what had happened. It appeared that the umpires had declared four outs for the inning. In any interpretation, it seemed that the umpires did not know what had happened. What was immediately evident was the absolute anger and frustration of Industriales’ coaches with the umpires. As coaches violently gesticulated and bellowed at the two umpires, fans erupted out of their seats, down the aisles, and onto Industriales’ dugout roof in vocal support. Normally a taboo space, they lined up three and four persons deep on the roof screaming at the umpires. Hundreds more pushed to get onto the already-packed roof. One elderly man managed to elbow his way onto the dugout roof and began blowing his whistle to get the fans’ attention in a vain attempt to restore order. A solitary police o≈cer, who was also on the roof, ordered individuals o√ the roof, but two more fans climbed on for every single person who vacated space. More climbed up behind his back as he ushered others o√ the roof. Furious and confused because the ruling did not appear to make sense, fans were screaming at each other and the umpires, ‘‘How can you have two outs at third?’’ Others were screaming insults and threats of bodily harm at the umpires. After what seemed like several minutes, the public address announcer informed the irate crowd over the pa system that they must calm down and return to their seats or Industriales would forfeit the game. This announcement only enraged the fans further. The crowd seethed and continued to howl its anger at the seemingly unfair decisions made by the umpires. One fan, skin mottled with frustrated rage, shouted in my ear, ‘‘How can he [the third base umpire] make that call for Strike Three? You can’t watch two plays at once. That umpire. He’s a son of a bitch. He used to play for Industriales fifteen years ago. Now, every call he makes goes against Industriales.’’ After the potential forfeiture announcement, both Pedro Molina, Industriales’ manager, and another coach pleaded with the fans on the roof to return to their seats. A forfeit would cost Industriales dearly in the race for the final playo√ spot. The athletes on both teams remained sitting in their ∏∂ chapter three

dugouts waiting to see what would happen. Fans kept screaming from the dugout roof as Molina and his coaches pleaded with them—playing on their loyalty and desire to see Industriales win by pointing to the scoreboard which showed Industriales winning 2–1 after seven innings—to go back to their seats. They were beginning to have some success and the crowd was beginning to settle down, when several Industriales’ players suddenly charged onto the field and the other two umpires (the first and second base umpires) raced over to the front of Industriales’ dugout. Fans roared and surged back onto the roof. Coaches and players attempted to separate some Industriales’ players and the third base umpire. It was very confusing and unclear what had just happened. After several more minutes, the situation on the field finally calmed su≈ciently that the fans’ emotions settled somewhat. Grudgingly, Industriales’ fans returned to their seats as their voices buzzed like angry wasps throughout the stadium. When Industriales assumed their defensive position in the eighth inning, Vargas, the first baseman for Industriales, did not come out. The third base umpire had ejected him. This development drew another roar of enraged protest from the fans, who still had no idea what had happened during the chaos on the field, while the game continued. Adrian Hernández, Industriales’ starting pitcher, bore down and began to strike out Cienfuegos’ batters. Adrian is a tall, reed thin, whip-like young man who throws sidearm. He is said to have the same motion and body build as Orlando ‘‘El Duque’’ Hernández, a former Industriales’ pitcher who had defected a few months earlier. As he began to strike out the batters, Industriales’ supporters, instead of chanting obscenities, began to chant, ‘‘¡El Dooo-que! ¡El Dooo-que!’’ His continuing domination of Cienfuegos, despite all the distractions, inspired most of the stadium: ‘‘Duque! Duque!’’ Industriales scored two runs in the bottom of the eighth to make the score 4–1. Adrian came out for the ninth, and the chant started up again: ‘‘El Dooo-que! El Dooo-que!’’ After he struck out the first batter, the chant grew louder and louder as fans abandoned hurling insults at the umpire and took up the Duque chant. The volume kept growing with each pitch. With two strikes on the second batter, it crescendoed as the batter tapped weakly back to the mound. Adrian fielded it and threw to first for the second out. The chant continued as the last out was made. The crowd stood on its feet throughout the eighth and ninth innings. After the game, Industriales’ players streamed onto the field and celeThe Spectacle of and for Cuba ∏∑

brated and congratulated each other. The Duque chant started again, and the crowd behind the Industriales’ dugout stood and cheered. Industriales’ players tipped their caps to the crowd, acknowledging the fans’ support. Outside the stadium gate, the energy stayed with the fans as they clapped each other on the back, shouted for joy, and animatedly talked about Adrian, the questionable umpiring, and Industriales’ win. Kids ran by and jumped up and down happily yelling at each other. A few fans discussing the night’s events were clearly excited. ‘‘Never! Never before! In thirtynine years have people chanted the name of a defector. Never! Never! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! A defector’s name has never been used before.’’ The fans’ jubilation at the end of the baseball game reflects their perspective of being involved and their emotional involvement in such spectacles. As an audience they are not separate from the spectacle; they are an integral part of it. In this particular instance, the fans’ use of a disgraced (from the state’s perspective) baseball player’s name reveals more about fans’ expectations than political positions. That evening a new hero was created through the fans’ reactions to Adrian Hernández’s performance and the perceived unfairness imposed on Industriales by the umpires. In rechristening Adrian as ‘‘El Duquecito,’’ fans forged a historical link between an older hero, Orlando Hernández, and the star of that game. The young Adrian Hernández (no relation) both looks and comports himself like the original El Duque. By chanting El Duque while Adrian Hernández pitched, the fans were not challenging recent past events of banishment and defection but evoking a nostalgic remembering of a beloved player who no longer played in Havana.≤ They were ‘‘honoring’’ the young Hernández, e√ectively constructing a baseball narrative that di√ered from the o≈cial state discourse. The fans’ use of a persona non grata—one who had been e√ectively erased from the o≈cial accounts found in the media and banished from the diamond—draws on a popular history that dramatically links previous athletic heroes that embody cubanidad to earlier discourses, a history that is related to yet remains just as distinct from the state’s historical discourses designed to legitimate its position. Fans’ use of nostalgic, sometimes painful memories, posits a ‘‘once was’’ with a ‘‘now’’ in a collective emotional reaction that dramatizes the uncertainties of contemporary everyday life. Baseball provides a particularly powerful stage for such social dramas. Any game in the Serie Nacional has the potential to invoke and validate ∏∏ chapter three

specific qualities deemed essential to cubanidad through contemporary events on the diamond linked by memory to past baseball heroes. Baseball provides a social poetics that people recognize and deploy via the debris of the past for all kinds of present purposes. Cuban baseball fans invoke the stars of bygone generations to reflect the concerns of the present. These snippets of action—a diving catch or a near miss in the outfield or a close play at the plate—can provoke hours of debate among fans not only immediately but for years after the event. As a cultural spectacle that dramatizes and condenses qualities of being Cuban into a passion play, spectators become emotionally invested and actively involved in the events on the diamond as dramaturgical discourses about what it means to be Cuban. These kinds of spectacle, however, require more than the occasional international competition to e√ectively arouse the sentiments that inculcate national identity. Sport is only truly e√ective at emoting collective identities when performed in front a crowd on a regular basis. The organization of leagues and the regularly scheduled contests between teams in those leagues act as a catalyst for producing the necessary environment for the emotion-laden cultural intimacy that nurtures the blossoming senses of being Cuban. The creation of that environment, or lo ambiente, is not a given. Lo ambiente refers to more than just one’s spatial environment. Rather, it invokes and depends on emotional reactions and attachments to that space and the events that take place within that space. Not every baseball game produces or reflects lo ambiente. The production of this particular feeling requires spectators’ participation in the overall event, an attachment to actions on the diamond, and an overall sense of being intimately involved in those events. Baseball is not the only spectacle that can produce such emotional associations. Other forms of spectacle can also create such powerful sentiments. One widespread spectacle that does this is Carnaval, the quintessential Caribbean spectacle. The similarities between the two spectacles are discussed in the following section. After exploring how Carnaval and baseball both manifest emotional ideas of belonging, the section considers bureaucratic e√orts at containing such spectacles and harnessing the emotional energies embodied in them. State bureaucracies increasingly play a vital role in promoting and planning such spectacular events, thereby allowing an atmosphere of apparent licensure to manifest while keeping tight reins on spatial and discursive expressions embodied in such spectacles. Baseball, therefore, should The Spectacle of and for Cuba ∏π

be understood as a recurring spectacle that allows Cubans to a≈rm and shape the constitution of their own identities and their place in the world via the ritual-like spectacles of nation that constitute and emerge from discourses of Cuban identity.

Lo ambiente of Cuban Spectacle Spectacle, as John MacAloon tells us (1984), is a remarkable or noteworthy public display appealing or intending to appeal to the eye by its mass, proportions, color, or other dramatic qualities. It denotes no specific style or mood other than di√use wonder or awe. Instead, a range of emotions may be generated and intensified within the spectacle. It is a dynamic form demanding action, movement, and exchange on the part of actors and of the audience. The normative, organically linked roles of actors and audience, performers and spectators, are the essential elements of spectacles. If one or the other is missing, there is no spectacle. In all games, particularly in athletic contests, display and representation constitute a central element—a reminder of the former connections between play, ritual, and drama. The players not only compete; they enact a familiar ceremony that rea≈rms common values. Ceremony requires witness and enthusiastic spectators conversant with the rules of the performance and its underlying meaning. Far from destroying the values of sports, the attendance of spectators makes them complete (Lasch 1979: 105).

In this manner, spectacles can be understood as a public form of thinking made physical, of telling stories about certain ambiguities and ambivalences in people’s existence (MacAloon 1984: 247). Yet these spectacles must not be understood as events in which the spectators passively accept or absorb the performance and its meanings. Rather, fans actively create not only social meanings but, through their emotional investment in the spectacle, create parts of the actual spectacle as well. The atmosphere in Cuba’s baseball stadiums exudes constrained energy suddenly released in vociferous, passionate celebrations. One particularly humid March evening, the rain pelted fans and players alike for two soggy, muddy innings of play. It having rained almost all day, the umpires decided the field was in no condition to continue play, and they sent the players to their respective dugouts. Groups of fans clustered around the stadium waited patiently for the already hour-long deluge to ∏∫ chapter three

lessen. One group took it upon themselves to keep the interest of the other spectators so people would not grow impatient and leave early. Cajoling nearby groups to join them, they provided a percussive counterpoint to the rain. Forming a conga line, several young men played various drums, one lead dancer blew a whistle, and a score more danced following the drummers and whistler. They weaved through the rows of seats in the section where they had been seated. Meanwhile, other groups conversed among themselves. Some resolutely stayed put, getting increasingly soaked, while others moved higher up the grandstand to take some shelter from the staccato beat of droplets. The conga line had been weaving back and forth amongst the rows of bright yellow, wooden seats for about thirty minutes when the stadium’s public address announcer informed the remaining fans that the game was cancelled. These exuberant fans responded by expanding their parade from their section to the rest of the stadium. One young man in a maroon tank top and shorts led the procession, waving his arms straight up in the air and dancing and chanting to the danzón rhythms. Two or three drummers rotated on the main, three-foot-high drum; when one drummer tired, another took over, so the beat continued without ceasing. Two other young men carried the drum as one played. A handful of other drummers carried their drums under one arm while playing them. They passed through the crowd shaking hands, sharing drinks, and leading sections in dancing before moving on to the next section. Ninety minutes after play had been cancelled, they were still going strong, thoroughly enjoying themselves. Finally, an announcement over the loudspeakers declared that everyone had to leave the stadium. The celebrants eventually streamed out of the stadium into the darkened streets, dancing, singing, and drumming as they went—two hours after the end of play on the field—the rain continuing all the while. These performers, drummers, dancers, and others clearly were part of the stadium environment. While the action that occurs on the field of play is a central focus of the spectacle of Cuban baseball, spectators are in no way distanced from the action. The audience, in general, does not passively observe. Rather, the audience is an integral part of Cuban baseball, for it is the people in the stands who create the atmosphere and spectacle that constitute the Serie Nacional. In this regard, it is not unlike that other quintessential Caribbean spectacle, Carnaval. ‘‘Of all possible sociocultural practices, the carnival . . . is the one that best expresses the strategies that the people of the Caribbean have for The Spectacle of and for Cuba ∏Ω

speaking at once of themselves and their relation with the world, with history, with tradition, with nature, with God’’ (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 294). Widely considered to be the quintessential performance of cultural identity across the Caribbean, Carnaval is commonly held to be a spectacle of public licentiousness, anarchy, and the reversal of social hierarchy. Interpretations of Carnaval center on Victor Turner’s ideas of the liminal (1969; 1988: 21–32), a temporal and spatial ritual space removed from everyday reality where symbolic meanings can be transformed, and the ludic (Huizinga 1971 [1950]), the playful elements that provide the most powerful and creative aspects of any given society. Scholarship on Caribbean festivals and national identity tend to demonstrate either how Carnaval strengthens group cohesion and national consciousness through the reinforcement of key symbols and commonly held values (Manning 1977, 1978), or how it breaks the daily monotony of everyday life by providing a separate social space in which social tensions in a multiracial, multicultural society can be released (Stewart 1986). As the liberating social ritual par excellence, Carnaval is most commonly portrayed as a spectacle of structural oppositions—‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low,’’ ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside,’’ ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’—joyously and extravagantly subverted to give birth to a utopian universe of play and unbridled pleasure (Bakhtin 1984). Portrayed as a celebratory flouting and reversal of social structures and hierarchies governing the ‘‘profane’’ order of society—the rich changing places with poor, men dressing as and caricaturing women—Carnaval certainly appears liberating. Yet far from being a harmonious whole that reifies binary oppositions, Carnaval elides di√erent aspects of power relations, thereby simultaneously reversing, intensifying, and reinforcing those relations within the same spectacle. At the heart of this spectacle lies uncertainty. ‘‘The whole point of the festival is precisely in not knowing what will happen in a world where adventure is finally radicalized because petty bourgeois social life is suspended and inverted’’ (DaMatta 1984: 237). It is this inability to know what immediate events will bring, their unpredictability, which forms both the dramatic quality of sport and, in particular, the vital quality of Cuban baseball that attracts fans—lo ambiente. Lo ambiente is central to producing valued spectacles. It involves certain aspects within a particular baseball game that not all games will have. For lo ambiente to become manifest on any given night, a game must be a closely fought contest with tense moments, controversial decisions π≠ chapter three

(not necessarily on the part of the umpire), and a historical (real or imagined) rivalry between the two contestants. The potentiality of at least one of the elements must exist to continue to attract the many fans who work their way to the stadium expecting drama. In part, it is anticipation that creates lo ambiente in the stadium, anticipation that something evocative will happen, that forms the attraction for spectators. Not every game produces lo ambiente; nor can every game even have the potential to do so. At the beginning of the thirty-seventh Serie Nacional, the 1997–98 baseball season, Metropolitanos played its first series of games at home in the Estadio Latinoamericano while Industriales were away.≥ The stadium was virtually empty; a single person shouting could be heard throughout the stadium. There was no atmosphere, no lo ambiente, yet Cubans continued to insist that baseball was a spectacle. ‘‘You’ve been going to watch Metropolitanos. Nobody watches them. Wait until Industriales play Santiago in two weeks. Then you’ll see a spectacle.’’ Throughout the thirty-seventh Serie Nacional few spectators attended Metropolitanos’ games, even after the team made the playo√s for the first time in more than ten years. When the initial anticipated series between Industriales and Santiago arrived, the stadium vomited riotous waves of sound produced by more than thirty thousand fans screaming, blowing on horns, climbing on dugout roofs to act out skits, and dancing in their seats. It was an assault on the senses, particularly after the silence of earlier games. In addition to anticipation, lo ambiente is also produced under local contexts. The rivalries that help produce lo ambiente in Estadio Latinoamericano revolve around Industriales and its relationship with two specific teams: Pinar del Río, their divisional rivals, and Santiago de Cuba, the capital of the Oriente and most successful team from the Eastern Division. The rivalries that Industriales’ fans help create, however, are not necessarily the same ones that their rivals, for example, Santiago’s fans and players, may feel. Santiago’s rivalries include Industriales but also comprise Camagüey and Villa Clara, the two teams that most often challenge Santiago’s supremacy in the Oriente. But not Pinar del Río. Similarly, Pinar del Río’s rivals include Industriales and Santiago but neither Camagüey or Villa Clara. Instead, other lesser rivalries include Isla de la Juventud and Habana. Thus, there is a clear hierarchy of rivalries in which the ranking depends on the local context of each particular team. These emotionally laden, localized constructs have been strategically extended to nationalist discourses. Even though the localized discourses The Spectacle of and for Cuba π∞

of rivalries di√er, the structure of these local discourses remains the same. They all follow the same rules and use the same crucial elements for dramatization. They are all embodiments of one and the same basic dramatization, as norm and praxis, which is therefore capable of inventing its many planes within the framework of a fantastic dramatic unity. In this context, then, baseball is not unlike the other quintessential Caribbean spectacle: the pre-Lenten Carnival. Writing about Carnaval, the Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta argues that while these may be di√erent carnivals, they follow the same rules and use the same crucial elements. ‘‘Carnaval creates its own social space, limited though it may be, with its own logic and norms for behavior. Because this space is in direct opposition to everyday life, it merely reinforces the everyday world’’ (DaMatta 1991: 61–62). Similarly baseball, indeed all team sports, follow similar principles in their organization of spectacle. The playing fields and the stadiums demarcate unique social spaces with their own logic for ordering social interaction. Even though spectacles appear chaotic and free flowing, they are actually highly ordered and hierarchical events. Because everything is legally organized and registered and must follow strict regulations set up by the state, spectacles rarely become a potential site for challenging the status quo precisely because it is the state that is the organizing agent of such license. The struggles do not take place during the air of festivity but in the preparations leading up to the spectacle, where the structure of the event is to be determined. The discourses and image associated with the Rio carnaval as a unifying and, in some ways, monumental national spectacle conceal a contrary history. . . . The contemporary carnaval, which is conventionally understood as a demonstration of democracia racial and the temporary collapse of class-based boundaries, is the negotiated product of a [Brazilian] history of racialized struggles for public space (Sheri√ 1999: 21).

The struggles culminating in the ‘‘theft of carnival’’ from the poor (Sheri√ 1999) are a product of a decades-long struggle over who ‘‘owns’’ Carnaval in Brazil. Similar political struggles over Carnaval in Cuba between political parties and African Cuban cabildos and Abakuá societies have continued since at least the nineteenth century (Bettelheim 1990). Since the 1959 Revolution, the Communist Party as agent of the state has controlled the organization and production of such spectacles, gradually shifting which carnival groups played these roles. Historically, Carnaval π≤ chapter three

was organized by comparsas, organized through strong neighborhood and ethnic ties; paseos, originally members of the criollo aristocracy; and the congas, which do not usually include costumed performers but accumulate power and prestige by gathering a crowd of dancing followers as they march through the streets. Later, organization was undertaken by groups established either by neighborhood a≈liation or by labor unions and industries. Nonetheless, Bettelheim notes that power struggles still rage between competing Carnaval groups in terms of the quality and quantity of support given to each group by the state.

The Spectacle of the Nation ¡El mejor béisbol amateo del mundo! ¡El mejor espectáculo deportivo! [The best amateur baseball in the world! The best sport spectacle!] —Slogan for the Serie Nacional

Spectacles are an articulation of present, everyday life that draw upon the experiences of the past through the medium of ‘‘social dramas’’ (Turner 1974). Social dramas exist in two senses: as ‘‘an objectively isolable sequence of social interaction of a conflictive, competitive or agonistic type’’ (Turner 1988: 33) and, at their simplest, as ‘‘literary compositions that tell a story, usually of human conflict, by means of dialogue and action, and performed by actors’’ (Turner 1988: 27). While either can apply equally within baseball, it is the former rather than the latter context that I use here. Such dramas can be the grand theater of state politics, when the actions of political figures feed on glorious pasts or central religious myths. The myths and histories in nationalist narratives revolve around such dramas. The narrative of the Cuban Revolution is based upon two such dramas, the e√orts and martyrdom of José Martí and of Che Guevara. Martí was a nineteenth-century Cuban journalist who organized and led the original revolutionary party against the Spanish. Similarly, Che Guevara’s life and death serve as a contemporary moralistic drama of the Revolution and Castro’s leadership. But social dramas are not limited to the grandeur of nation building and state politics. It is no less suggestive for humbler moments—the kinds of stories ethnographers often tell—to serve as important narratives that rea≈rm and accentuate specific social identities. Baseball games fulfill just such a role. It is through participation in such evocative spectacles that Cubans find The Spectacle of and for Cuba π≥

not just venues for representation and participation but also solidarity and fraternity in an atmosphere of pachanga (festivity). The festive air generated and regenerated via participation in spectacular performances, such as those found in baseball, produces both the structure and the limits of expression and participation, thereby defining who does and does not belong to the nation. In this manner, ‘‘hegemony always involves ‘practical activity,’ and the social relations that produce inequality, as well as the ideas by which that inequality is justified, explained, normalized and so on’’ (Crehan 2002: 174). The popular element ‘‘feels’’ but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element ‘‘knows’’ but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel . . . The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned . . . One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and peoplenation . . . If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation (Gramsci 1971: 418).

Antonio Gramsci defines intellectuals as ‘‘all those with a responsibility to instill knowledge into others and ensure, in however minor a way, that a given way of seeing the world is reproduced. Included within his category of intellectual . . . are those who perform organizational tasks’’ (Crehan 2002: 132). Ultimately, sports spectacles serve to reinforce social normality and a clear social hierarchy. They tend to reinforce existing economic and political hierarchies. The spectacular experience of the world turned upside down produces ‘‘enclaved liminal moments of ‘ordered disorder’ ’’ (Featherstone 1991: 136) in direct contrast to the discrete predictability of the daily routine. Regular attendance in the stadium leads spectators to an emotional sense of community and belonging. As one older Industriales supporter explained, ‘‘I have been coming here for twenty-nine years. At first, I was not really a fan, but then I started shouting at an Industriales game and that did it.’’ Stadiums are self-contained environments that accommodate thousands of regular ‘‘residents’’ and come to be viewed and experienced as a place where friends and family come together to work, play, and share in community celebrations (Trujillo and Krizek π∂ chapter three

1994). Perhaps, that is why the most common forms of ‘‘the Caribbean’s cultural manifestations always imply a public, an active spectator, a participant without whose performance little could be done’’ (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 292). As a spectacle, baseball in no way embodies the reversal of society’s hierarchical structures but serves to reinforce them. Although baseball appears to be carnival-like, it does not allow excessive breaches of normative behavior. Rather than conceiving of baseball as a complete relaxation of social norms, it is better to perceive the Serie Nacional as a licensed social drama of both local and national significance. Social dramas take place among those members of a given group who feel strongly about their membership. Asserted in various contexts, formal or informal, at home or in public, emotions, such as pride, joy, shame, or grief, are fundamental in the life and discourses of sports fans (Archetti 1997; Bromberger 1995). Such feelings impel fans to enter into relationships with others, which makes the activity become ‘‘meaningful,’’ in the sense that the beliefs, values, norms, and symbols ‘‘carried’’ in that group’s culture become so internalized that they constitute what an individual member might regard as part of one’s identity (Turner 1988: 46). Those Cubans who attend baseball games do so for a variety of expressed reasons: to watch the game, to cheer for Industriales, to socialize and meet with friends, to conduct an illicit a√air, to get out of the house. Emotion provides the meaning that ties social drama to the place and the team. It is important to the construction of both individual notions of cubanidad as well as the collective understanding of what it means to be Cuban. These spectacles only take place with the blessing of the state. The state’s presence in the celebration of baseball is evident from the beginning of each game via the ritual of singing the national anthem. The media, as well, act as representatives since they produce the ‘‘o≈cial’’ versions and interpretations of the events that happen on the field. The state’s presence remains throughout with the continuous although subdued presence of police o≈cers. But ideally, the state presence is only made as an unobtrusive reminder—at the beginning of the game, as one enters the stadium, and in reading the accounts of events in the following day’s newspaper—otherwise state power remains discretely in the background. Spectators, as citizens, are vaguely aware that government institutions and bureaucrats worked to create and maintain the Serie Nacional during the game, but the state presence barely registers among their The Spectacle of and for Cuba π∑

concerns. Their concerns lie, rather, with how Industriales are going to defeat Pinar del Río that evening. Yet it is to the state that I now turn, for comprehending the Cuban state’s roles in producing the settings and structure for the spectacle that is Cuban baseball is vital to further understanding how spectacle produces the cultural intimacy informing the politics of passion within Cuban identity.

State Control of Spectacles States are not naturally occurring entities despite the legitimating discourses that each produces claiming the contrary. Rather, the work of the state, these state projects (Abrams 1988), requires constant reminders, declarations, proclamations, and other public statements asserting its natural position of power and as a means of social organization. Out of the vast range of human social capacities—possible ways in which social life could be lived—state activities more or less forcibly ‘‘encourage’’ some whilst suppressing, marginalizing, eroding, [and] undermining others. . . . Fundamental social classifications, like age, and gender, are enshrined in law, embedded in institutions, routinized in administrative procedures and symbolized in rituals of state. Certain forms of activity are given the o≈cial seal of approval, others are situated beyond the pale. This has enormous cumulative, and enormous cultural consequences, consequences for how people identify . . . themselves and their ‘‘place’’ in the world (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 3, 4).

Statehood, then, is not a thing per se but the manifestation and social articulation through symbolic discourse of specific social relationships. These relationships come to define one’s place in society and, through the establishment of social hierarchy, give the appearance of solidity to something that is, for all intents and purposes, a fluid situation. Once a state discourse is constructed and objectified, it is likely that it embodies a powerful salience, often seeming ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘primordial,’’ based on the everyday experiences of individuals. Such constructions, however, are not a matter of recognizing an already present commonality, nor a matter of inventing an ‘‘identity’’ out of whole cloth, but originate in relations of inequality. Nonetheless, the deception inherent in state projects is that the strength of the state appears to be based on the commonalities of the populace living in its space, often through the discourse of citizenship π∏ chapter three

but also through invocations of national interests (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). If we conceive of hegemonic processes and common discursive frameworks, ‘‘the languages of contention,’’ as unarticulated but necessary state projects rather than as state achievements, in other words, as processes rather than outcomes, it becomes possible to advance our understanding of state formation in relation to cultural forms, such as sport (Roseberry 1994: 365). What hegemony constructs . . . is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination. That common material and meaningful framework is discursive: a common language or way of talking about social relationships that sets out the central terms around which and in terms of which contestation and struggle can occur (Roseberry 1994: 361).

These common frameworks are frequently the invented traditions of the contested nation. Exactly how specific nationalist discourses, that is, the struggles over cubanidad, are deployed depends on specific sets of social relations reified through invented traditions. Invented traditions are a set of practices, ‘‘normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and mores of behavior by repetition’’ (Hobsbawm 1983: 1), which automatically and ideally imply continuity with a suitable historic past. Such inventions do not preclude innovation or change up to a point, but the tradition’s appearance must remain compatible or even identical with precedent. Hobsbawm notes that the invention of tradition should be expected to become more frequent when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which the ‘‘old’’ traditions had been designed (Hobsbawm 1983: 4). The Cuban Revolution fits this particular dictum perfectly. The social upheaval resulting from the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship, along with the shift in economic orientation transforming what had been a nationalist liberation project into a socialist-state-building one, constitutes a historical moment when the previous traditions, the everyday rituals along with Cuban historical discourse, had been ruptured. Revolutionary leaders needed to reassert a historical continuity with Cuba’s past. In so doing, they attached their movement with previous Cuban struggles: the overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in 1933 and the struggles The Spectacle of and for Cuba ππ

against the Spanish culminating in their ouster at the end of the nineteenth century. A revolution, by its very nature, is the destruction of existing social structures; the inversion of some relations with the outright sundering of others. In the transference of political power, however, some social continuity must be maintained, or the emergent legitimacy of the nascent state project has little chance to become established. The ruptures caused by the Cuban Revolution constituted a reorganization of Cuban society. These ruptures were not singular momentous events but a gradual process that entailed shifting the attitudes of the island’s population and the reorganization of social institutions, such as sport, as well as the renegotiation of transnational relationships. Baseball, in this regard, was no di√erent than other institutions. When Castro’s guerilla forces rolled into Havana and assumed power in January 1959, the International League, a professional league stretching across the eastern half of North America, maintained its presence in Cuba. One of the teams, the Havana Sugar Kings, played its home games in the Estadio Latinoamericano, then called El Gran Stadium del Cerro, or the Gran Stadium for short. As a franchise of the International League, the team was ultimately a subsidiary of Major League Baseball (mlb). While nationalist jingoism often appeared in the press, as it did when the Cubans won the 1959 Junior World Series against the Minneapolis Millers, the team itself was a combination of Cuban and North American professional athletes. So nationalist outbursts of ‘‘¡Cuba Campeones!’’ (Cuba Champions!) when the Sugar Kings defeated the Millers were not necessarily anti–United States. Rather, such expressions were in line with the early aspirations of the Revolutionary regime attempting to create a new political system based upon the 1940 Cuban Constitution while maintaining the island’s lucrative relationships with the United States. By the summer of 1960, though, the changing relationship between Revolutionary leaders and the U.S. government shifted the nature of the Revolution’s trajectory. What had been a nationalist political movement to remove a corrupt, illegitimate government became a radical economic strategy that nationalized various industries. Cuba was still capitalist throughout 1960 and into 1961 while undergoing democratic reforms in its political system. However, internal Cuban factions defending their own interests, along with a callous U.S. reaction to the termination of neocolonial relations between the two countries, resulted in the Ameri-

π∫ chapter three

cans canceling the sugar quota—the sugar purchased by the United States at a fixed price—in retaliation for the takeover of U.S.-owned companies. This deteriorating situation quickly a√ected baseball as well. Throughout the spring of 1960, rumors circulated that the Sugar Kings would be moved before the season began. Ominously, a spring exhibition series in Havana between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cincinnati Reds was cancelled. Both teams had a long history of playing exhibition games on the island. The season did open with Rochester visiting the Sugar Kings in Havana, and Castro threw out the ceremonial first pitch. Despite Castro’s entreaties that he would never nationalize the Sugar Kings, the president of the International League, Frank Shaughnessy, used his newly acquired powers to move franchises and alter the schedule to relocate the Sugar Kings to Jersey City, New Jersey, in July, the middle of the 1960 baseball season. The reaction was swift and sharp. The manager and coaches, all of whom were Cuban, resigned in protest. More important, the withdrawal of the Sugar Kings along with other developments made it clear that the next season of the Cuban League, the professional baseball league in Cuba, was in jeopardy. Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Ford Frick, ‘‘recommended’’ that the owners of Major League clubs not allow their players to compete in the winter leagues in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.∂ Frick’s saber rattling was an attempt to bring the two leagues into line, both of which were pulling away from mlb’s control. The fourteam Cuban League was owned and controlled by mlb interests that were more interested in ‘‘developing’’ young American players, having to pay them little, than having to pay more to established Cuban athletes, many of whom already played professionally in the Major League system, especially in the Minor Leagues. Rumor had it that he was considering banning all Latin American players in mlb, including Cubans, from performing in Havana. The newly appointed Revolutionary government’s overseers of the Cuban League responded by declaring that the Cuban League would henceforth be comprised of only Cuban players. When tryouts were held, over one hundred professional Cuban ballplayers came to El Gran Stadium to try to make one of the four teams. For many, it was the first time that they had a real chance of making one of them. What became clear as that first all-Cuban season was played was that importing U.S. players in the past

The Spectacle of and for Cuba πΩ

had caused many Cuban professionals to have to play in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, where racial and other social barriers were less stringent and salaries were significantly less. While the all-Cuban composition breached the agreement that committed team administrators to use U.S. players for development, the threat to mlb control became even more pronounced when plans emerged that would have Cuban League teams play in Venezuela. Cuban baseball o≈cials, in negotiations with Venezuelan o≈cials, decided that each of the four Cuban League teams would play games against teams in the Liga de Zulia (in Maracaibo) and Liga Central (in Caracas). The main reason for this agreement was to allow Cuban players to leave their earnings for playing those games in Venezuela, which they could later draw upon in other countries, something they could no longer do with their earnings in Havana as relations between the United States and Cuba had further deteriorated. This commingling of the two Venezuelan leagues with the Cuban League hinted that a pan-Caribbean league could possibly be established beyond the control of mlb. The possibility of baseball-playing countries across the Caribbean aligning themselves in direct challenge to mlb’s domination was a prospective economic threat of a kind that had not been faced since the 1946 ‘‘Baseball War’’ between mlb and the Mexican League.∑ This potential realignment of baseball power throughout the Caribbean quickly proved moot, though. Despite the Revolutionary all-Cuban Cuban League being filled with high-caliber players and producing a most thrilling conclusion, with only four games separating the champions from the last-place team, the League was overwhelmed by financial and logistical challenges. The leading television station, cmq, could not pay the contracted fees to the Cuban League for broadcast rights, which by October was a moot point since the television station was by then nationalized. As part of a campaign to include the provinces in all aspects of Cuban life, but also because revenues were at an all-time low, games were played in cities other than Havana. A great deal of enthusiasm was generated; it appeared, though, that many of the game’s supporters had fled in the previous months and others were too distracted with ongoing political upheaval on the island. It was apparent that there would not be a next season as this one drew to a close, at least not a Cuban League organized along those economic lines.

∫≠ chapter three

The Serie Nacional Initially created in 1961, the Serie Nacional was created to replace the four existing professional teams of the professional Cuban League: Almendares, Habana, Cienfuegos, and Marianao. Those four teams all played in the capital. With play beginning in 1962, the Serie Nacional also began with four teams, but unlike the professional league sited solely in Havana, the four teams represented the entirety of Cuba. Those four teams, Orientales, Occidentes, Azucareros and Industriales proved so popular that the league quickly expanded into a six-team league in 1965 and then a ten-team one in 1967. Cuban o≈cials continually tinkered with the composition of the league, changing the number of contests each season while maintaining the geographic basis for each squad. The league expanded in the 1980s to eighteen teams before settling back to sixteen teams in the 1990s. From the 1994–95 through the 2002–3 Serie Nacional the structure of the league remained the same, the longest period of time in the forty years of the Serie Nacional that the number of teams and structure of the league has not changed. There are sixteen teams divided into two eight-team divisions. These two divisions, Occidente and Oriente (or the West and the East), are subsequently divided into two groups within each division. This makes four teams in each group, eight teams in each division, and sixteen teams total. Each team represents a province with the exceptions of Ciudad de la Habana, which has two teams (Industriales and Metropolitanos), and Isla de la Juventud, which is part of Pinar del Río province from an administrative perspective but is separate in its sport programs as the island serves as a specialized training ground. The structure of the Serie Nacional for the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth seasons, the two I spent in Havana, is in table 1. The current organization of the league is as follows. All sixteen teams play every other team throughout the season. Four teams from each division—Occidente and Oriente—qualify for the playo√ tournament. Usually, this means the two teams with the best records from each grupo make the playo√s. Occasionally, a third team from one grupo has a better record than the second-place team in the other grupo within its division. That team would qualify instead of the second-place team from the other group. For example, if Industriales and Habana had the two best records from Grupo A and Pinar del Río and Cienfuegos had the two best records from Grupo B then those four teams would meet in the first round of playo√s. The team with the best record from Grupo A would play the second-place

The Spectacle of and for Cuba ∫∞

Table 1. Structure of the Serie Nacional for the 37th and 38th Series Nacionales Occidente Grupo A Industriales Habana Matanzas Isla de la Juventud

Oriente Grupo B Pinar del Río Metropolitanos Cienfuegos Sancti Spiritu

Grupo C Santiago Las Tunas Camagüey Granma

Grupo D Villa Clara Ciego de Avila Holguín Guantánamo

team from Grupo B and vice versa. However, if the third-place team in Grupo A say Matanzas had a better won-lost record than the second-place team in Grupo B then Matanzas would play the first-place team in Grupo A while the second-place team played the only representative from Grupo B. Thus, the overall record against the entire league can be of prime importance when competing for playo√ places and position. Within the playo√s, starting with eight teams with the best won-lost record of each division, an eventual champion from each division is determined, who then plays the other division’s champion for the national title. This infrastructure provided by the state was vital in the establishment of the Revolutionaries’ abilities to establish a hegemonic position of power. Indeed, the Serie Nacional is only one part of the larger infrastructure of baseball in Cuba. There are children’s leagues, workers’ leagues, and developmental leagues, all of which act as training grounds for Cuban athletes and provide an environment for socialization and sociability for many Cubans. In addition to the Serie Nacional a select league called the Serie Selectiva has periodically played after the end of the Serie Nacional. That competition is currently comprised of four teams— called Orientales, Occidentales, Centrales and Habana—that draw on the best players from the teams in the Serie Nacional based on the province they represent. Thus, Occidentales is made of up of the twenty best players from Matanzas, Pinar del Río, Isla de la Juventud, and Cienfuegos. At the top of this infrastructure is the national team or, rather, national teams, since there are several teams that represent Cuba in various international tournaments. The distinction here is the players’ age: a di√erent national team represents Cuba at the Olympics than the one that competes at the World

∫≤ chapter three

University Games or World Youth Games. Thus, even within the national team institution, there is a hierarchical structure of national squads. The national team that draws its players from the Serie Nacional and competes in the most prestigious tournaments, such as the Olympics, is the one that draws the most attention and has the most prestige. The Cuban national teams’ prestige and prominence in international tournaments have been part of a particular strategy of Cuban leaders since the early 1960s. The reasons for leaders’ emphasis on sporting prominence remain twofold. The first is that it provides a regular and steady symbolic discourse of the physical prowess of the Cuban nation, which by inference reflects the robustness of the state itself. The national team embodies national and state power in the international community of nation-states. This is especially pertinent in Cuba’s case, since Cuba’s economic and military power is not terribly prescient, but through its athletic prowess, it maintains a highly visible presence in and among the community of nation-states. Lest the presence and sporting success be treated as somewhat superficial, the political significance of participation in prestigious international sports festivals, such as the Olympics, is far reaching. Immediately after World War II, political recognition of East Germany by the powers in the West did not occur until after the East German athletes tasted success in the 1948 Olympics, the first Olympiad held after the war, and especially in 1952, when they and the Soviet Union dominated numerous events.∏ However, while the national teams garner prestige for the state through their international competition, it is not the national teams’ migrations but the regularity of the national league’s games that serves as the most important sport spectacle. The Serie Nacional is the vital component of Cuban baseball because it comprises the regularly available spectacles that produce the requisite consent for civic leaders to continue in their positions of power. The government’s creation of this infrastructure, especially a league that allowed access to Cubans across the island, provided regular spectacles in which local athletes, athletes born and raised in the communities near each stadium, competed against Cubans from other regions of the country. Furthermore, the nascent Cuban state built numerous stadiums in those cities that had none earlier and upgraded many of the facilities outside the capital. The role of the state extends far beyond coercion to include cultural forms that penetrate deep into society.

The Spectacle of and for Cuba ∫≥

The enormous power of the State is not only external and objective; it is in equal part internal and subjective, it works through us. It works above all through the myriad of ways it collectively and individually (mis)represents us and variously ‘encourages,’ cajoles, and in the final analysis forces us to (mis)represent ourselves (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 180, 199).

The state then provides the stage for the formation of national and localized passions played out in the rivalries within the Serie Nacional.

The Nation and State as Teammates The making of identities occurs in the minutiae of everyday practice, most notably in the routine encounters between individuals embodying different identities. State-building projects are intimately linked to hegemonic processes. Hegemony, as a concept, moves away from a monolithic conceptualization of domination and toward the idea of a problematic contest over domination. Thus, state discourses about a particular identity need to be understood in the context of specific historical processes of struggle. However, the social conditions that gave rise to a specific identity are not necessarily the same conditions that nurture that identity. Thus, the composition or content of a given identity constantly changes, adjusting to the shifting power relationships found within a given society, and, therefore, questions of identity emerge from structural relations of power and inequality. Sports crowds in stadiums provide the necessary environment for the creation of these identities. Turner makes exactly this observation when considering the spectacle of a Brazilian fútbol crowd in Rio de Janeiro. A soccer game in the huge Maracaná Stadium between the great Rio rivals Flamenco and Fluminense has something of ritual quality with its ‘‘baterías’’ of drummers, banners borne aloft when a team scores, fireworks, clouds of powder ejected upwards, club colors, praise songs, corporate groups of supporters each based on a traditional barrio of the city: in all this one can detect a transcendence of mundane reality and a sense of civic and national history made present (Turner 1988: 49).

The same processes occur in the baseball stadiums across Cuba. The spectators’ involvement as active participants in the sporting spectacle produces sentiments of civic and national identities. One regular attendee ∫∂ chapter three

at Estadio Latinoamericano explained the pervasive significance of baseball throughout Cuba. It is a thing constantly in peoples’ lives. It’s talked about when you turn on the television, turn on the radio; it is inside your house. When you talk on your street corner, you talk about baseball. When you go to the corner from your house, there are some boys playing. When you go to work, there is discussion among your coworkers about baseball, or when you go to the stadium. There is an everyday presence of baseball so strong that a friend of mine, who lived in Colombia for a time, said that when he arrived in May and the baseball season had ended, this is the most boring country in the world because there isn’t anything else to talk [about]. Because every day there are baseball games, you can arrive at your work and talk about yesterday’s game. They say baseball always gives a topic of conversation, and realistically it really does, when there isn’t a game, life is much more boring.

The Serie Nacional then, is a vital part of the creation of Cuban identity because of the crowds of spectators, not the sporting activities in and of themselves. Athletes’ bodily actions are inherently devoid of meanings. Running, throwing, and swinging a bat all have little to no intrinsic cultural significance even within the context of a baseball game. The games in Estadio Latinoamericano could literally be taking place anywhere there is a field in Cuba, or anywhere around the world for that matter. What makes the games played in the Estadio Latinoamericano and other Serie Nacional stadiums across Cuba significant are the meanings imbued on the athletic action by the spectators. In this manner then, the state, the media, the athletes, and the fans all become teammates, in a quasi-Go√manesque sense. A team may be defined as a set of individuals whose intimate cooperation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained. A team is a grouping . . . in relation to an interaction or series of interactions in which the relevant definition of the situation is maintained (Go√man 1959: 104).

In general, those who participate in the activity that occurs in a social establishment become members of a team when they cooperate together to present their activity in a particular light. A teammate is one whose cooperation is dependent upon fostering a given definition of the situation: if such a person goes beyond the pale of informal sanctions, giving The Spectacle of and for Cuba ∫∑

the show away or forcing it to take a particular turn, he is nonetheless a part of the team (Go√man 1959: 83). Nor can it be said that conflicts and disagreements among teammates cannot arise. As anyone who has ever been on a team is acutely aware, personal di√erences, di√erent agendas, and outright disagreement often play a significant role in the formation and maintenance of a team. It is the transformation of this relationship between performer and crowd, from the separation of audience and actors to one in which the spectators acquire the active role of participants in collective processes, that is sometimes cathartic and that may symbolize or even create a community. Sports events, music concerts, theatrical events, processions, and exhibitions certainly can provide the opportunity for spectators to express emotions vicariously without making deeper commitments. Many are seduced so that an athlete (or team), film actor, or rock star becomes an emotional axis of a fan’s life. Indeed, Henri Lefebvre articulates this frequently repeated, powerful argument that emotional commitments to such icons are likely to be ultimately unsatisfying because they are mediated by ideologies of marketing and commodification (Lefebvre 1991). From this perspective, emotional investment in one’s self is subject to an objectification that alienates the spectator from the heart of that spectacular experience, thereby contributing to the general sense of remoteness and distance in everyday life. The assumption of reduced emotional investment to a particular relationship in which the self is solely a capitalistbased consumer narrows the human capacity for emotion to a singular attempt to gratify desires, and therefore fails to take the breadth of emotional motivation and attachment into consideration. By reducing the spectacle to an item to be consumed, the presumption is that the spectator has no vested interest in the spectacle’s outcome. Yet, there is much more to emotion than fulfilling consumerist desire. Indeed, the paucity of consumer goods on the market for Cuban consumption makes the spectacle that is the Serie Nacional all the more powerful, since one cannot buy other desires. The fans’ emotions ‘‘retain value as a way of talking about the intensely meaningful that is culturally defined, socially enacted and personally articulated’’ (Lutz 1988: 5). Indeed, it is the experience that is of special value, not any commodification of such spectacles. This is true not only for Cuban fans but for sports fans in general.π As a category more open than others, emotion retains its value through the creation of a link between the mental and the physical and between ∫∏ chapter three

the ideal and the embodied world. It retains value as a way of orienting people towards things that matter rather than things that simply make sense. It is emotion that produces an individual’s connections between personal experience and the idea of belonging to a collective, such as a nation-state. In this manner, baseball becomes an experiential social drama, enacting core values and beliefs inherent in ‘‘the politics of passion’’ (Fernández 2000) that shapes the struggle over cubanidad. Baseball, as is the nature of sport, dramatizes victory and loss in ways that do not always seem ‘‘just.’’ In a ‘‘just’’ world, the skilled athlete or team that puts forth the greatest e√ort would emerge victorious, but the realities of competition include other variables that prevent such predictability. This aspect of sport is what di√ers from the statistical analysis of athletic performance and the actual embodied competitions; it is, as it is often said, ‘‘why they play the game.’’ It is the sudden, unexpected outcomes that exemplify a whole lifetime’s drama about choices: loss and victory can be exemplified in one single competition, and contests may remind the spectators of mythical themes.∫ The dramatic qualities of sport contests make them speak immediately to spectators’ own understanding of their worlds, and it is most definitely in states’ interests to control the production of such spectacles. Cuban baseball is a constant contest in which the concept of cubanidad is waged. Deployed by state o≈cials as an embodiment of its particular discursive vision of how the Cuban nation is defined, the national team is a focal point in the ongoing struggle over the definition of what it means to be Cuban. Those games, like the others the Cuban national team play in international tournaments, are significant because they illustrate how baseball can be a spectacular event that heightens nationalist sentiments. The national team acts as a sort of ‘‘home’’ team for the nation-state. The irony is that this Cuban ‘‘home’’ team rarely plays in Cuba. When it has, stadiums have been packed to capacity with rabid supporters, as was evident in the 1990 Pan American Games held in Havana. Since the national team almost always plays ‘‘away,’’ it does not evoke the powerfully felt embodied emotions that spectatorship engenders. Watching the national team on television or hearing its match on the radio as it plays in Japan, Spain, or elsewhere around the globe involves a decided lack of bodily experience and sensation—not for the athletes, of course, but for the multitudes—since it is the spectators’ physical and emotional involvement that makes sport spectacles what they are. Since the majority of The Spectacle of and for Cuba ∫π

Cubans never have the opportunity to watch their national team play in person, the Cuban national baseball team’s ability to generate the passion that engenders, magnifies, and fuels the sentiments of cubanidad is especially problematic. The national team’s appearance in Baltimore and its exhibition game against a Venezuelan national team demonstrate the importance sport plays in the state’s discourse of cubanidad. Exactly how this occurs and the struggles involved in this production are explored in the next chapter.

∫∫ chapter three

CHAPTER

∂

The State in Play: The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport Just before midnight on 3 May 1999, Andy Morales, Cuba’s backup third baseman, slugged a three-run home run, confirming the Cuban national team’s victory over the Baltimore Orioles. Jubilantly, Morales circled the bases, blowing kisses, waving his arms in windmill-like circles, thumping his chest and pointing his finger into the humid sky thanking his God. The small Cuban delegation behind the third base dugout joined Morales in celebration, jumping, shouting, dancing, and blowing whistles. The home run put a capstone on an emphatic victory and represented all of the Cuban nation’s frustrated pride. The replay of Morales’s blast and his exuberant circuit presumably has been replayed thousands of times in Havana. After the game, Omar Linares, the star third baseman of the team, crowed, ‘‘We’re having a national party right now. This is the day we were waiting for.’’ The baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team played in Camden Yards, the stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, was a game like the thousands, if not millions, of others that have been played over the years. In one sense, it was merely a baseball game, and not a particularly enthralling one at that, yet an especially festive air enveloped the anticipatory buildup to the actual game. Games are, after all, meant to be festive; rather, they are not meant to be taken seriously but to divert their participants from the seriousness of life, however fleetingly. In another sense, this game di√ered from all the others. It was the first time a Cuban national team had played a Major League team on U.S. soil and only the second time a Major League team had played a Cuban national side since 1957. Furthermore, this was not a game between two professional teams (as the term is usually understood); nor was this a game between two teams explicitly representing nations as happens in the Olympics. The game was between a highly paid team of professionals of diverse nationalities representing a city in the United States, and a team of equally skilled nominal amateurs originating from and representing a

singular nation-state. It deviated from the expected sport spectacle provided in the United States because of the presence of a romanticized Cuban squad. It also deviated from the norms of international sport spectacles in that the contest was not between two teams representing countries but between di√erent understandings of one country, Cuba. The Cuban national team and its supporters on the island saw the contest as a measure of national skill and pride. Baltimore’s civic leaders, along with more liberal elements of the U.S. media, portrayed the exchange as a celebration of all things Cuban: a romanticized, nostalgic imagining of Cuba. Anti-Castro Cuban Americans and conservative elements of the U.S. media saw this exchange as the first step of a potential capitulation in their decades-long struggle against communism and Castro. Because these and other contexts surrounded the actual athletic competition, this game represented so much more to the ruthless o√-field competitors, who attempted to project certain understandings of this game and of Cuba. In short, this was no ordinary baseball game. Although the Baltimore-Cuba games were not standard international sport spectacles, international politics circumscribed the exchange between the Orioles and the Cuban national team from its very inception. Opponents to any rapprochement with the Castro government worked to prevent the exchange from happening in the first place. Having failed to prevent an agreed-upon exchange or the first exhibition game in Havana, opponents worked to ensure that the scheduled return game in Baltimore would not take place. When initial e√orts to thwart the Havana game proved unsuccessful, various obstacles were placed to make it as di≈cult as possible for the Baltimore game to proceed. The U.S. State Department tacitly supported Cuban exile groups dedicated to resisting any form of normalized relations. Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based Cuban exile group, threatened to boot the wheels of the two Cuban airliners upon the Cuban contingent’s arrival. Their plan’s legitimacy was based on a U.S. court lien imposed after Cuban fighters downed two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in 1996. That potentiality was avoided when go-betweens persuaded the Orioles’ owner Peter Angelos to charter his own planes to bring the Cubans to Baltimore. Other political wrangling also threatened the potential goodwill the exchange could have generated. The U.S. State Department refused to grant visas to invited prominent Cuban o≈cials Ricardo Alarcón (National Assembly President) and José Ramon Fernández Alarcón (Olympic CommitΩ≠ chapter four

tee Chairman). In a policy remaining from the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, the State Department still often refuses to issue visas to standing members of the Communist Party of Cuba who are invited to participate in academic conferences, cultural exchanges, and other theoretically nonpolitical events. Widely considered by leaders in the Western Hemisphere to be the only liberal in the Cuban government, Fernández Alarcón only acquired an entry visa through the intervention of U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd. Ricardo Alarcón never did obtain an entry visa. Further wrangling occurred over how the proceeds from the exhibition series would be distributed also delayed the exchange. American authorities wanted the proceeds to go to Caritas, the Cuban counterpart to U.S.-based charity Catholic Services, which attempts to provide social services in Cuba. Cuban authorities, however, see the organization as redundant and a front for American interference in Cuban a√airs. Ricardo Alarcón expressed their desire to see the funds go to a neutral cause. Eventually, it was agreed that the majority of the funds would be donated to the relief organizations working in Central America after two devastating hurricanes. Also, the State Department supposedly had asked the Baltimore police department to ‘‘facilitate’’ defections by setting up a special ‘‘safe’’ room under the grandstand in Camden Yards. Defections were a particularly touchy subject with Cuban o≈cials because of the defections of several Cuban baseball players over the previous three years. Although numerous Cubans had left the island, a handful of celebrated cases in which prominent Cuban baseball players had defected or had been smuggled o√ the island fueled Americans’ popular imagination of Cuban baseball. The 1997 and 1998 World Series reinforced the image of an untapped Cuban ‘‘gold mine’’ of baseball talent as a Cuban pitcher played a prominent role in his team’s eventual victory each year. Once it became certain that the game in Baltimore would proceed, which was only apparent the day before it was scheduled, Brothers to the Rescue and other anti-Castro groups remained determined to get their viewpoint seen and heard by disrupting the event as much as possible. Brothers to the Rescue reportedly had plans to buzz the stadium with small aircraft towing banners, resulting in President Clinton declaring the area around Baltimore’s stadium a no-fly zone. Prominent Cuban American politicians denounced the American government’s ‘‘restriction of their [Cuban anti-Castro protestors] rights,’’ that is, preventing their attempts to confront visiting Cuban authorities. The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport Ω∞

In the hours leading up to the game, protestors of varying political persuasions shouted to make their opinions heard outside Camden Yards. Under festive banners fluttering on the city’s lampposts, two contingents of protestors promoted opposing views in Babe Ruth Plaza. Various Cuban American, anti-Castro organizations chanted, ‘‘Cuba Sí, Castro, No!,’’ blew whistles, carried co≈ns, and waved signs. One group of middle-aged Cuban women, wearing t-shirts with dripping red letters that spelled out ‘‘Fidel Murderer,’’ waved signs and banners with catchy slogans, such as ‘‘Make Fidel Strike Out’’ and ‘‘Take Fidel out of the Ball Game.’’ Another anti-Castro group calling itself ‘‘The American tfp‘‘ unfurled a large banner declaring that ‘‘For the enslaved Cuban people, Fidel Castro’s ‘baseball diplomacy’ means little bread and lots of circus!’’ Two U.S. congressmen, Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida and Representative Bob Menendez of New Jersey, joined the protests. Diaz-Balart told the surrounding protestors that this game was an insult. ‘‘The game gives a vision to the world that everything in Cuba is fine.’’ Right next to the anti-Castro demonstrators, another group of protestors displayed their support for the exhibition match and condemned the U.S. blockade of Cuba. One group was adorned with matching red baseball caps and white sweatshirts, each emblazoned with a large baseball, which proudly declared, ‘‘We Love This!’’ Another group bore placards proclaiming ‘‘Cuba Sí! Blockade No!’’ and a brilliant yellow banner with a picture of Malcolm X meeting Castro that demanded, ‘‘End the U.S. blockade of Cuba. Jobs & Justice Now!’’ One protestor explained that ‘‘the embargo is a crime and a violation of the human rights of Cubans who need food and medicine.’’ Another Cuban American protestor voiced support for the baseball games and advocated greater contact between the two countries: ‘‘There was a war and it was lost by the people that are here. How could I not support them [the Cuban team]? I feel bad for this isolation my country, the United States, is imposing on our other country, Cuba.’’ Inside Camden Yards, an eastern seaboard carnival was in full swing complete with music, drink, dance, and eventually baseball. Balloons and banners displayed a special Orioles-Cuba logo commemorating the event. ¡Cubanismo!, a fifteen-piece music group from Havana, played for the growing crowd in an open area usually reserved for family picnics behind the left field fence. Curiosity seekers, protestors, diplomats, journalists, fans, and others mingled in the festive atmosphere pervading the Ω≤ chapter four

grounds—all of whom had converged on Baltimore for this singular game-like-no-other game. Most of these individuals held varying perspectives, intertwined, complex, and contradictory, about Cuba, the Cuban team, the Orioles, and baseball. Security personnel, ushers, and vendors circulated throughout the stadium before, during, and after the game. Others were more restricted; security kept many away from the Cuban contingent that had flown in from Havana for the game. The game’s events were not all that remarkable, but the events surrounding the game and occurring in the midst of the game were another matter entirely. The event was widely promoted as a cultural exchange, a form of ‘‘baseball diplomacy’’ that abrogated the still-existing Cold War political situation between the American and Cuban governments although that was a more of a red herring than anything else (Carter 1999). One reason this game did not embody ‘‘baseball diplomacy’’ was that the Orioles did not represent a nation. The Orioles are a professional team with athletes from several di√erent nations, whereas national teams in international competition are comprised of athletes from a single nation (or nation-state). The Cubans, on the other hand, did represent a nation. As a group, they had just finished their season and were anxious to prove that they could beat a Major League team. The earlier game, played in Havana, had taken place during the Serie Nacional’s playo√s. Consequently, several of Cuba’s best players were not available for that previous game. Thus, the game in Baltimore would have Cuba’s very best playing against a group of professionals who play in the best league in the world. A victory by Cuba would prove that their national squad was among the best baseball teams in the world. On the day of the game, the Orioles were in the middle of their season, and they were the worst team in the Major Leagues at that point of the 1999 season. Ray Miller, the team manager, was in danger of losing his job. The exhibition game claimed one of the players’ rare o√-days, in which they did not have a game against another Major League team or have to travel. As professionals, some of the players quietly rebelled, since they were not being paid for this game. Albert Belle, the left fielder and prime slugger for the Orioles, never took the bat o√ his shoulder in his three at bats, clearly refusing to participate in any active manner. That the Orioles were the worst team in the Major Leagues at that point in time did not matter to the Cubans. What mattered was proving that they could beat a Major League team. The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport Ω≥

3 Anti-Castro Cuban protestors outside Camden yards, Baltimore, 1999. Photo by author.

The event from the evening’s festivities that elicited more commentary than any other had nothing to do with the o≈cially planned activities. A protestor ran onto the field in the fifth inning carrying a small sign condemning Castro. When he neared second base, the protestor pranced in front of the second base umpire, Cuban César Valdés.∞ Valdés reacted angrily, chasing and grappling with the unnamed protestor. He then picked the o√ending man up and slammed him to the ground before pummeling the protestor. Baltimore police o≈cers arrived, restraining Valdés and arresting the protestor. After the game, Valdés explained his reaction by asserting that the protestor had taunted him by insulting his Ω∂ chapter four

4 Anti-Castro banner at protests outside of Camden Yards, Baltimore, 1999. 5 Cuban protestors calling for end of U.S. blockade outside of Camden Yards, Baltimore, 1999. Both photos by author.

Cuban heritage, and then, unable or unwilling to articulate his emotions further, he simply shrugged his shoulders and remarked by way of explanation, ‘‘Above all, I am Cuban.’’ No one questioned Valdés’s claim to being Cuban. The issue was not his identity per se. How Valdés’s actions were represented in the American media depended on the political perspective of the organization reporting on the event. More conservative commentators interpreted this confrontation as evidence of the restriction of U.S. citizens’ rights at this event. Some even asserted that Baltimore police arrested the wrong man, saying that Valdés should have been arrested for assault and battery while the ‘‘freedom fighter’’ should have been given a hero’s reception. The more liberally oriented commentators considered the confrontation with some bemusement, opining that the protestor got what he deserved.≤ The central issue obscured by the pithy comments and political rhetoric was, quite simply, the ongoing struggle over what it means to be Cuban. It is clear that di√erent ideas of being Cuba and of Cuba were at play that day. At first glance, the sociopolitical contexts surrounding this game appear clear cut and obvious. On the one hand, there were right-wing anticommunists and anti-Castroites. On the other were leftists, and human rights and anti-blockade advocates. In short, it appears that these demonstrators were reproducing simplified and calcified Cold War positions and projecting them onto the organizational ethos of both squads. One team is a privately held, for-profit organization and the other represents a socialist state which eschews the payment of athletes and the ‘‘buying, trading, and selling’’ of athletes as yet another form of capitalist exploitation. Yet, these demonstrators, their positions, and the exhibition game between Baltimore and Cuba have little to do with ‘‘baseball diplomacy’’ and Cold War politics (Carter 1999). The Cold War’s rhetorical positioning did not adequately apply because this event was not an international sporting event between two teams representing two di√erent countries. Rather, the game was between a subsidiary of a transnational corporation, the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball, and a national team, the Cubans. Ultimately, this game simply could not represent the Cold War struggle between democratic and communist political organizations; nor could the game be construed as a symbolic struggle between capitalist and socialist forms of economic organization, despite the clearly oppositional ideological frameworks that were at the base of the organization of each team and despite the Cuban government’s rheΩ∏ chapter four

torical attempts to make it so. Instead, the main conflict at the core of this exhibition series, despite multiple positions involved in the contest, turned on the struggle over the definitions of cubanidad, and thereby delineating Cuba: what it is, what it will be, and how it will be imagined, experienced, and understood.

The Contested State as ‘‘Home Team’’ The protestors’ attempts to define the position of Cuba and Cuban identity on Baltimore’s streets competed not only with each other but also with how Cuba is imagined in popular American discourse and, more important, with how the momentarily silent Cuban o≈cials positioned Cuba. It is Cuban o≈cials’ attempts to position Cuba and Cuban identity in this struggle that I now turn. As prominent producers of nationalist discourse, government leaders, especially Fidel Castro, explicitly use sport in general and baseball in particular to establish a socialist-based position for being Cuban. Nationalist connections to sport serve the express purpose of symbolically emphasizing the ‘‘sameness’’ of state leaders and working classes through their shared experiences and passion for a sport. Such connections aid in obscuring the hierarchical structure of a state and in controlling the populace through sentiment, yet the political use of sport in this manner is contradictorily fragile. These symbolic connections are not prima facie predetermined but are based upon narratives recounting the social experiences of the sport in question. When constructing these narratives, individuals do not include all experience or every event. Rather they select specific nodes that are, for them, most significant in the construction of a coherent story. These ‘‘experiential tropes’’ are themselves of indeterminate meaning. Their potential polyvocality allows for di√erent individuals with dissimilar experiences to use the same trope to construct autobiographical accounts (Borneman 1997: 97). State o≈cials propose a model narrative for the populace using a variety of tools, including educational institutions, housing regulations, fiscal and momentary policy, and marital laws. Citizens reflect on and respond to this narrative in everyday experiences and ritual encounters. In these interactions with the state’s narrative, citizens formulate their own accounts that parallel, contradict, challenge, or confirm state-based discourse. Both state and individual commentaries take narrative form; in The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport Ωπ

other words, identities and other narrative discourses are understood to have a sequence with a beginning, a middle, and an end and a subject or narrator. The identity of that narrator embodies broad social categories that link the individual to the state as a member of the nation. In this regard, the legitimacy of state policies can be analyzed as a series of historical interactions or generation-specific narratives about the nature, coherence, and validity of national identity. As powerful sites of cultural and symbolic production, these narratives are embedded within local histories and are locally reproduced, represented, and understood in specific ways, making it possible to speak of states, and not just nations (Anderson 1991), as constructed entities that are e√ectively ‘‘imagined.’’ As social constructs, states are made socially e√ective through particular imaginative and symbolic devices (Coronil 1997; Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Joseph and Nugent 1994; Scott 1998). Such a position challenges the conceptual separation of state and people so pervasive in academic and popular writings alike. This separation is a perpetually reified construct in which the state exists in opposition to another entity called society: ‘‘Society is one half of an antithetical pair whose other half is the state’’ (Wallerstein 1978: 315). This position has become so embedded in language and common wisdom that any ordinary citizen is familiar with these disjunctive and dichotomous references. Such constructs are highly reductionist interpretations: This kind of approach creates two separate entities in which society is a space reserved exclusively for free and voluntary associations, commonly referred to as the private sphere. The state, in turn, becomes identified exclusively with the conglomeration of public institutions of repression— the military, courts, the executive, and legislative bodies—that is not only separated from society but is placed above it. Congruent with a specific vision of power, one that understands power as an epiphenomenon—that is, something that puts in an appearance after society has already taken shape—this view understands power exclusively as repression and coercion. This inherently positivist view portrays society as a succession of definable spaces laid out one alongside the next, each with its own dynamic. Each of these spaces is identified with a tangible, substantial, and visible referent, with a thing. These spaces hold things that themselves are easily di√erentiated and perceived. Thus, in the space of politics we find things such as the state and political parties;

Ω∫ chapter four

in that of civil society, ngos and other voluntary associations; in the space of the economy, things such as merchandise, work instruments, and money; and so on. This reification obscures the actuality that the state is not an entity unto itself but is a conglomeration of competing and disparate interests working in relation to one another. Taken as a system of relations (Abrams 1988) instead of a singular object, the state becomes an assemblage of structures and institutions that vie for, consolidate, and wield power. That we tend to forget this is testimony to a disavowal that circumscribes a particularly modern moment, not just in anthropology, but in Western social thought in general (Wolf 1988). People strategically reify the state all the time, everywhere. They invoke solidified histories, rediscovering in an o≈cial mythology some aspects that will serve their own cause (Herzfeld 1997: 24–25). It is not only postcolonial subjects who, by compromising with the corrupting control that state power tends to exercise at all levels of daily life, rea≈rm the state’s proclaimed incontestability— precisely in order to play with and modify it whenever possible (Chatterjee 1993). Behind such invocations lie the desires and designs of real people. Paradoxically, they blame, in one moment, this ill-defined but allimportant presence in their lives for their failures as they would a living human being, yet in the next appeal to its impersonal ‘‘thingness’’ as the ultimate guarantor of disinterested authority. Conversely, and no less paradoxically, the occasionally su√ocating formal ideology of the state lays claim to intimacy and familiarity in a series of rather seemingly obvious metaphors (Herzfeld 1997: 5): the body politic, patria (homeland), or ‘‘Children of the Revolution.’’ This state-based power that is supposed to materialize nations is not normally thought of as being constituted in what Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard call ‘‘sacred precincts’’ (1970)—spaces in which the rationalization of power allows the symbols securing hegemonic consent to be created. Long conceived in the West through a transference of the body politic with the human body, the modern state is more often than not portrayed as possessing ‘‘higher’’ functions, such as reason, rationality, control, and regulation, compared against the irrationality, passions, and uncontrollable appetites of the lower regions of society that hinder the ‘‘progress’’ or development of that society. This particular idiom is especially true of socialist states that represented fully modern ideologi-

The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport ΩΩ

cal constructs that discursively removed so-called irrational practices, such as religion, from o≈cial discourse, thereby emphasizing a scientific modernism based wholly on rationality (Verdery 1996: 63). The contradiction within such narratives is that loyalty and patriotism are a√ective feelings based upon emotions rather than on Western logic. A particularly thorny aspect of this conundrum is how to explicitly reify a supposedly benevolent, rational state when people’s consent and loyalties are predicated upon their emotional connections to places, symbols, myths, and imagined solidarity with strangers. Mediated and structured by cultural systems and social and material environments, emotions are ‘‘elements of local ideological practice,’’ and their expression ‘‘involves negotiation over the meaning of events, over rights and morality, [and] over control of resources’’ (Fernández 2000: 12–13). Insofar as emotions are always about something, they are intentional choices, albeit sometimes hasty ones. Since they have purpose, emotions are, in essence, judgments about the world, and not uncontrollable eruptions from the human heart. These judgments, expressed a√ectively, and perhaps e√ectively, are usually normative and moral. As a consequence, emotions, such as passion, are indicative of people’s interests and their purposes. Nelson Valdés has identified four important narratives that dominated Cuban nationalist discourse before and after the Revolution (1992), which Fernández labels ‘‘the codes of passion’’ (2000: 38). The first is a recurring narrative in which the younger generations are portrayed as the saviors of the nation, saving or redeeming the Cuban nation from its earlier faults and foibles. These youthful generations embody courage, idealism, and purity of heart. The second narrative is a complex idealistic morality play in which how one comports oneself is perceived as a manner of honor, duty, and dignity. Such a social position eliminates the potential for pragmatism or compromise, which would be understood as weakness. Nothing less than total victory over one’s enemy is acceptable. To refuse to compromise is a sign of one’s superior conviction and strength of character. The third is the decisive role betrayal has played in Cuban politics. This narrative establishes a position insisting that loyalty and truth are absolute and any opposition to a group’s given position is tantamount to disloyal treachery. Such extremism leads to the fourth narrative, in which the highest manifestation of altruism and moral conviction is expressed in individuals’ willingness to die for their ideals. This

∞≠≠ chapter four

helps to explain not only the periodic political violence that has historically occurred but the implementation of suicide as politics by other means.≥ These narratives form the principal instrument of the politics of passion. It is a discourse understood through personalization and a√ect that appeals to people’s senses, most especially to their sense of social morality. People feel and use its language to define right from wrong. Consequently, the politics of passion is Manichean: good and evil are easily distinguishable with no room for ambiguity. This discourse is oriented toward the past and to the future, often merging the two into a contextualized present thereby providing meaning to and identification with collective identities (Fernández 2000: 20). Easily embodied in sport, the political discourses of passion elide the transference of collective identities into morality plays performed before an audience in athletic competition. The first two narratives, in particular, are embodied in the spectators’ passion for the Serie Nacional and the support of ‘‘their’’ team. Both of these themes are played out on the baseball diamond. In line with the first narrative, baseball players are ‘‘Children of the Revolution,’’ demonstrating the superiority of the Cuba nation and socialist system to the rest of the sporting world and, by extension, capitalist world. inder o≈cials’ labeling of Cuba’s international athletes as Children of the Revolution is an obvious instance of placing the state in a position of nurturing and moral authority over Cuban athletes, which is then extended to the Cuban populace a whole. Baseball can be played by all ages, but at its highest levels, it is a game played by young men. Consequently, embodied redemption is achieved by each successive generation even as the mythohistorical past of the sport retains its power in the memories of the older generations. Athletic excellence, in general, is a requisite of younger generations because of the physical demands that elite-level sports require for eventual victory. Thus, athletes embody the ideal of the younger generation redeeming the older generation’s failures. Second, the refusal to compromise is perfectly embodied in the neat divisions that emerge from athletic competition. A baseball game becomes a passion play in which the two sides embody Manichean positions. Outcomes are clear cut and unambiguous; one is either the victor or one is defeated. The third narrative is embodied by the fans themselves. Fans’ loyalty to a given team must be unwavering and unequivocal, no matter the circumstances. The state’s narrative attempts

The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport ∞≠∞

to equate fans’ passion for a baseball team to passionate loyalty to the nation as defined by the state. As will be seen toward the end of this ‘‘game,’’ loyalty to one’s team does not necessarily equate to loyalty to the state.

The Political Game over Cuba The struggle over how Cuban identity is defined depends on various groups’ ability to delineate what the terms of discourse actually represent, thereby reflecting how power is implemented. Within these unifying symbols that also serve as points of struggle, these languages of contention permit opposed groups to tacitly contest the meanings of an agreedupon common symbolic vocabulary. For example, justice was one term in play that afternoon in Baltimore. Both contingents of protestors invoked the notion of justice. On one side, justice was equated with the removal of Castro and his associates from power. Underlying this notion of justice is the assumption of ‘‘return’’: a perspective that combines the symbiotic removal of the current Cuban government from power and the resumption of social, political, and economic prominence for those who will be coming home (Pérez Firmat 1997). On the other, justice was equated with human rights that are denied to Cubans by U.S. government policies. This particular use of justice refers to the embargo or blockade of Cuba,∂ and how its implementation denies Cubans on the island ready access to necessary food and medicines. Justice, then, has definite yet di√erent meanings depending upon the individual protestor’s political position regarding Cuba. That afternoon in Baltimore, groups expressing either position invoked the Cuban nation. Cuba is similarly imagined in di√ering ways that are contingent upon an individual’s position. The very idea of Cuba as a nation, and its relationship with the United States, is a focal point of the debate between the various factions engaged in this struggle. Both of the contingents present outside Camden Yards on that Baltimore afternoon claimed nationalist connections. Cuban and American flags were visible and waved among the banners and placards within each contingent. Whatever the political leanings of the protestors, many articulated a distinction between the Cuban nation, as they imagined it, and the Cuban state, which they condemned or praised, depending on their political views. Protestors demonstrating support for the Cuban team unequivocally equated their ∞≠≤ chapter four

support for the team with support for the Cuban nation. Many of the vocal anti-Castro protestors also admitted they wanted the Cuban team to win, making distinctions between loyalty to the Cuban team and despising the government. One staunch anti-Castro protestor, holding a sign denouncing ‘‘The Gulag of the Caribbean’’ claimed, ‘‘We are not against the players. They are our brothers.’’ His companion echoed the sentiment, ‘‘I am a Cuban and I have a lot of pride in my nationality.’’ Only among those Cuban spectators arriving from Havana was support for the current Cuban government equated with the team and nation. Protestors expressing more liberal perspectives refrained from outright support of Castro, instead focusing on American repression of Cuba. Overall, each group clearly had di√erent ideas of what justice and Cuban national identity represented. Television crews buzzed around the groups, which responded to the cue of the camera’s red light illuminating, signifying its recording of the scenes. Protest groups from both political camps jostled for prime position on the barricades so that journalists could reach them for interviews and photographs. Baltimore’s police in their dress uniforms kept the protestors in their designated spaces by the side of the entrance road to the stadium. In a manner of speaking, the two sets of protestors in Baltimore were similar to two baseball teams engaging in a game. In a baseball game, two teams vie for victory by attempting to safely circle the bases the highest number of times in a game. Athletes venture forth from safety into a potentially hostile environ and attempt to return ‘‘home.’’ In this ‘‘game,’’ both sets of protestors positioned themselves as Cubans who had left Cuba and had express desires to return ‘‘home.’’ They agreed ‘‘to play the game’’ of Cuba: the meaning of Cuba would be the central point of contention in which di√ering versions of that imagined entity called Cuba would be contested. They occupied the same space and did not vie for territorial control, although it did take the Baltimore police to keep this ‘‘game’’ from literally becoming a physical struggle for territory outside Baltimore’s stadium. The protestors were, in e√ect, base runners attempting to return home in a game contesting Cuban identity. That home was imagined in congruent yet disparate ways is also part of the ‘‘game’’ in which they were engaged. Metaphorically taking their positions in the field, the protestors attempted and continue to try to control the terms of discourse of how Cuba will be imagined in the past, present and future. They argue over which position is valid and thus will beThe Politics of Cuba’s National Sport ∞≠≥

come the dominant meaning of Cuba. In order to validate their specific meanings of Cuba, each side attempts to metaphorically venture into the other’s imagined Cuba and return safely ‘‘home’’ to his or her original position, thereby validating that particular perspective.

The Political Appropriation of Baseball This chapter concludes by examining how state leaders explicitly used baseball to simultaneously demonstrate their own cubanidad and the Revolution’s legitimacy. The strategic insertion of sport at the time of the Revolution’s triumph and, more prevalently, state leaders’ attempts to be associated with sport, either through tropes of ‘‘winners’’ or as ‘‘sportsmen,’’ historically intertwines sport with Cuban nationalist constructions. Cuban leaders are by no means unique in their attempts to a≈liate sporting prowess and success with political strength and vitality. This particular strategy is extremely old, going as far back as medieval monarchs who used hunting and jousting to demonstrate their physical vitality and, by extension, their political vitality. In other words, the physical health of the monarch’s body is the equivalent of the health of the state. This remains a standard metaphor within modern politics, but is no longer limited solely to the physical displays of athletic prowess. Individual physical exertion is not the only means of implementing sporting discourses to legitimate political positions. Appearances by political leaders with championship sports teams are one common modern strategy. Castro frequently greets returning athletes, comparing them to soldiers and calling them ‘‘conquering heroes,’’ and praises their defense of their patria. At nearly every one of these publicized meetings, a victorious athlete returning from international tournaments ‘‘gives’’ Castro a gold medal, stating that the medal really belongs to the ‘‘people’’ since it was the state’s sports program and the people’s support that made the athlete who she or he is. In these semipublic staged congratulatory meetings, athletes returning from recent international competition are depicted as both representing the state to the Cuban people and the people to the state. Meetings such as these can be viewed as part of a public discourse characterized by the use of ritual and symbolism more than any rational-critical discourse so prevalent in Castro’s lengthy speeches. As semipublicly performed spectacles contextualized into a broader symbolic discourse of state-based narrative, ∞≠∂ chapter four

such events are calculated to reinforce specific narratives equating the naturalness of state o≈cials’ hierarchical positions with the equality of citizen members of the nation. These kinds of events can take a multitude of forms, including (but not exclusively) opening and closing ceremonies, welcoming and departing ceremonies at airports, and tea and talk meetings, and appear to be occasions during which state o≈cials share a space with representatives of society. The sharing of sporting space is a second strategy that politicians pursue to establish their position. State leaders engage in sports activity to appear as ‘‘one of the people,’’ that is, as an average citizen who is essentially the same as a factory worker or taxi driver. Appearances at sporting events as spectators serve the same purpose. At sporting events, Castro has been seen cheering for the same play as an auto mechanic, garbage collector, or baker. Yet such appearances simultaneously accentuate the social di√erences between leaders and the ‘‘average citizen.’’ State leaders are often spatially separated from other spectators by walls and security guards. Castro has taken this sharing of sporting space a step further by sharing the competitive space on occasion with other athletes, at times actually competing, while in others, directing the action on the diamond. Two instances occurring forty years apart su≈ce to demonstrate the use of baseball in this manner. Taken as moments connected by the enduring Cuban state, each of these demonstrates that Castro and other Cuban political leaders manipulate and use sport as a state-based discourse on cubanidad. These spectacles take the form of sports competition yet remain finely scripted events in which the symbolism is tightly controlled. The first of these moments occurred soon after the triumphant entrance of the guerrillas into Havana. A series of exhibition games were played in which Cuban leaders participated. These exhibition ‘‘games,’’ of course, were rife with symbolism in which three specific themes can be found. The first theme evident is the metaphoric reenactment of the struggle against Batista’s forces. In the majority of the early baseball exhibitions, Revolutionary leaders played against a team of former military police o≈cers from Batista’s regime. The most famous of these ‘‘games’’ was a two-inning spectacle that occurred as a ‘‘warm-up’’ for an International League game between the Minneapolis Millers and Havana Sugar Kings on 24 July 1959. This exhibition game was between a team comprised of military police o≈cers and a team led by Revolutionary stalwarts, Fidel The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport ∞≠∑

and Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Che Guevara. Their team, Los Barbudos, originally a nickname for the guerillas while fighting in the Sierra Maestra in eastern Cuba, clearly represented a new version of Cuban identity. In defeating their opposition, the Revolutionary leaders provided a not-so-subtle allegory of their victories over the Cuban armed forces a year earlier. The participation of Revolutionary leaders against former military o≈cers provided an allegorical recounting of the actual armed struggle and reconciliation. When asked by reporters why he had turned down the opportunity to pitch for the opposing military police team, Camilo Cienfuegos reportedly quipped, ‘‘I never oppose Fidel in anything, including baseball’’ (Rucker and Bjarkman 1999: 204). While Cienfuegos made it abundantly clear that Castro should not be opposed, the overarching message of the exhibition was that the guerilla leaders opposed and defeated the militarized forces on the playing field and then clearly could share amiable moments with them afterward. The second theme these games demonstrated was the changes the Revolution was bringing in terms of governance. The Cuban governments prior to the Revolution were infamous for their corruption. The previous dictators all treated the state’s co√ers as their private bank account, absconding with millions in succession. Castro was adamant that the Revolutionary government would cease the blind robbery of the Cuban populace. This was reinforced in the exhibition games. Stealing was banned, making it all too clear that it was not to be tolerated in the new Cuba, not even in baseball (Nelson Valdés 1999, personal communication). The third theme these early exhibitions accentuated was the Cubanness of the Revolution’s leaders, and thus, by extension the Revolution itself. Although the cultural identity of some of the leaders, such as Castro, could hardly be questioned, the Revolution in its nascent phase needed to quickly establish and reinforce that it was taking power for the people of Cuba. Demonstrating the same popular sentiments and passions that the populace exhibited was one means for the Revolution’s leaders to confirm their cubanidad. For some, like the popular Camilo Cienfuegos, who was far and away the best baseball player of the Revolutionary leaders, his demonstration of baseball skills only solidified his popularity as a ‘‘true’’ Cuban. Ernesto ‘‘Che’’ Guevara’s claim to cubanidad, however, was more problematic. Although he was already linked to the Cuban Revolution as one of Cuba’s main political leaders, it was vital to show that Guevara was

∞≠∏ chapter four

in some sense ‘‘Cuban.’’ Not normally associated with sport outside of Cuba, physical demonstrations of the ‘‘Heroic Guerrilla’s’’ love of lo cubano (all things Cuban) were made through his participation in various sporting events. ‘‘Che was a passionate sportsman, a man always interested in sport and, whenever it was possible, an active practitioner of a variety of its disciplines’’ (Gálvez Rodríguez 1995: 1). Guevara’s learning to play and passion for baseball were particularly important ‘‘evidence’’ of his cubanidad and commitment to the Cuban Revolution. Whether or not assessments of his status of a sportsman are accurate, it is not entirely clear when he learned to play baseball. Some accounts explain that he learned it in Mexico prior to the Granma expedition or while in the Sierra Maestra with Castro, Cienfuegos, and the others (Gálvez Rodríguez 1995: 147; Szulc 1986). Guevara himself suggested that he did not learn to play baseball until after the triumph of the Revolution. He ‘‘confessed’’ to a reporter in Havana that ‘‘this is the first time I have practiced this discipline’’ after an exhibition game on 10 August 1964 (Gálvez Rodríguez 1995: 174). Whenever he first learned, Guevara was not a good baseball player. Indeed, he only physically participated in impromptu exhibition games in which regular clothing and footwear were utilized. Nonetheless, his active participation, via watching and playing baseball games with the other Revolutionary leaders, was important in demonstrating his position in the new Revolutionary government to everyday Cubans. Cuban leaders’ participation in baseball demonstrated that even though the individuals in question may not have actually been Cuban by birth, they were nonetheless wholly Cuban in temperament and ideology. Especially important for legitimating Guevara as a Cuban leader, these exhibition games were all played during the early days of the ascendancy of the Revolution when its staying power was an open question. Even after the Revolutionary leaders were firmly entrenched in governmental positions, they continued to use baseball in a state-based discourse, equating passion for baseball with both cubanidad and socialismo (socialism). Thirty years on, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the state’s loss of the majority of its economic trading partners nearly caused its demise. The end of the Soviet-American Cold War resulted in Cuba having to find its own economic way. Throughout all of that economic uncertainty, sporting excellence remained a major ideological propaganda support, especially Cuba’s baseball success in international play. The exhibition against the

The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport ∞≠π

Baltimore Orioles, in particular, provided a needed boost to the Cuban government just as Cuba was emerging from the greatest crisis the state had faced since those early heady days of victory. The second moment in which state-based discourse and political symbolism were blatantly harnessed was an exhibition game between Venezuela and Cuba. New partnerships were forged in the 1990s, and one of newly formed ones was the political alliance forged between Cuba and Venezuela. Venezuela was an important new relationship. As a member of opec and a major petroleum producer, Venezuela was vital to Cuba’s recovery because the loss of subsidized Soviet oil nearly destroyed the Cuban economy. Just how close these two countries had become became clear in the latter part of 1999. At the end of the Ibero-American Summit hosted by Cuba, President Hugo Chávez, who openly admires Cuba’s socialist state, and Castro announced that an ‘‘old timers’’ game, between former Cuban and Venezuelan baseball stars, would be played to demonstrate the mutual respect and admiration the two states had for each other. One spectator in the stadium that day opined, ‘‘This is about brotherhood between Chávez and Fidel. The Cuban Revolution and the Venezuelan Revolution.’’ Not only would this athletic spectacle involve former sports greats in a show of cultural friendship, but Castro and Chávez would be directly involved in the ‘‘friendship game.’’ Chávez announced that he would play on the field to show that Venezuelans have a firm understanding of a field that Cuba tends to dominate. ‘‘Every hit that I allow will be received with great a√ection. Each step, swing and play will be a golden grain in this mission to unite our two people. So, Cuba and Venezuela will both win.’’ Castro announced that the only thing preventing him from pitching was his advanced age and, as such, would accept the ‘‘limitation’’ of managing the team, thereby remaining firmly in charge. During the course of the game, the coaches and manager of the Cuban side were none other than Castro and other prominent Cuban politicians: Carlos Lage, Felipe Pérez Roque, and Carlos Valenciaga. Chávez began as a pitcher before moving to first base and managed the Venezuelan squad from the field. After five innings in which the two teams were tied, Castro pulled a surprise. A string of replacements who wore mock grey beards and fake bellies entered the game, ultimately producing the margin of victory since the game ended with Cuba winning the game 5–4. These replacements, because of their comical disguises that aged them, could ∞≠∫ chapter four

not be identified by fans, broadcasters, or the Venezuelan players on the field. It only became clear afterward the Castro had pulled a ‘‘fast one.’’ These ‘‘barbudos’’ were several prominent members of the Cuban national team, which, by their inclusion, increased the likelihood of a Cuban victory. Talking to journalists later, Castro chuckled, insisting that his use of ringers was the kind of practical joke that Chávez enjoys. ‘‘The Venezuelan veteran team members really played a glorious game because, at the end of it, they were actually playing with the Cuban national team and the game ended in a tight score.’’ Chávez echoed Castro, jokingly referring to ‘‘the barbudos from the Sierra Maestra who throw a dazzling ninety miles per hour. That’s Caribbean ingenuity. This was a battle of love, of love of the people of Venezuela and Cuba.’’ Smiling wryly, Chávez continued, ‘‘The Cubans thought that I was just a passing player. But when I went to the stadium to practice this afternoon, Fidel sent someone to look at me. Fidel decided he better reinforce the Cuban team.’’ The game that November illustrates the political power that sport spectacles can have, particularly in conveying state-based discourses regarding how the world should be understood. The game demonstrated the vitality of both leaders, as Chávez, a man in his late fifties, still had the energy, power, and skill to compete on the playing field against some of the best Cuban ballplayers. Similarly, Castro demonstrated that even as he approached seventy, he was still su≈ciently dynamic to lead. The teams in this instance became more than two baseball teams comprised of mostly aging athletes playing a game. They became the embodiment of the two states. Although Cuba won the game through a piece of skullduggery by Castro that was not completely within the rules of most baseball games (these ‘‘substitutions’’ were not players on any team roster), the game was framed by both leaders and the Cuban press as a victory for both sides. ‘‘From the very start of the game the winners were known, both Cubans and Venezuelans. Latin American and Caribbean friendship and brotherhood won.’’ Although many sport spectacles can do so, this particular exhibition game illustrates in a more explicit fashion how sports can be deliberately harnessed to political purposes. Baseball is just one fluid and open-ended arena in which various discourses come into play. Which discourse becomes dominant is the crux of the matter, for the ability to define something constitutes the ability to impose one’s own perspective, at the cost of others’ challenging it, on the world. The only reason this game was The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport ∞≠Ω

even played was to illustrate the ‘‘love’’ between Cuba and Venezuela, although that love and mutual admiration was between two heads of state and not necessarily the two nations. This alliance was forged through international politics in the face of neoliberal global pressure emanating from the United States. The outcome of the game was e√ectively as scripted as any other form of passion play. As a semipublic spectacle in which the physically present audience is as tightly controlled as the actual discourse being disseminated, sport spectacles serve as rituals of state to reinforce nationalistic discourses. Most sporting events are predicated upon competition, but in this particular instance it was the pretext for demonstrating the new alliance between two states rather than competition between them. The popularity of baseball throughout Cuba makes the sport a floating signifier for cubanidad. Well aware of the sport’s significance, Cuban leaders made and make explicit use of baseball and other sporting narratives, not just to legitimate their Revolutionary agendas, but to explicitly demonstrate, legitimate, and e√ectively naturalize their positions as leaders of the Revolution. Because of its historical associations with Cuban nation building, as discussed in earlier chapters, baseball is a particularly powerful symbol for conveying the project of the Revolution. The national team’s participation, not to mention its unprecedented success, in various international sports spectacles, becomes an extension of the triumphs of the Revolution. This chapter shows how Cuban state-based discourses about cubanidad are attached to baseball. The two-game series between Baltimore and Cuba and the Cuba-Venezuela game in Estadio Latinoamericano were ritual-like spectacles predicated on a sport-based format that fed stategenerated discourses. It is these emotive, ritual-like spectacles engendering cultural intimacy to which The Quality of Home Runs now turns its attention. Moving from the international settings to the national, the preeminent Cuban national league becomes the context for considering how Cuban baseball serves as an emotional public ritual for reinforcing the discourse of cubanidad. This discourse, however, does not go unchallenged, just as the Cuban team’s dominance has been challenged on the diamond in recent years. Such state-based discourse is not uncritically accepted by Cuban fans, as will be seen in upcoming chapters.

∞∞≠ chapter four

CHAPTER

∑

Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba Industriales’ pitcher stands on the mound peering intently toward home plate. He has Omar Linares, the star third baseman for Pinar del Río and widely considered the best ballplayer in Cuba, in a hole. The count is no balls and two strikes. A fan sitting nearby calls out ‘‘aplauso de ponche’’ (punchout applause) and claps slowly.∞ Others in the group join him and soon, rhythmic, slow beats gradually build up in tempo. Nearby spectators join in and suddenly, like a wave building, whole sections are beating their hands together in time, increasing the ferocity and frequency of the claps as the pitcher goes into his windup. By the time the pitcher delivers the ball, the clapping is frantic and rapid. The slider misses low and outside and there is a loud, low sigh of disappointment. The catcher returns the ball to the pitcher, and the aplauso de ponche starts again. This time, more start the aplauso, causing it to resound arhythmically until the various groups synchronize their e√orts, creating an even larger beat. Groups farther up the foul line join and soon thousands all along the third base line, all Industriales supporters, are pounding their hands together. Two or three whistles punctuate the rhythm as they are blown in time. This time the pitcher throws some sort of change that dips slightly, and Linares swings over it. The crowd erupts and the fans high five each other. Linares rarely strikes out. The aplauso clearly had its e√ect; the spectators know that they had an e√ect on the game. An athletic performance, like other performances, calls upon and conjures a rich train of associations and fantasies, shaping perceptions of life. It is the spectators as well as the athletes who create these associations. Spectatorship is no more ‘‘passive’’ than daydreaming, provided the performance is of such quality that it elicits an emotional response (Lasch 1979: 107). By entering imaginatively into athletes’ worlds, heightened forms of embodiment, the pain of defeat and the triumph of persistence in the face of adversity, are experienced, and in so doing, fans derive standards against which to measure themselves. Among those

groups who directly impact the discourse of baseball, spectators—those that watch those who have mastered the sport—have the greatest impact on the public discourse of baseball. The spectacle of baseball is a moral artifact based on discourse. While those on the diamond produce the events most discussed, fans are the ones that recall and reproduce those events. Baseball fans as a social group are both underrepresented and misrepresented in social science literature. The great tendency in both academic and popular literature to classify fans as deranged loners or hysterically violent mobs ultimately characterizes them as socially deviant or dysfunctional (Jenson 1992). Frequently portrayed as psychologically attempting to compensate for the absence of ‘‘real’’ relationships in their lives, fans are supposedly alienated from modern life, and their passion for a sport or team is an attempt to reconcile their alienation. Such thinking argues that meaningful relationships with family and work are absent in fans’ lives, and thus fans lack any sense of a self-identity. According to such logic, fans are di√erent from ‘‘people like us’’ (students, professors, patrons, etc.). Fandom is what ‘‘they’’ do; we have tastes, preferences, and interests. Our interests are ‘‘logical,’’ but the involvement and a≈liations of fans are passionate and therefore emotional and irrational. What ‘‘they’’ do is ‘‘deviant’’ and therefore dangerous, while what ‘‘we’’ do is ‘‘normal’’ and hence ‘‘safe.’’ Consequently, fans seek social connections, meaning, and identity via team loyalty. Such stereotypes coalesce individuals into an anonymous mob with no consciousness or intellect. In other words, fans are Othered, much as anthropological subjects are or were (Rosaldo 1989). Media portrayals of fan violence reinforce such stereotypes without examining the social factors leading to such behavior. For example, soccer hooliganism in England is frequently explained as drunken mobs easily led into destructive behavior. Bill Buford challenges such stereotypes by showing how soccer hooliganism’s roots lie in working-class disenfranchisement articulated in xenophobic nationalism (1991). Unable to find employment because they compete with recent ‘‘colored’’ immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean for low wage jobs, white English working-class youth vent their frustration against a state they feel abandoned or betrayed them.≤ Instead of treating Cuban baseball fans as socially deviant or marginal members of society, I argue that they embody a central cross section of Cuban society cutting across class, racial, and political lines. By treat∞∞≤ chapter five

ing fans as normal people, I focus on how class, generation, and race inform fans’ performances of Cuban identity at Estadio Latinoamericano. Two groups of Industriales fans, El Círculo Latinoamericano and La Conga de Lucumí, are introduced. Although the groups are allied in their passion for the team, di√erences in their perceived racial composition, class, and manner of support also make them rivals, in which each claims to be Industriales’ ‘‘real’’ fans. These locally imagined rivalries—embodied in their actions, positions, and passions—are then extended geographically via Industriales’ rivalries with other Cuban teams, creating a multiplicity of modern Cuban identities all geographically mapped onto the island. Rivalries bodily reflect and reinforce fundamental divisions within a society, and sport is a passion play in which tensions about such divisions come to the fore. Teams and athletes embody supposedly quintessential qualities of Self and Other; a victory of one over the other temporarily creates a symbolic ascendancy over another. This is especially apparent in the Serie Nacional, Cuba’s national baseball league. As described in chapter 3, the Serie Nacional has sixteen teams: one for each of Cuba’s fourteen provinces and two that represent the capital city. According to the multitudes of fans and journalists, those last two teams, Industriales and Metropolitanos, are structurally equivalent to the Yankees and Mets of New York. Industriales are the Yankees, regularly winning championships and representing a particular brand of baseball with inherent bodily qualities that extend to its supporters. Metropolitanos, on the other hand, are the equivalent of the Mets, losing more than winning in ever more creatively inept ways and embodying very di√erent qualities. The most heated rivalries in Cuba though are not between these two teams but between Industriales and Santiago de Cuba, and Pinar del Río. These rivalries are embodied and played out not just on the diamond but between fan groups that support the same team in which supposedly inherent bodily qualities are reflected in the membership of each group. Which particular qualities are embodied, then, identify which group is the ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘real’’ supporter base for Industriales.

El Círculo Latinoamericano During any game at Estadio Latinoamericano, the crowd is not evenly dispersed throughout the seats. Instead, clusters of fans occupy specific spaces, particularly the spaces behind each dugout. Industriales’ fans, in Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞∞≥

particular, congregate in pockets behind the third base dugout, reaching around to the sections directly behind home plate. About ten rows back and halfway between home and third, a particularly large and vociferous group maintains its presence—always sitting in the same rows of the same section—and becomes part of the spectacle. That group is El Círculo Latinoamericano. El Círculo Latinoamericano is a group of men who gather for every baseball game played in Estadio Latinoamericano, no matter which teams are playing. Most are Industriales’ supporters, although there are the odd individuals who claim to support either Metropolitanos or Pinar del Río. If Industriales are not playing, however, the game is almost incidental to El Círculo’s socializing. The stadium and the game provide a backdrop to their own congregating. Arriving more than ninety minutes before the game to claim their seats, the first men ‘‘reserve’’ the other seats for other members, only relinquishing them if others know a given fan will not make it to the stadium that night.≥ Each individual’s ‘‘assigned’’ seat in the section has been determined by friendships and habit. El Círculo’s members cover the racial and generational spectrum of Havana. Many of the regulars are known by their supposed ethnic characteristics, such as ‘‘Blanquito’’ (‘‘Whitey,’’ for his skin color), ‘‘Chino’’ (for his supposedly Asian eyes and yellowish skin), and ‘‘Mexicano’’ (for his alleged resemblance to Mayan Mexicans). I was known, for rather obvious reasons, as ‘‘Americano.’’ As these monikers suggest, nicknames were often predicated on varying skin tones and physical attributes, although this was not always the case. Rocco was an extremely dark man from Pinar del Río, while Blanquito was, as his nickname suggests, very pale. In addition to diverse racial categories, various ages were also present. The círculo clearly cuts across generations, uniting men from di√erent age groups in their love of baseball. Cotorro was at least fifty years of age, and his remaining hair was wispy gray. In contrast, ‘‘Niño’’ (Kid) was a ten-year-old boy who stayed seated with his elders rather than running around the stadium as many young boys did. Most other members were between twenty and fifty years of age. This círculo also stood out because it was not always exclusively male. A couple of girlfriends or sisters were also part of the group, although they very rarely attended games. Thus, El Círculo reflected much of the diversity of Cuban society while also demonstrating its patriarchal dominance. Cotorro is the de facto leader of El Círculo: by default, he claims. Along ∞∞∂ chapter five

with many Industriales fans, he sees himself as part the spectacle that is the Serie Nacional. He has been coming to the stadium longer than any other member, sitting in the same seat and leading cheers since 1966. ‘‘Twentynine years,’’ he told me one evening, I have been coming here, sitting in the same seat for twenty-nine years. I was not an Almendares fan before the Revolution. I was not Blue.∂ But gradually I became an Industriales fan as they won championships in ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65. I didn’t yell at first [i.e., lead cheers]. Gradually, I got so involved that after a few years I was shouting, and the crowd seemed to like what I did.

Cotorro instigates and leads the crowd seated behind Industriales’ dugout in chants and performs impromptu one-man skits on the dugout roof. His skits occur during the ‘‘dead’’ time in baseball games, between innings and when a team is changing pitchers. Three of his most frequent skits occur when the opposing team has to change pitchers in the middle of an inning. Each pantomime usually accompanies a nocout (knockout) count—a shouted chant that mimics a boxing referee’s count given to a floored combatant∑ —and is applied to the opposing pitcher either before or after his skit, and in some cases both before and after. When the opposing team’s manager comes out to change pitchers, Cotorro runs from his seat down to the dugout, climbs onto its roof, and begins a knockout count. After administering the count, he begins marching with sti√ened legs at one end of the roof, staggering slightly, as if carrying a heavy weight on one shoulder in the manner that a pallbearer carries a casket. He slowly carries the imaginary co≈n across the dugout roof. To the fans’ loud roars of laughter, Cotorro bears his co≈n back and forth across the dugout while the manager and departing pitcher wait for the new pitcher to arrive on the mound. He then puts the invisible co≈n down, begins pantomiming digging a grave, and lowers the co≈n into the hole he has dug as the departing pitcher leaves the field. A second skit Cotorro uses frequently imitates how the opposing manager allegedly feels about his pitcher getting ‘‘knocked out.’’ After leading the crowd on a nocout count, he immediately begins sobbing into his handkerchief and shaking with grief, occasionally lifting his head to wail at the sky as he staggers across the dugout roof. After enacting this performance, Cotorro leads Industriales’ supporters in another chant: ‘‘Otro pitcheo llorando; Molina está contento’’ (The other pitcher is crying; Molina is content). Molina is the manager of Industriales. If the opposing Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞∞∑

6 Cotorro trying to attract supporters’ attention. Photo by author.

pitcher is one of the stars of the Serie Nacional, then his name is put frequently into the first phrase. For example, in a game between Industriales and Habana, José Ibar, arguably the best pitcher in the Serie Nacional in 1997–98, was removed late in a game after Industriales rallied to take the lead. The crowd chanted as Ibar was taken out of the game, ‘‘Ibar está llorando; Molina está contento.’’ A pitcher’s name is not used when he is not well known, which usually means he is either a younger player or from a weaker club or both. The two phrases in the chant can be in either order. The third skit used when the opposing team changes pitchers is similar to the grieving player/manager skit described above. Typically performing it when several close calls or other apparent misfortunes (e.g., errors in the field behind the pitcher) have occurred, Cotorro climbs onto the dugout roof, getting the crowd’s attention by blowing on his whistle. He ∞∞∏ chapter five

pantomimes sobbing, but instead of quickly becoming overcome with grief, the embodied emotion is frustration. He throws himself onto his back, kicking his legs and flailing his arms in the air as if he were an infant having a temper tantrum. He continues with his infantile tantrum until the opposing pitcher begins to leave the field. He then leaps up and begins a nocout count as the pitcher leaves, timed to reach the number ten exactly as the pitcher enters his dugout. Throughout each of these skits, the crowd cheers, claps, jeers, and laughs at Cotorro’s antics and the departing pitcher. His skits provide commentary on the game’s events but do not compete with them, thereby adding to the overall spectacle. Instead, they are part of the spectacle that fans expect of games played in the Serie Nacional. He also leads cheers in response to events on the field, criticizing athletes’ inept or unintelligent play or umpires’ unclear and apparently biased decisions. For example, in the first inning, a pitch that looked like Strike Three and would have been the third out, ending Habana’s turn at bat, was called a ball. On the very next pitch, Habana’s Oscar Macías, one of Cuba’s many highly skilled second basemen, hit a single to score a run. Industriales’ fans began shouting ‘‘¡Asesino!’’ (Assassin!) at the umpire. After a few minutes of these cries, the spontaneously organized chant began to change to ‘‘¡Hijo puta!’’ (Son of a Bitch!). The crowd of several thousand continued cursing as Habana ended its turn at bat, and the raucous noise only subsided when Industriales began their turn to bat in the first inning. After another bad call in the third inning, the same chant (‘‘¡Hijo puta!’’) began again. The chant lasted again until that half inning ended. The chanting fans then changed the chant to remove all doubt about who had enraged them. The new chant, ‘‘¡Umpire Ache Pe!’’ (Umpire H. P.; i.e., Umpire Hijo de Puta), was clearly directed toward the umpires standing on the baseline, conferring as the teams changed positions. Cotorro did not initiate these chants, but once they had started, he did climb onto his stage—the dugout roof—and made sure that they ended when Industriales came to bat. Another example of Cotorro’s prominence was evident during the 1998 Juego de Estrellas (All-Star Game). The television announcer described his antics three or four times throughout the broadcast, particularly during breaks in the action, between innings when there would be some dead space in the broadcast.∏ At the Juego de Estrellas, Cotorro cheered for Orientales because he was sitting on the third base side behind the dugout, which was Orientales’ dugout. The Occidentales team, which included playFans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞∞π

ers from Industriales, was on the first base side of the diamond. When not on the Orientales’ roof, he sat on a portable seat that hung from the retaining wall separating the playing field from the stands and that suspended him into the field of play. Fans, particularly círculo members, teased him incessantly at the next game in Estadio Latinoamericano after the All-Star Game, calling him ‘‘traitor.’’ ‘‘How could you cheer for Orientales?’’ The teams from the Oriente are the major rivals for Industriales, whom he cheers for all the time. Cotorro sheepishly grinned, retorting, ‘‘What could I do? Those fools [National Commission administrators] didn’t even have a seat for me.’’ Cotorro could be considered a mascot, like the costumed characters that commonly entertain fans between innings at Major League games, such as the ‘‘San Diego Chicken’’ did in San Diego and the ‘‘Philly Phanatic’’ does in Philadelphia. One National Commission administrator openly called him a mascot. ‘‘He is like the mascot of other teams in the Big Leagues [Major League Baseball], but Cotorro is not paid.’’ Cotorro is not a mascot, however. He engages in public displays and adds to the spectacle of the Serie Nacional. But most of the time, he is not performing and is seated with El Círculo arguing and watching baseball. Círculo members call upon him and his knowledge to support their positions in debate amongst themselves. Other fans in nearby sections shout to get his input in their arguments about the statistics of a certain player or when a specific team won the championship. Fans recognize Cotorro as an accurate and knowledgeable source. His support of a position usually ends the debate of that particular point. In short, Cotorro has no formal position of authority within the spectacle, but he does have a large degree of ‘‘moral authority’’ amongst the performers, especially among those in the stands. His authority is legitimated by his vast knowledge and ability to dispense it quickly. He uses this respect to maintain the crowd’s decorum, enforcing acceptable ‘‘morals’’ of fan behavior. He leads cheers but also prevents the party from getting out of hand as best as he can.

La Conga de Lucumí Approximately a month before the end of 1997–98 Serie Nacional’s season, La Conga de Lucumí first announced its presence in Estadio Latinoamericano with a large white bedsheet proclaiming that ‘‘con La Conga de Lucumí, Industriales no pierda’’ (with La Conga de Lucumí, Industriales won’t lose). ∞∞∫ chapter five

They occupied a section directly behind Industriales’ dugout, two sections away from where Cotorro and El Círculo sit. The members of La Conga were mostly fashionably dressed young men, wearing gold chains, patent leather shoes, and the latest styles from Europe or Miami. They danced on their seats, enjoying themselves and the spectacle. At first, La Conga followed Cotorro’s lead in many cheers, providing rhythmic drumming for his skits and lending their voices to nocouts and other chants. However, the more often they showed up, the more frequently La Conga ignored what Cotorro and El Círculo were doing. After a couple of weeks of regular attendance, they began to assert their own version of spectacle, one that challenged the dominance of Cotorro and El Círculo. Their music, dancing, and chanting continued nonstop throughout the game, breaking the norms of aficionado etiquette. Unabashedly, they jumped up and down, leading the crowd in various chants and cheers, drumming, dancing, drinking, and cheering whenever they felt like it instead of within the context of the game’s events. The leader of La Conga, Gregorio, was a large, barrel-chested AfroCuban man dressed all in white and wearing a rubber white-maned lion mask. He would climb onto Industriales’ dugout roof—from where Cotorro traditionally leads his cheers—and lead the conga group, dance to the music, and put curses on the opposing team’s players. Initially, he often joined Cotorro for his pre-game ‘‘ceremony,’’ brandishing various items of ‘‘power’’ from Santería at the opposition in e√orts to convince the spiritual powers that be to aid Industriales. He would dance on the roof between innings when Cotorro was relaxing with the círculo. When he would don his mask, the conga group would play a rumba beat as Gregorio transformed into one of the orishas of the Regla de Ocho.π Orishas are the spirits or gods or saints that form the pantheon of the Regla de Ocho, or Santería. There are eight main deities, each of whom have various aspects that require a variety of sacrifices, appeasements, and o√erings to obtain intervention on a supplicant’s behalf (Matibag 1996). The orisha manifesting itself in Estadio Latinoamericano would stomp, writhe, and shimmy across the roof, brandishing its wand of power at the opposition in time to the music. The performance would continue for various lengths of time until the spirit/Gregorio tired in the heat. Then the mask would come o√, and Gregorio would sit on the edge of the dugout, smoking cigarettes and drinking water until it was time for the orisha to take possession of his body again. Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞∞Ω

The group’s self-identification with Lucumí illustrates the intersection of Cuban baseball and religion. Lucumí is part of the ever-present African heritage embedded in Cuban identity. The descendants of the Yoruba in Cuba are often called Lucumí. Lucumí was the name of a region of Africa, originally called Ulcumí or Ulkumí, almost on the Niger Delta just northeast of the former kingdom of Benin (Ortiz 1990: 265–66). References to a tribe called Ulkumí in that region date back as early as 1728. Others suggest that Lucumí is an altered form of akumí, which referred to the Aku region of Nigeria from which many of the Yoruba were taken into slavery. The name is also said to originate in oluku mi, Yoruban for ‘‘my friend’’ (Matibag 1996: 52–53). The Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz suggests Lucumí was a corrupted form of ‘‘oluku mi’’ due to the influence of the Congo and Bantu-speaking peoples among the slaves in Cuba, the majority of whom were Yoruba speaking (1990: 267). Santería engages the relationship between invisible powers and worldly concerns. Spectacles—whether ritual, theater, sport, or festivals—reveal the structure of the social world and its organization. ‘‘The world is revealed as a theater for the interaction of invisible powers, and the orisha within is an infallible guide to worldly success and heavenly wisdom’’ (Murphy 1993: 143). For practitioners of Santería, this connection is embodied in the interplay between the orishas and the real world. Urban spaces are transformed into sacred places within Santería’s discursive practice. Urban space and the built environment are transformed into ‘‘places’’ both through the daily material struggle of life, and through annual and periodic rituals of initiation, divination, spirit possession, and collective ritual practice. The community of creative agents includes not only human priests and supplicants, but also the pantheon of Lucumí deities and numerous spirits of the dead who make their wishes known through spirit possession and formal divination methods. The space of Santería is usually organized into three distinct sacred places, each with its own purpose (Brown 1999:160–64). The cuatro sagrado (sacred room) is where shrines are established and initiations conducted. The sala (room) is the social space for receiving clients, gathering of families, and sequestering non-initiates. The solar (courtyard or patio) is usually an enclosed space open to the sky used for drum dances, ritual meals, and the cultivation of sacred plants. A courtyard is the preferred performance space for drumming, dancing, and spirit possession. La Conga’s presence and use of the stadium’s confines temporarily trans∞≤≠ chapter five

forms that space and the ongoing secular performance of a baseball game into part of a drum dance and possession, invoking divine support for the worldly a√airs that will occur on the diamond. A similar conceptualization of social worlds revealed through spectacle is evident in baseball as well. Some members of El Círculo talked about the connections between baseball and life. According to one, You can see life in baseball and from baseball you can see life. It is said there is a communion, because it is a thing constantly in peoples’ lives. This is something that you can see in Cuban society, but in the stadium it is multiplied and in the people who go to the stadium . . . a singular idea. They give expression to the same form that can come from a construction worker, a doctor, a mathematician, an athlete, a thief, a housewife, a twelve-year-old boy. Because it’s as if a common environment is created where there are not any distinctions of class, nor of color, nor of gender, nor political a≈liation. The entire world . . . the only option that there is, is the passion for baseball. I suppose that there are political intentions, this is indisputable, but fundamentally the expressions given are sports terms. This communality is one of the best things that baseball has.

Both groups’ perspectives and use of spectacle as reflections of how the world is organized and perceived simultaneously complement and conflict with the other. Both positions are entirely Cuban and are aspects of being Cuban. The following section clarifies how the two groups’ embodied practices of portraying themselves as Cuban initially complemented each other in their support for Industriales. It also shows, however, that the longer they were associated with each other, fractures also became apparent. These fissures had more to do with the social position of the members of each group in terms of class and race within the urban environment of the capital. At the same time, their own contradictory positions vis-à-vis each other coalesce and shed light on how the rivalries of the various teams representing geopolitical regions of the island are perceived and understood by the regular fans in Estadio Latinoamericano.

Teammates and Rivals: Interactions between El Círculo and La Conga When La Conga first appeared, Gregorio led the group in support of Cotorro. Whenever Cotorro ascended the dugout roof to perform one of Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞≤∞

his many skits, Gregorio remained in the stands near the rest of La Conga, where he watched and directed the group’s musicians to provide an ambient background, setting the scenes for Cotorro’s dugout roof skits and emphasizing fans’ chants with trumpet blasts and beating drums. The nocout chant was frequently the cue for La Conga’s supportive role in Cotorro’s performances. It would focus La Conga’s attention as they joined in partway through the chant. Upon completing the chant, Cotorro would shout at Gregorio over the crowd’s noise. The trumpeters would start playing a funeral dirge, and Cotorro would begin a sti√-legged march of a pallbearer. While La Conga’s role in the spectacle was initially supportive of the antics of Cotorro and El Círculo, the longer La Conga’s members participated, the more involved and prominent they became in the stands. La Conga first became active performers when Gregorio approached Cotorro after completing one of his skits during a game and asked about making use of the roof for his performances. Initially, he only did so with Cotorro, which they did the next game at its very beginning. Before a crucial game, one Industriales needed to win to keep their playo√ hopes alive, Gregorio joined Cotorro for a pre-game performance that Cotorro only uses before vital games. Cotorro explained that he only uses this performance for certain occasions, ‘‘when the situation is important,’’ because he does not wish to waste any ‘‘power.’’ This performance entails Cotorro standing on the dugout roof before the public address announcer begins introducing the starting lineups for the two teams. Facing across the diamond toward the opposition, he performs a ‘‘blessing.’’ With a lit cigar in one hand and a laminated paper cup full of liquid (water or rum) in the other, he gestures toward the sky several times, blows smoke into the air, and dips his hand in the liquid and shakes the droplets into the air and onto the field. The crowd responds ‘‘Oh-Ay!’’ at various points with vocalized emphasis each time he throws water. He does this until he runs out of water, asking the orishas to aid Industriales in their victory on this day. On that day, as Cotorro finished, Gregorio began shaking convulsively and then started shimmying, waved a wand of power, and dipped his hand in the liquid thereby adding the orisha’s strength to the incantations cast against the opponents. After acting in support of Cotorro’s performances several times, Gregorio began to appropriate the space on the dugout roof for himself. These instances, at first, were during the early innings, when Cotorro typically did not perform. The drummers played in support of Gregorio, ∞≤≤ chapter five

providing constant rhythm to his sinuous movements. As the tension of the season mounted, the tensions between the two groups also increased. The drummers and dancers of La Conga began to perform when the mood struck them rather than in concert with or in response to events on the diamond. This shift a√ected the relations between the two groups, as El Círculo resented those among La Conga who breached the norms of the baseball spectacle. The final straw was when La Conga continued to blast out rumbas while Industriales’ players were batting. Cotorro and Gregorio had performed a skit between innings and both were still standing on the dugout roof watching the action on the diamond when Cotorro, along with the rest of us, heard them continue. The first time this occurred, Cotorro tried to quiet them down by blowing on his whistle to get their attention, a strategy he had used successfully in the past to get the attention of La Conga and other groups. After that did not work, he attempted to reason with Gregorio. Gregorio talked with Cotorro, but finally Gregorio shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘‘Look at them [dancing and playing music]. I can’t control them.’’ Cotorro then climbed the stairs to the section where La Conga partied in an attempt to talk with the leader of the dancers, a young bespectacled man dressed in a neon green shirt and flat, black, broad-rimmed hat, who was a particularly animated dancer. His response along with the dancers around him was to give Cotorro a nocout count, turning part of Cotorro’s own arsenal against him. They began chanting loudly, counting out numbers like a boxing referee and punctuating each number with a downward swing of an arm. When they reached ‘‘ten,’’ they yelled out, ‘‘¡Nocout!,’’ drowning out any argument Cotorro was making. Cotorro attempted to continue his remonstrations, but gave up as the conga group administered their third knockout count directed at him. Cotorro just waved at them in disgust as he walked back down the aisle and back to the section where we sat. When he got back to our group, Cotorro ranted to the rest of us. ‘‘What a bunch of idiots. They’re not here to watch. They’re here to drink and party. They should go someplace [else].’’ The conga group was thrilled and yelled in delight with their ‘‘defeat’’ of Cotorro. From that point on, they continued to play whenever they were bored with the action on the field. They occasionally followed Cotorro when he was leading cheers on the dugout roof. However, by shouting him down, they evidently felt they had established their own ‘‘authority.’’ Their ‘‘authority’’ was validated Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞≤≥

further by cheering and getting other fans to follow along when they decided to dance and play music on their own without paying attention to the action on the field. From El Círculo’s point of view, such behavior ‘‘disrupted’’ the game on the field and showed ‘‘disrespect.’’ Aficionados perform animated running commentary about decisions made on the diamond, most obviously in reference to umpires’ decisions but also ones made by team managers and players and, occasionally, other fans in the stands. These discourses are impressionistic, giving quick biting glances at social contexts that critique assumed authority. The ‘‘disrespect’’ members of La Conga demonstrated was one aspect of the Cuban discourse of choteo. Choteo, analyzed and identified by the Cuban philosopher Jorge Mañach, is characteristic of Cubans’ ‘‘peculiar tropical psyche’’ that involves making fun of everything and everyone. He considers choteo to be ‘‘a sign of independence which is exteriorized as mockery against all forms of authority’’ (1991: 71). In the world of choteo, individual exceptionalism and personal attachments are valued above the personal rules and distant norms of bureaucratic order. Choteo goes hand in hand with quick wit, improvisation, and disregard for respect. Such impressionistic performances can lead to precipitous and passionate reactions. The space of choteo is public and social, and requires an audience of sympathetic ears who will understand the cultural references and the punch line. These criteria make Estadio Latinoamericano a perfect environment for choteo’s performance. Mañach argues that the critical aspect of choteo arises from specific collective experiences and does not reflect any essential or innate character of being Cuban. Rather, choteo and its accompanying laughter act as a ‘‘social gesture’’ of protest against alienation and perceived injustices, undermining authority and serving as an escape mechanism (Fernández 2000: 30–31). It renders social relations relaxed and informal yet simultaneously guarded because anyone can chotear (mock) as readily as they can be choteado (mocked). When Cotorro attempted to regulate the music and dancing produced by La Conga, the discourse of choteo—normally reserved for umpires and opposing teams—became directed at him. Industriales were losing badly when Cotorro made his attempt to assert his moral authority. From La Conga’s perspective, they would have to make the game entertaining since the spectacle was not particularly enticing. Even though Industriales were batting, the trumpeters, drummers, and maracas shakers kept playing. El Círculo members did not care for these antics because they felt that such ∞≤∂ chapter five

noise distracted the players, breaking their concentration. When La Conga decided to ‘‘enjoy themselves’’ rather than the spectacle on the field, El Círculo members called them payasos (clowns) and locos (crazies). They also insisted that those young men dancing, chanting, playing music, joking, and singing were not really fans. Many other spectators commented that ‘‘They aren’t here to cheer. They’re here to party. They think this is a party.’’ In short, La Conga did not follow the game closely or follow proper cheering norms; instead they kept dancing, thereby creating their own fiesta. They distracted from the ‘‘o≈cial’’ espectáculo (spectacle) by creating ‘‘their own spectacle,’’ as one círculo member derisively put it. La Conga de Lucumí’s complete disregard for the aesthetics of cheering disgusted many Industriales supporters, especially those of El Círculo. The choteo directed at Cotorro was the culminating point, emphasizing that La Conga de Lucumí embodied di√erent ideals of aficionismo. La Conga’s banner announcing their presence signified not only a new group’s arrival but the arrival of a di√erently positioned fan group. Their di√erent perspective on how to behave within the spectacle of the Serie Nacional became apparent in the buildup to their confrontation with Cotorro. Several games earlier, members of La Conga unfurled a new homemade banner declaring ‘‘Con La coco y La Conga de Lucumí Industriales en playo√ ’’ (With [the support of ] La coco and La Conga de Lucumí Industriales will be in the playo√s). La coco is the nickname for Radio coco, the regional radio station that broadcasts the Serie Nacional games from Estadio Latinoamericano and unashamedly supports Industriales. Local radio commentators noticed the antics of La Conga and began describing their actions during the breaks in the game. The broadcast booth in Estadio Latinoamericano is an open-air room, so the group’s drumming and horn blowing could be heard in the background of the play-by-play. Several members carried transistor radios and heard the radio announcers describing the group’s actions and painting a celebratory picture of the event. The group acknowledged and sought further recognition from La coco by producing this new banner, and suddenly exploding into a chant of ‘‘¡La coco! La coco!’’ and pointing at the broadcast booth. In addition, if the group felt that it had been too long since the last time they had been mentioned, they began pointing toward Radio coco’s broadcast booth, chanting ‘‘¿Dónde está La coco? ¡Allí! ¡Allí! ¡Allí!’’ (Where is La coco? There! There! There!). They kept this chant up until the anFans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞≤∑

nouncers mentioned them on the radio or leaned out the window to give the chanting fans a wave. The actions of La Conga de Lucumí clearly demonstrated that they felt that they were a spectacle in their own right. The emphasis of their behavior shifted from supporting the context of a sport spectacle to seeing how frequently they could be mentioned in national radio broadcasts. Other fans disliked La Conga’s actions because the spectacle that is the Serie Nacional is di√erent than the party La Conga was attempting to make it. Social norms of stadium behavior were supposed to complement and not compete with the action on the diamond. These norms were learned through regular attendance at games. That La Conga so willingly transgressed these norms meant that they were not ‘‘real fans’’ but were somehow di√erent. Their disregard demonstrated that they had not acquired the baseball knowledge of aficionismo passed on from generation to generation. It also became clear that distinct class di√erences also drove the divide between their conceptions of fan support and El Círculo’s notions. In general, La Conga de Lucumí would arrive en masse just as the game was getting under way. Most fans arrive to socialize well before the game begins. The game provides the reason and context for their meeting and then becomes the environment on which social relations are based. Because most of La Conga’s members arrived just before or, more insultingly, in the early stages of the game (the first two innings) many of those in attendance, particularly those over the age of thirty, considered the group antisocial (here to party) because their late arrival signified they had no wish to interact with the others in the stands. Although much of La Conga’s behavior contradicted such assertions—for example, cheering, drumming, and supporting Cotorro’s performances—many spectators nonetheless felt that these young men were not truly baseball fans. La Conga’s ability to make a grand entrance en masse is directly attributable to their greater access to private transportation than the majority of people in Estadio Latinoamericano. Most of La Conga arrived from more upscale boroughs of Havana, Miramar, and Playa, on the western side of the city.∫ After arriving in the first inning, they would stay for the game. When the game was over, they would pile into their cars and roar o√ into the night, trumpeters leaning out the windows and serenading pedestrian fans walking back to their homes. Many would continue their festivities in a hard-currency (i.e., late 1990s U.S. dollars) nightclub. In contrast, the

∞≤∏ chapter five

rest of the crowd mostly walked the darkened streets to their homes, occasionally stopping along the way at a neighborhood bar or café or friend’s apartment to continue their social evening. Mechanized transportation is an expensive luxury in Havana. Gasoline prices range from us$1.50 per liter upward, when it was available.Ω Individual citizens can only purchase gasoline with hard currency. Those who cannot a√ord autos use Havana’s extensive public transportation system, take taxis (not tourist taxis),∞≠ bicycle, or walk. The public transportation system, however, does not run at night; nor does it pass by the stadium. Consequently, the majority of fans in attendance lived in relatively close proximity to the stadium, or went to extra lengths to get there. Even Cotorro, who did not live or work in the stadium’s neighborhood, often walked from his job to the stadium, a distance of approximately two miles. With no available transportation, nor the financial means to procure more expensive options, many fans from farther away simply chose not to attend the games at the stadium. The issue of transportation became paramount when the playo√s began. Industriales’ first away game for the playo√s was in Pinar del Río, roughly three hours drive from Havana. The National Commission usually arranges a bus to take fans from Havana to Pinar for playo√ games. After many assurances from National Commission administrators that I could ride with the fans, I arrived on the designated morning to wait with Cotorro for the bus. After a several-hour delay, we were informed that the bus would be arriving at 6:00 pm for a 9:00 pm game.∞∞ This announcement infuriated Cotorro and the rest of El Círculo. As we waited in a small park across from the stadium, Cotorro complained, What this is is a lack of respect. A lack of respect. We’ve been coming for years. Leaving at six is idiotic. Coño [A strong expletive], we get there at 9:00, there won’t be any place to sit. Oh sure, they’ll be spaces along the wall at the top but for our group, that won’t do. I can’t be heard from there. We’d get there at 9:00 and may not even get in. Pinar has rabid fans. The stadium fills up an hour or two before the game. Remember when we went to Ciego that Sunday [the All-Star game in Ciego de Avila]? The game was at 2:00 pm. People started coming at 5:00 am. Or that time in Santa Clara when it was full three hours before game time. There’s no point to going, leaving at 6:00. Stupid. The people will wonder ‘‘Where is Cotorro?’’ I’m not going. It is

Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞≤π

stupid. The fans will ask and the Commission will hear their questions. It’ll be the first one [playo√ game] I miss. Sure, La Conga will be there. They went by car. Coño.

Despite our waiting until 7:00 pm, the bus never did arrive. Cotorro’s disgust with this turn of events reflects not only the di≈culties of dealing with Cuban bureaucracy, but also his acknowledgment that La Conga’s presence is a rivalry of passion. The stake in this rivalry is an understanding of what it means to be an Industriales supporter and a baseball aficionado. The ability of each group to cause spectacular actions on the part of spectators in the stadium serves to delineate what constitutes ‘‘real’’ fans. What particularly galled Cotorro was that he, as a nationally known figure, had to rely on state transportation, while the younger, wealthier La Conga leaders could a√ord their own transportation. The di√erence in their economic positioning accentuates the simple reality that fans are not a homogenous mob, but are comprised of individuals from a variety of social positions. That El Círculo’s members represent the localized, working-class neighborhood that surrounds the stadium, making the stadium’s environs a working-class place, was reinforced when several friends from more middle-class neighborhoods eschewed attending games with me because they did not like lo ambiente (atmosphere), preferring the comfort of watching the games on their televisions in their homes. This point was further evidenced by the arrival of La Conga, a group of obviously upscale urban fans whose actions and attitudes clearly bothered other fans in the stadium, particularly when they refused to followed the behavioral norms of that place. At the same time, Industriales supporters do represent a coherent, unified ideal of cubanidad that is contested with other positions. This coherent representation is played out in the rivalries within the Serie Nacional. The di√erences between La Conga and El Círculo are indicative of the complexity that is encompassed within notions of both ‘‘fan behavior’’ and cubanidad. Despite their di√erent socioeconomic positions and attendant views on how to ‘‘properly’’ engage the spectacle within Estadio Latinoamericano, La Conga and El Círculo represent a unified construct of cubanidad predicated upon their support for Industriales against all comers. By virtue of their mutual demonstrative support for Industriales, La Conga and El Círculo, along with other Industriales fans, embody a specific discourse of cubanidad—that of urban modernity—that is explicitly contrasted with ∞≤∫ chapter five

other visions of cubanidad. These di√erences are embodied in and played out in the rivalries between the teams of the Serie Nacional.

Cuban Rivalries and Rival Cubas While waiting for a bus for that all important playo√ game in Pinar del Río, other members of El Círculo also expressed their perspectives on the issues concerning themselves, La Conga de Lucumí, baseball, and the general state of Cuban society. Many of their comments clearly supported Cotorro, sharing his frustration. Rocco, a regular member of El Círculo, echoed Cotorro by firmly placing the blame for our present di≈culty on the National Commissioner. The National Commissioner was new to his job and, worse in the eyes of many fans, was not a baseball administrator, but a party ideologue who took the post after an internal power struggle within the national governing body of sport (inder). Many fans expressed fears that because he had no passion for the game, he would destroy the infrastructure in complete ignorance of and with no regard for the emotional connections fans have with players, teams, and the sport. They feared he would e√ectively cripple an institution that was in crisis. At that particular moment, however, the concern was more on how he did not recognize that fans had an important role to play in the spectacle. You all know me and where I’m from. I’m a Pinareño. But I’m a baseball fan. I can’t help my preference for Pinar but this is still outrageous. I’ve been here [in Havana] for ten years. I live right over there [gesturing down one of the side streets visible from the park], and this has never happened before. This is all the fault of the Commissioner. He’s Pinareño [from and for Pinar del Río]. He doesn’t want Industriales’ fans there. He wants San Luis [the stadium in Pinar del Río] full of Pinareños. ¡Carajo! [an expletive] It is a lack of respect. A lack of respect.

Rocco’s comments regarding his own loyalties, ingrained in him by virtue of his place of birth, Pinar del Río, suggest that the place of one’s passion, the team one is emotionally involved with, serves as a focal point for how cubanidad is formulated and understood. Rocco’s comment further emphasizes that the di≈culties they (El Círculo) were facing were not due to di√erent social positions of Industriales fans per se, but inherent problems within the institution of Cuban baseball fueled by these evocaFans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞≤Ω

tive ties of place. Fans could certainly be expected to have emotional ties to their teams. But for administrators, who are theoretically neutral, to be a√ected as well indicates that specific aspects of cubanidad—particular loyalties, perspectives, and imagined bodily qualities—are cognitively mapped onto the geography of Cuba. Rocco, by virtue of being Pinareño, felt the pull of his boyhood loyalty toward Pinar del Río, yet at the same time his residency in Havana allowed him to split his loyalties between a nostalgic boyhood first love and a contemporary passion tempered by the knowledge of that first love. As newly minted socialist administrators in 1961, inder o≈cials inadvertently reinforced the colonial heritage of the island when they designed the league and named the teams. Formed at the height of revolutionary fervor over a ‘‘new Cuba’’ and emphasizing socialist ideology, the league structure, as it has evolved over the years, is more a historical reflection, distorted as it may be, of pre-Revolutionary relations than of massive social change. Two practices, in particular, reinforced the regionalist approach to the reorganization of baseball. The first was how prospective players would be developed, and the second was what each team would symbolically represent. Ideally, each province develops its own players. Thus, a player raised in Santiago de Cuba will play only for that province. Cuban o≈cials argue that this creates a greater passion among the athletes, for they represent the place from which they originate, and that the fans also are impassioned because they know and have followed these players through their development. At the same time, such an approach emphasizes the localized production of quality athletes, creating an atmosphere and discourse of direct competition between provinces with superiority readily evident when one team defeats the other. The creation of the new league also caused the dissolution of the existing leagues, so fan favorites in Havana—Almendares, Habana, and Marianao—no longer existed. Each new team was given a nickname to facilitate the transfer of fans’ interest, but in the case of the teams of the Serie Nacional, these were not imagined totems—à la Alacranes, Leones, and Elefantes (Scorpions, Lions, and Elephants)—that had dominated play in Havana. While it is not unusual whatsoever for a sports organization to create a nickname that conjures up a locally relevant mythohistorical image,∞≤ the new teams’ nicknames reflected a more socialist orientation toward such practice. Each nickname invokes a province’s main economic contribution to the socialist nation-state as a whole. Rather than ∞≥≠ chapter five

conjuring competitive ferocity or toughness, each team represents productivity and aspired prosperity, central concerns of the newly minted socialist state when the Serie Nacional was created. Each uniform is adorned with a patch on the sleeve that represents these dynamic aspects of each province instead of where corporate logos might be found on capitalist sports uniforms. Hence the Vegueros (tobacco growers) of Pinar del Río, Citroceros (citrus growers) of Villa Clara, and the Fructiceros and Niqueleros (fruit growers and nickel miners) of other Oriente provinces. The two teams of the capital—Industriales (Industrialists) and Metropolitanos (Metropolitans)—invoke an urban industrial imagery that contrasts with the emphasis of soil and ruralness found in many other teams’ names. However, because Havana has two teams, Metropolitanos have historically been used to bring outstanding prospects from other provinces to the capital, which has better facilities to develop an athlete’s skills. As a result, Los Metros are typically younger, less skilled athletes; rarely make the playo√s; and have never won the league championship. When young Metros players become more polished, they transfer to Industriales or return to their original province to play for that squad. Thus, Los Metros are a team that represents Havana but does not necessarily have individuals from the capital on its roster. Baseball fans are acutely aware of this distinction between Industriales and Metropolitanos. Many fans in Havana, especially Industriales’ supporters, therefore dismiss Los Metros as not truly representing the capital city or themselves. Indeed, within the confines of the stadium, regardless of whether Industriales or Metropolitanos were playing, the universal claim was that no one from Havana that is truly knowledgeable about baseball was a Metropolitanos fan. Only one marginal member of El Círculo claimed a≈liation with Los Metros, and Rico was the butt of many of the group’s practical jokes. Ironically, Los Metros are perceived to represent the rural, unsophisticated migrants flocking to the capital that strain the city’s infrastructure. Industriales and Metropolitanos share Estadio Latinoamericano, using that stadium as their home field. They do not share the local fans’ interest however. Attendance at Metropolitanos’ games were approximately onetenth of Industriales’ crowds during the 1997–98 season, when Los Metros were making a surprising run at the playo√s. Some nights, other than El Círculo, no more than a few hundred spectators attended Metropolitanos’ games in a stadium that is designed to seat tens of thousands. In contrast, La Conga de Lucumí never attended Los Metros’ games. At times, the silence Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞≥∞

was oppressive and eerie. Sitting in the stands, one could easily overhear players’ grunts, slaps of leather, and other noises not normally discernible during Industriales’ games. During one game between Metropolitanos and Cienfuegos, a player for Los Metros, Antonio Scull, was about to take his turn at bat. Scull is a large muscular man whose extremely dark skin shines in the stadium lights at night. His body’s physical power is readily apparent, even from over two hundred feet away from where El Círculo’s members are sitting. As Scull stepped into the batter’s box, Cotorro broke o√ his running argument with Blanquito, Rocco, and Rey clamoring ‘‘Hey look! King Kong is up!’’ Cotorro then stood up and began chanting ‘‘King Kong! King Kong! King Kong!’’ He cajoled the rest of El Círculo, and soon the other members of the group took up the chant. In the quiet night air, the few other fans seated in the closest sections picked up the chant, and by the third pitch of Scull’s at bat, the sparse crowd was all chanting ‘‘King Kong!’’ Scull flied out, and Cotorro and the other members of El Círculo chuckled at their contribution to the spectacle.∞≥ In one sense, Cotorro’s reference to Scull as ‘‘King Kong’’ could have been interpreted as recognition of Scull’s massive physical power and ability to swat the ball, similar to how Kong swatted airplanes out of the sky in the climatic confrontation atop the Empire State Building. Of course, Kong’s eventual fate atop that building is well known. Círculo members’ comments immediately after Scull’s at bat, however, made it apparent that they thought Scull was similar to a gorilla for other reasons. His dark skin and alleged brow both made him ‘‘monkeylike’’ as Rocco, a black man himself, put it. Blanquito explained that Scull survives through his brute power and not through his intellect. In another Metropolitanos’ game, during a lull in the action when the stadium was quiet, Chino stood up and bellowed out, ‘‘You all are a disgrace. None of you know how to play properly. You should all be sent back to the fincas (farms) and mountains where you came from. Gómez can stay. He knows how to play, but the rest of you! Back to the hills! Go back to where you came from.’’ Beaming with his clever repartee, he turned around to face the rest of El Círculo seated around him, as they were howling with laughter and applauding. Players and coaches from both teams clearly heard Chino’s eruption. They scowled and glared up at him as Chino stood there basking in the amusement of his compatriots. These two incidents reflect broader imaginings of Cuba based on colo∞≥≤ chapter five

nial history, globally influenced economic patterns, and race relations related to Caribbean-wide social organization of plantations. As residents of the capital, Habaneros (people from Havana) claim an identity rooted in urban, modern, industrial imagery, one that is ostensibly racialized as European and white. Many Havana-based fans perceive Industriales as the team with the most lighter-skinned players in the league and as the smartest team in the league.∞∂ Industriales supporters argue that the team may not have the most physically gifted athletes but that it has the most intelligent ones. As Blanquito elucidated, ‘‘Take [Industriales’ second baseman] Padilla there. He’s not as good as Pacheco or Dueñas, in terms of batting or speed, but he’s smarter. Knows how to play defense better. Understands the nuances better. He is better even though he has less physical ability, not much less but still less.’’ In contrast, Industriales supporters argue, Los Metros and athletes from the Oriente are more physically gifted (i.e., stronger and faster) but do not understand the nuances of baseball strategy. These athletes embody an ‘‘uncivilized’’ physicality, an untapped physical power that is currently not employed in a properly directed fashion. In short, they do not know how to play the game. Only through training and education can an individual harness that physical power in a more appropriate manner, and, metaphorically, this is how the ‘‘civilized’’ Cuban nation is developed. Perceptions such as Blanquito’s are partially based on hours of observation, covering the years of players’ careers. But such perceptions are also informed by historically based discursive ‘‘civilizing processes’’ (Elias 1978, 1982) that explicitly distinguish the modern, urban capital from the rest of the country. Occasionally, their ‘‘modern’’ Cuba imaginatively extends to include the Occidente region of Cuba, but only as far east as the city of Matanzas and not into the agricultural region of Pinar del Río, west of Havana. The imagined Other in this discourse is still Cuban but is a rural, traditional, agricultural, and black cubanidad located in the Oriente, or eastern region of the island. Geopolitically defined, the Oriente, consists of the easternmost provinces of the state. From the position of baseball fans in Havana, however, the Oriente is much more elastic; it approaches the very edges of the capital city and, as will be seen momentarily, penetrates it. Some fans, grudgingly, extend the imagined ‘‘civilized’’ values and traits of the capital as far as Matanzas to the east. However, Pinar del Río, the westernmost province, is imagined as part of Oriente despite its geopolitical Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞≥≥

location as part of Occidente. To the great frustration of Alfredo, a friend originally from Villa Clara (in Centrales), his colleagues and friends consider Villa Clara to be part of Oriente and therefore imagine people from Villa Clara to be black, rural, ‘‘traditionalists.’’ He, of course, does not see himself in that light at all but rather as an urban sophisticate of European heritage. Utterances and demonstrative performances by Industriales fans toward each other and the players on the field suggest that there are multiple Cuban identities within an encompassing ideal of cubanidad and that these Cuban identities have discrete imagined locations on the island. The professional baseball league in Cuba is a nationwide a√air. Revolutionary bureaucrats symbolically forged ties between di√erent regions of the island, thereby strengthening nationalist discourses when they constituted a new island-wide league. However, the rivalries that emerged in this new league became predicated on supposed characteristics of the inhabitants of each region thereby accentuating perceived di√erences amongst Cubans while simultaneously demonstrating that they are all Cuban by the virtue of their passion for the sport. These rivalries and the historical imaginings of being Cuban, spatially mapped onto the island’s geography, create distinct territorially based locations for di√erent aspects of cubanidad. The contentious relationship between La Conga de Lucumí and El Círculo Latinoamericano demonstrates that fans are not socially homogenous, even if they happen to be supporting the same team. Nonetheless, the groups’ mutual support for Industriales provides a common experiential thread that further ties those two groups together despite their disparate socioeconomic di√erences. As Cubans, each group’s identity is situated within the context of an urban, modern Cuban identity predicated upon their position within Cuban baseball and by virtue of their being in Havana. Specific assumptions about the nature of themselves and of those who do not live in the capital shape their imagination, experience, and embodiment of cubanidad. Those who live in Santiago de Cuba, for example, or Pinar del Río, have di√erent perspectives on being Cuban, just as baseball fans from those two cities have di√erent positions on various aspects of Cuban baseball. Played out on the baseball diamonds across Cuba, these rival imaginings produce temporal and racialized versions of cubanidad. The historical cultural practices of the various Iberian or African ethnic groups that now jointly share cubanidad retain their salience and power in ∞≥∂ chapter five

present-day Cuba. Galicians, Gallegans, Guanche, Ibo, and Yorubans all inform the discourse of cubanidad (Guanche 1996), yet such ethnic identities are subsumed within a racial mapping of cubanidad in which the Occidente is European, white, urban, and modern, and the Oriente is African, black, rural, and traditional. In essence, multiple Cubas exist, interlocked and intertwined in the Cuban imagination, simultaneously occupying the same space while contesting with each other’s discursive legitimacy. In this aspect, baseball rivalries serve as the perfect embodiment for such struggles; teams compete against one another while sharing the same territory. Teams embody representative regions of the island and, through the skin color of their athletes, can readily be seen to embody specific characteristics of cubanidad. How certain characteristics of cubanidad inform the discourse that comprises the language of contention is historically informed and provides a continuity that reaches back to the initial struggles for Cuban independence. These discourses take on historically specific forms but have, nonetheless, been embedded in the practice of baseball since the sport’s earliest days on the island. It is to two contemporary forms of discourse within the language of contention that The Quality of Home Runs now turns.

Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞≥∑

CHAPTER

∏

Talking a Good Game ‘‘Tomás, make sure to come to our ‘doble juego [double header]’ tonight,’’ Ryan told me as we left the café after having enjoyed a relaxed lunch. Somewhat confused, I responded, ‘‘What double header? Aren’t you going to Industriales tonight?’’ Ryan barked in laughter and then explained that a doble juego is the fans’ description of their own activities immediately preceding a game at Estadio Latinoamericano. Before each game in the Serie Nacional, small groups of Cubans stand in the small plaza outside Estadio Latinoamericano talking baseball. Others regularly congregate in the stadium’s stands as much as two hours before the scheduled start of the evening’s game. These fans do much more than merely converse; by definition, what they actually do is argue passionately. Their opinions—often expressed at the top of their voices—cover the whole gamut of the game, from the debatable error charged to Germán Mesa, Industriales’ shortstop, for charging a hard chopper the night before, to the controversial strategy employed to select the national team. Indeed, an approaching observer unable to hear their exact words might think these men are about to come to blows based on their gesticulations, reactions, and body language. The scope of their arguments is wide ranging, and no topic is o√ limits. These fans take up any subject to make their point. Debate is not the exception but the rule, and while the debate’s protagonists may finally cease over a rum or co√ee in a nearby café/bar before they retire to their homes for the night, it is far more likely that they will continue to argue when they meet again before the next game. Baseball discourse in particular provides a resonating, repeating buzz that informs the construction of cubanidad and the constant debates of what it means to be Cuban. The irony within this contested discourse is that the social environment created by baseball provides public space for Cubans of all persuasions to become intense participants in an all-tooobvious public discourse. This vociferousness seems especially powerful,

as Cuban scholar Rafael Hernández points out (2003b), in light of the alltoo-commonly and uncritically accepted picture of self-censoring Cubans who do anything but talk to each other. A visit to any particular stadium dispels any misguided notion of a muted populace. Nor does this consciously produced, baseball-centered discourse serve to obscure political discourse, despite Eco’s assertions that this is exactly what sports-related discourse accomplishes. Sports debate is the easiest substitute for political debate. Instead of judging the job done by the minister of finance (for which you have to know about economics, among other things), you discuss the job done by the coach; instead of criticizing the record of Parliament you criticize the record of the athletes; instead of asking (di≈cult and obscure questions) if such-andsuch a minister signed some shady agreements with such-and-such foreign power, you ask if the final or decisive game will be decided by chance, athletic prowess, or by diplomatic alchemy. In short, it allows you to play at the direction of government without all the su√erings, the duties, the imponderabilities of political debate (Eco 1986: 171).

Instead of separating baseball from politics or any other form of social action, this chapter makes the explicit point that ‘‘sports chatter,’’ as Eco calls it, is anything but trivial. Rather, it forms a vital part of the everyday production of the discourse of cubanidad. Eco’s conception of politics in this instance is limited since, in this sense, it pertains solely to the state. ‘‘Sports chatter has all the characteristics of a political debate . . . only the object is not the city (or the corridors of the statehouse) but the stadium, with its locker rooms,’’ which ‘‘deceitfully passes itself o√ as talk of the City’’ (Eco 1986: 163, 165). Baseball’s power is embedded in the dynamics of cultural politics in which various social issues are played out among the populace. Politicians are only one of a multitude of the ‘‘players’’ in this wider ‘‘game.’’ Since baseball talk is a multi-stranded narrative within the popular discourse of cubanidad, state o≈cials have a vested interest in assuring that their version of this language of contention dominates what it means to be Cuban. Two discursive genres are considered here to demonstrate the influence fans’ narratives have in forming the construction of cubanidad. The first consists of the various arguments that ensue because of the events on the diamond. The second is fans’ poetic commentaries on current events relating to baseball. Both genres are as old Talking a Good Game ∞≥π

as the game itself, existing since the sport’s arrival in the late nineteenth century.

On Narrative Practice and Cubanidad Drawing on Richard Bauman’s profound examination of oral performance (1984, 1986), I adapt his ideas on storytelling by considering the various speaking acts of Cuban fans to be forms of dialogic narrative, the meanings of which are continuously and constantly contested. In this manner, I am altering the relationship of narration and nation that Bhabha introduced, linking literary composition to the discourse of nation (1990). As I use the concept, narrative becomes a much more dynamic and active practice, one that is continually and regularly engaged through organically produced discourses. These discourses are based on negotiated interpretations of events, not only by lettered intellectuals but the entire populace. Keyed toward both the events that the speakers recount and the environment in which such stories are told, narrative is rooted in culturally defined scenes or events, that is, bounded segments of behavior and experience that constitute meaningful contexts for action, interpretation, and evaluation. As culturally specific events, such discourses serve to create social boundaries, reinforcing group identity and separating those ‘‘in the know’’ from cultural Others to the extent that a story told among outsiders will di√er in structure and content compared to the same story told to cultural insiders (Basso 1996). In short, the construction of narratives goes a long way to engendering feelings of cultural intimacy. The events under consideration here are baseball and how baseball is lived and experienced through the actions on the diamond. For most people, however, this lived experience is not manifested through the physical act of playing the game but through the verbal acts of speaking. In similar fashion, Luis Antezana considers the manner in which most of the Argentine nation experiences soccer as especially illustrative of the significance of soccer in Argentina. How do we live in football? Obviously, we don’t live playing, in the common sense—play—of the term. Nor do we live, although it is a node of our articulation with it, observing it directly. My suspicion is that fundamentally, we live it verbally. To put it another way, we live talking—more or less—about it

∞≥∫ chapter six

and its manifestations. Here, ‘‘talk’’ and ‘‘verbalize’’ are inclinations that make the pragmatic functions of the tongue, one could say, when the tongue is also acting [or] acts. For example, there is a foul in the penalty area. Whatever our loyalties, we immediately consider whether it was legitimate or illegitimate. We simply argue immediately, this verbal acceptance or negation, jaw over its authenticity of value in giving punishment. Consequently, our active participation in the soccer spectacle is indicative of these kinds of verbalization. These values—polemics, in the example—are not in the game, in the action; rather they are produced in the spoken comments, discussed, tested, rehashed, and so forth, these other acts that follow or followed in the fields, in the games, in the championships, or include in the history and the rumor mill of the sport (Antezana 2003: 87–88).

Spectators and fans clearly form a vital active element of any sports spectacle. ‘‘The form of life in football [soccer] is speaking, verbalizing, that is what makes the spectator also an important actor—like the Greek chorus—in the spectacle’’ (Villena Fiengo 2003: 259). Like the soccer crowd in Antezana’s example and Sergio Villena Fiengo’s comment, the spectators in Estadio Latinoamericano immediately react to events on the diamond. A close play at the plate causes an instant surge in commentary. Did the umpire make the correct call? Was the runner really out or was he safe? Similarly, others question whether the coach followed the correct strategy. Should the runner have been sent in the first place? What was the coach thinking with the team’s best hitter coming up to bat next? It is through these heated articulations that baseball is lived in the stadium and across the island. ‘‘Without a doubt, the crowd constitutes an active, summative chorus that responds to the dramatic events on the field of play. It is enough to observe the galleries in a relatively important encounter to verify the complexity of this fact’’ (Antezana 2003: 88). Yet such discursive events are not limited to the spectators’ reactions in moments immediately after the ephemeral action on the field of play. Fans continue to discuss the meaning of such actions long after the final whistle has been blown. It is the structure of the signification in their narratives that gives coherence to our understanding and enables us to construct, in the interdependent process of narration and interpretation, a coherent set of interrelationships that we call an ‘‘event’’ (Bauman 1986: 5). The elaboration and circulation of such discourse is the work of all aficionados, but they are not the only producers of this elaborate and Talking a Good Game ∞≥Ω

contested discourse. They, along with sports journalists, ‘‘elaborate narratives about the cultural roles considered [to be] the nucleus of national identity embodied in ‘the national style’ of playing’’ (Villena Fiengo 2003: 259). Consequently, Cuban aficionados produce emotive narratives that form a central aspect of the language of contention that is cubanidad, a culturally intimate discourse that is constantly debated and struggled over in both content and meaning. Narrative, then, should be understood as a mode of communication, a way of speaking, the essence of which resides in a speaker’s assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of a linguistic skill, highlighting the way in which communication is carried out. From the point of view of the audience, the narrative act is thus laid open to evaluation for the way it is done, for the relative skill and e√ectiveness of the speaker’s display. Narration thus calls forth special attention to and heightened awareness of both the act and the speaker. In these terms, it may be understood as an enactment of poetics, the essence of spoken artistry (Bauman 1986: 3), and can, thus, provide a particularly rich source of knowledge about the significance people find in their everyday lives. Such narratives often reveal more about what can make life worth living than about how it is routinely lived. These baseball stories fans tell both reflect what actually happened on the field and define the kinds of experiences they themselves aspire to and seek out.

La Esquina Caliente / The Hot Corner The Hot Corner, so named because of the speed with which batted balls arrive at the fielder, refers to third base. A fielder at the Hot Corner has to be able to react ‘‘instinctually,’’ that is, without consciously thinking about his actions. The locations where aficionados argue are likewise named because of the rapidity of questions and answers fielded by discussants. Debates are loud, heated, multivocal, and simultaneous, making it extremely di≈cult to present any coherent record of the conversations that occur. Debates break apart into a variety of side arguments and then rejoin once again in a continuous cycle. Anyone can inject a comment at any time, leading to several people attempting to speak at once, and shouting down other speakers to be heard. Two or three debates often occur simultaneously as fans participating in one discussion pick up and follow a di√erent thread of an argument and form a subgroup. Speakers turn and ∞∂≠ chapter six

ask for support from bystanders, asking other listeners, often with mocking incredulity, if they heard their antagonist correctly or whether we, the surrounding aficionados, can believe what the antagonist is saying. Opposing arguments are summarily dismissed with a simple ‘‘No se sabe’’ (You don’t know), accompanied with a wagging finger in an antagonist’s face. As arguments heat up, insults get nastier and more personal until one shouted-down protagonist grows so impotently frustrated he glowers in silence, plotting to renew the argument at a later date. These arguments are not the verbal confrontations of strangers but of good friends. Each group clustered around the stadium is a small social network that distrusts outsiders, which limits the interaction between clusters. During the early part of the 1997–98 Serie Nacional season, I spent three frustrating nights listening to one group of entertainingly vocal fans who resolutely ignored my constant presence a few rows behind them. I continued to remain distanced yet within earshot until the third night, when one of the group looked over at me and asked the apparently innocuous and incongruous question of whether I liked pineapple. After I a≈rmed that I did, indeed, enjoy that succulent fruit, he moved a couple of rows up to sit in the row in front of me and explained, ‘‘We are like pineapples. We cluster around each other; even if you pluck one out, we get in closer together. Also, we don’t like outsiders bothering us. We want nothing to do with them. So we are prickly towards others. Get it?’’ Relieved to finally have them acknowledge my existence, I told Ryan that I did indeed understand his point. We continued to exchange initial pleasantries, when one of his friends shouted up to him, ‘‘Hey, Cabrón! What are you doing? ¿Le hace jinetero? [Are you a jinetero?∞]’’ Ryan, angrily turned back to his compatriot, ‘‘¡Amarillo! Liar! What is your problem?’’ Pointing at me, he continued to berate our interrupter, ‘‘He knows baseball!’’ Turning back to face me, he commented about his friend who had interrupted our initial conversation, ‘‘He doesn’t know anything. Why do I talk with him? He knows nothing.’’ Intrigued by Ryan’s assertion that I knew pelota, the others in the group turned and began to question me to adjudicate Ryan’s claim of my expertise. Ryan’s assertions regarding my aficionismo as well my own claims when I was with other groups were immediately challenged through several sets of esoteric questions. The initial questions had clear-cut answers, and then as such knowledge was ‘‘proven,’’ others that did not were fired at me. Talking a Good Game ∞∂∞

‘‘How many Cubans are in the Hall of Fame?’’ ‘‘Which one? There are at least four.’’ ‘‘Oh?’’ ‘‘Yeah, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada and the U.S. of course.’’ ‘‘Cuban.’’ ‘‘I don’t have any idea, I’m not Cuban although I’d guess there’s about sixty.’’ ‘‘You’re American? In that case, the U.S.’’ ‘‘There’s only one: Dihigo.’’ ‘‘How many Latinos then?’’ ‘‘Five.’’ ‘‘Who are they and what’s their nationality?’’ [On the side, two men wager whether I’ll know the answers or not.] ‘‘Dihigo, of course, Cuban. Juan Marichal of the Dominican Republic, [Roberto] Clemente, Puerto Rican, and Rod Carew of Panama. And let’s see . . . Oh yeah, [Luis] Aparicio of Venezuela.’’ ‘‘Are there any others that should be in who aren’t?’’ ‘‘Well . . . [Tany] Pérez is on the ballot and he probably should get in. Other than that I don’t know of any other Cubans.’’≤ ‘‘What about [ José] Canseco or [Rafael] Palmeiro?’’ ‘‘Canseco, no way. Palmeiro I don’t think so.’’

From this exchange, an argument ensued about whether either player was worthy of admission to the U.S. Hall of Fame and whether they could be considered Cuban. Embroiled in an argument about whether Palmeiro should be inducted into the U.S. Hall of Fame,≥ Ryan laughed in relief and then shouted over our ongoing argument, ‘‘I told you. He knows, He knows.’’ These sorts of exchanges, where fans prove their esoteric knowledge, remains a practice from the sport’s earliest days. Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte, a player and historian, chronicled a nineteenth-century encounter in which a fan proved his knowledge of contemporary players by identifying a passing player in the street. No sooner do we appear outside the gym door than the curious began to stop in their tracks and stand in front of us, and those who recognize us point us out to their friends as if we were some sort of monument. ‘‘There’s Carlito Macía,’’ pointing his finger at my teammate. ‘‘Look, that’s Alfredo Arango.’’

∞∂≤ chapter six

‘‘So fat? I thought he was much thinner.’’ ‘‘Well, I’ll prove it to you. Psst, psst, hey aren’t you Alfredo Arango? . . . Yeah, man, that’s him. He just doesn’t want to answer’’ (Gálvez y Delmonte 1889: 99).

Gálvez y Delmonte’s account demonstrates that this particular form of cultural capital used to indicate one’s cubanidad has remained relatively constant over the years. Being Cuban in this context is validated by more than where one is born. It requires specific forms of cultural knowledge, knowledge that individuals must be able to articulate, not simply possess. No one is immune to this sort of questioning or testing. Any aficionado will eventually be challenged, merely to see if he ‘‘belongs.’’ Such questions serve two purposes. They confirm that this unknown individual is an aficionado, socially speaking, and through his willingness to engage in argumentative confrontation, the aficionado’s cubanidad can be determined in relation to others’ (Carter 2001). As an individual proves his knowledge, he demonstrates his cubanidad via a willingness discutir pelota (to argue baseball), which quickly extends to broader questions involving por la situación.∂ Later that month, I met with Ryan and his friends at the Estadio Latinoamericano. An impassioned, blazing argument over who was the better slugger, Marquetti or Muñoz, raged as I arrived. While two of Ryan’s compatriots argued the virtues of each home-run hitter, Ryan leaned over to Yuni and said, ‘‘I got three kilos of shrimp in yesterday, how much do you want?’’ Ryan works at a fish shop that is managed by his brother, Robi (Robinson).∑ I spent the previous day hanging out at the pescadería talking with Robi, Ryan, and the other workers, and no delivery was made. Deliveries were regularly scheduled for Mondays, and now it was a Tuesday evening. That Monday, Robi and Ryan spent their day turning customers away, explaining that there was no shrimp available. Now, suddenly the pescadería had three hundred kilos of shrimp? As Yuni and Ryan concluded their conversation, the argument continued to rage. The two main protagonists agreed that both sluggers were some of the best Cuban home-run hitters, but neither would agree on who was the better slugger, because of the di√erences in pitching during each player’s career and the di√erence in equipment. ‘‘Besides, how can you compare them?’’ Yuni suddenly interjected into the debate, ‘‘One played for six more years than the other.’’ That comment triggered a whole new round of argument Talking a Good Game ∞∂≥

about whether it was the cumulative total that should be the criteria for judgment or whether the average number of home runs hit per year should be the basis of excellence. As the new parameter reshu√led the allegiances in the two camps regarding Cuba’s home-run hitters, Ryan responded to my query as to how he had shrimp to sell when there had not been a delivery. ‘‘This shrimp came in via an alternative route. It never enters the o≈cial books. Robi never had it, and since he never had it, how could we have sold it? When the truck doesn’t come, what can I do? I can’t a√ord to be out por regla.’’ Out por regla (out by rule) in baseball indicates that the athlete has broken some formal rule of the game and is put out by umpire’s decision rather than through the play of the game. For example, a base runner attempting to avoid being tagged out by a defending player runs out of the base path. Whether that athlete has exceeded the imaginary space of the base path by more than three feet is entirely up to the umpire, who is the ultimate arbiter in these instances. If the umpire determines that he has gone out of the base path, then the athlete is out, even if he is not tagged by the defending player in possession of the ball. Similarly, Ryan used this baseball metaphor to explain his positioning while attempting to sell a truckload of illicit seafood. It is against the rules, but if he and his ‘‘teammates’’ at the pescadería can continue to operate as per the norms of their fish shop rather than the bureaucratic rules, then everything is fine. He is acutely aware that they have to actually have documents stating they have shrimp in stock before they can sell it. Otherwise an o≈cial in charge of the fish business might hear about this shop selling shrimp when they do not o≈cially have any. They would be shut down and out por regla. Ryan’s work as a fishmonger does not involve an open questioning of the bureaucratic rules, but does involve a space in which he can maneuver where the interpretation of practice is debatable. It is out por regla decisions that often lead to vociferous arguments between team managers and umpires. Those arguments are not over the rule itself but over the interpretation of the event. Debates like this ensue almost every day. The argument over the primacy of Marquetti or Muñoz is but one example. Just as the Serie Nacional itself has evolved and fluctuated in its structure, the parameters of an argument can take days if not months to resolve, never mind that the initial comment that caused the argument in the first place may never actually get debated. ∞∂∂ chapter six

Where these lines are drawn is continually negotiated, and the constant flow of men arriving and departing the argument ensures that some are unaware of the initial boundaries. Arguments, however, are not so much about actual confrontation as they are about demonstrating one’s cubanidad. Although there are a few instances in my notes of an argument growing so heated it clearly becomes a confrontation, la esquina caliente is a place men gather, wherever its geographic location, and socialize in a relatively secure context. This ‘‘sports chatter’’ provides a facade that appears apolitical, yet the arguments often lead to other discussions that constantly draw upon current events, national concerns, and local gossip. Engaging in these debates allows individuals to assert claims of their own cubanidad while simultaneously and implicitly recognizing another’s claim within their discursive engagement. By confirming an individual’s aficionismo through discutir pelota, the ensuing debates also suggest that a culturally intimate self-identity being displayed is specifically Cuban while not state controlled.

Poetic Play The arguments of contemporary Cubans clearly demonstrate how Cuban discourse informs the language of contention that is cubanidad on the level of everyday practice. The regular and continuous debates between fans on street corners, in the parks, and in the stands, provide a running social commentary that, while centered on events on the diamond, extends beyond the confines of the stadium both in space and time. Arguments and other narrative forms occur elsewhere around the island, informing and being informed by events on the diamond and by events away from the playing fields. These arguments also inform and are informed by the particular moments in which fans produce them. The particular discourses they create are specific to those historical moments and the social contexts in which they are uttered. Similarly, the poetic narratives produced by passionate followers of the sport also are specific to the historical moments of their creation. This is equally true for the early games of Cuban baseball and for the recent seasons of the Serie Nacional. In the following subsections, two poetic performances are described, one a nineteenth-century poem, most probably performed for elite criollos after a Sunday afternoon’s entertainment; and the second, a recitation written by a fan tired of the overt partisanship of radio broadTalking a Good Game ∞∂∑

casters during the 1997–98 Serie Nacional. Both of these poetic examples are evidence of how this particular narrative provides an organic critique of contemporary social situations on the island. The first is a commentary on the existing political situation toward the end of the nineteenth century, and the second is a critique of Havana’s baseball supporters and media for focusing solely on the capital rather than celebrating the best teams of a campaign at the end of the twentieth century.

A Manifesto for the Baseball Country The first poem, ‘‘Manifiesto al pais pelotero,’’ was published in May 1887 in one of the periodicals, El Figaro, written by and for criollo consumption throughout Cuba.∏ Poetry was one form of political commentary that shaped criollos’ debates on the politics of Cuba: how Cuba should be governed, and what its position should be: that is, whether it should be annexed by the United States and become a state; become an independent nation-state; or remain part of the Spanish Empire with equal rights for Cubans. One of the antiSpanish criollo leaders, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who returned to Cuba in the 1850s from exile, remained a consistent critic of Spanish governance of the island. He was detained briefly in 1851 for reciting an impromptu poem demanding freedom at a banquet in Las Tunas where the military governor of that town was present (Thomas 1971: 243). These contemporary concerns along with the periodic banning of baseball by Spanish governors in Cuba informed the author’s commentary and position. The Spanish were aware of the political implications of baseball and took steps to curtail its spread. As early as 1853, the Spanish governor, José G. de la Concha, warned authorities in Madrid that the emerging trend of criollo children being educated in the United States would have ‘‘most baneful consequences.’’ The first outright ban on the game was implemented in 1873 in the middle of the Ten Years’ War. Colonial authorities labeled baseball as an ‘‘anti-Spanish activity’’ (Pérez 1994: 511). Revoked a year later, baseball remained a controversial symbol within the language of contention. Cuban and Spanish ideologues struggled over its symbolism to legitimate their own positions. Spanish o≈cials refused to sanction the name Yara for a new baseball team in Havana. The refusal stemmed from the Spanish realization that the name carried connotations of the independence movement, since the Ten Years’ War was pre-

∞∂∏ chapter six

cipitated by the proclamation of rebellion, ‘‘The Grito of Yara’’ of 1868. Spanish authorities interpreted a baseball club in Remedios named Anacaona, for a Taína Indian princess who died resisting the Conquest, as a further sign of Cuban insolence. The conservative newspaper Diario de Cárdenas warned in the mid-1880s that the popularity of baseball was a threat to the integrity of the country (Pérez 1994: 511). The Spanish governors’ refusals to allow certain club names and their periodic attempts to control the game reflect the importance baseball had in the struggle over what it meant to be Cuban. It was within this sociopolitical environment that the ‘‘Manifiesto’’ was first recited. The poem itself addresses the conflicted emotions a Cuban baseball fan possesses between the three major clubs of that time: Habana, Almendares, and Fé. But these emotional conflicts recount more than simply a person’s loyalty to a baseball team; they also reflect an underlying discussion of one’s filial devotions to one’s country. On the most basic level, the poet discusses his reasons for supporting Almendares instead of one of the other two prominent teams, Habana or Fé. But at a deeper level, team allegiance can also be interpreted as a declaration of political allegiance. Wordplay and political allusions permeate the poem, and such ambiguities were political necessities when it was first published in 1887. Its very title reflects the political conflicts of late nineteenth-century Havana. On the one hand, the title can be understood as ‘‘Manifesto for the BaseballPlaying Country’’ but it can also be understood in a di√erent sense, depending on how the word pelotero is understood by the audience. Pelotero can also mean ‘‘turbulent’’ or ‘‘quarrelsome,’’ thus rendering the title ‘‘Manifesto for the Country in Conflict,’’ which Cuba certainly was. This deliberately ambiguous use of pelotero is repeated near the end of the poem, where peloteros could be construed as meaning baseball players, fighters, or both. Manifiesto al pais peloteroπ Me ha tachado un habanista A habanista has branded me de inconsecuente, por qué a traitor to my principles, because en un tiempo fuí de Fé at one time I was [on the side] of Fé y ahora soy almendarista. and now I am almendarista. No hay tales inconsecuencias de mi parte, a lo que infiero

There is no such betrayal on my part, which I infer

Talking a Good Game ∞∂π

porque yo fuí del primero cuando tenía creencias.

because I was for the first one when I was a believer.

Más tarde, lo cierto fué que tras de mil desazones me quedé sin ilusiones, y perdí toda la fé.

Later, the truth was that after a thousand disappointments I was left without illusions And I lost all faith.

Y no es posible que trate de ocultarlo, no, señor: solamente ese color me gusta en el chocolate.

And it is not possible to try To conceal it, no, sir: I like that color only in chocolate.∫

Almendaristas a pares solicitaron mi ingreso en su club, y lo confieso, me encantaba el Almendares.

Almendaristas by pairs asked me to join their club, and, I confess, I was charmed by Almendares.

¿Cómo no haber ingresado en él, si Luz, Guillermina, Gloria, Hortensia y Ernestina, me tienen siempre a-su-lado?

How could I not have joined it, if Luz, Guillermina, Gloria, Hortensia, and Ernestina keep me always at their side?Ω

Dije:—‘Cueste lo que cueste entro en él con alma y vida’. ¡Si era entonces mi querida de mirada azul celeste!

I said: ‘‘Whatever it may cost, I’ll join with all my heart.’’ For at that time my beloved’s gaze was of celestial blue!

Y entré en él, porque quería encontrarme entre mi gente, porque hasta mi medio ambiente lo ordenaba y lo exigía.

And I joined it, because I wanted to be among my people, because even my environment Ordered and demanded it.

Y cuando muera, los tules de mi ataúd funerario no serán, cual de ordinario, negros, sino bien azules.

And when I die, the tulles that cover my funeral casket, will not be, however ordinary, black, but actually blue.

Que mi alma beis-bolera, hasta muerta consecuente, directa yy [sic] rápidamente y volará a la azul esfera.

For my criollo baseball-player soul, faithful unto death, will fly swiftly and directly to the blue sphere [of heaven].∞≠

∞∂∫ chapter six

Porque entre esbeltos palmares y con dulce murmurío, hay en nuestra patria un río que va diciendo: ‘Almendares’.

Because among graceful palm trees and with a sweet murmuring, there is, in our mother country, a river that says as it flows: ‘‘Almendares.’’

Es de ver con qué donaire la bandera azul ondea, y cómo se enseñora cual soberana del aire.

It must be seen with what elegance the blue banner waves, and how it governs as sovereign of the air.

Dándoselas de demócratas, algunos, para insultarnos, suelen a veces llamarnos orgullosos y aristócratas.

Claiming to be democratic, some people, in order to insult us, are sometimes accustomed to call us proud and aristocratic.

Y yo no lo tomo a insulto, ni con mucho al contrario: ¡si en cada azul partidario hasta la sangre es azul!

And I do not take it as an insult, nor with much objection, for in every blue partisan even his blood is blue!

Ya veis que mi evolución fué precisa y decorosa, y el que me diga otra cosa, carecerá de razón.

Now you all see that my evolution Was necessary and proper, And he who says otherwise to me Will lack good sense.

Porque es el color del cielo

¡porque azules son los ojos de Josefina y Consuelo!

Because [that] is the color of the heavens and because of not being [on the side] of the reds; because blue are the eyes of Josefina and Consuelo!

Al dar semejante paso de un modo tan radical, dejé de ser general para ser soldado raso.

On taking such a step In so radical a manner, I stopped being a general In order to be a lowly soldier.

Almendarista seré peloteros, mientras viva, por abajo y por arriba; os lo juro por mi . . . fé.

Almendarista will I be, ballplayers, as long as I live, from head to toe I swear it to you on my . . . faith.

y por no ser de los rojos;

Talking a Good Game ∞∂Ω

Queda mi cambio explicado y no es preciso que insista, y colorín colorado, digo azulín azulado que diría un almendarista

My change is [thus] explained and there is no need to insist on it, and [instead of ]reddish red, I say, bluish blue, as an Almendarista would say.∞∞

Denying any betrayal on his part, the poet connects team loyalty to belief in a Spanish Cuba by explaining that the speaker no longer has belief or faith ( fe), linguistically toying with the name of one of the teams (Fé) to emphasize this point further. From the poet’s perspective, the nation as an imagined entity is something that requires belief or faith in its relevance and power, and, having lost his belief in one side, he finds it elsewhere. Throughout the poem, sporting loyalties are used to represent political beliefs. Team colors are especially used to denote political a≈liations as well as sporting loyalty. Each team had a representative color: that of Almendares was blue, while Habana’s was red, and Fé’s yellow. Thus in the very first stanza, this political symbolism is made clear as the poet says that a Habanista has branded him a traitor because he has left Fé. Being accused by a Red for leaving the Yellow is clearly an allegorical representation of loyalty toward Spain. By refusing allegiance to Habana and abandoning Fé, the poet rejects the two colors of the Spanish flag, thereby denying any loyalty to Spain. Instead casting his lot with that of Almendares, whose name derives from a natural feature (Almendares is a river) of the island, the poet is thereby hinting at the naturalness of a≈liation to such a team. Blue is particularly important throughout the poem, and it is worth reiterating that Almendaristas are ‘‘blues.’’ Gálvez y Delmonte described Almendares’s blue banners flying upon his team’s arrival (Gálvez y Delmonte played for Habana) for a game against them (Gálvez y Delmonte 1889: 99). The blue banner mentioned in the poem, however, could also be the Cuban flag, which has three sky blue stripes, and the presence of a blue banner alludes to the national flag by proclaiming it acts ‘‘as sovereign of the air.’’ An ability to claim sovereignty over something means being in a position to rule, and, in the poem, planting a flag to claim the air over the island is a metaphor for claiming the island. Since these baseball players were criollos, they were also the land-owning class of Cuba and the use of the verb enseñorarse, meaning to take possession of something (usually land), is highly suggestive of such social power and ∞∑≠ chapter six

position. Its use in the same passage is clearly indicative of a political position being taken in relation to notions of sovereignty. Two stanzas in the middle of the poem also refer to the criollos’ social position, through the metaphor of ‘‘blue-bloodedness.’’ As Almendares supporters, it would make sense to claim that their blood is blue by playing on the metaphor of the blue partisans. By following the claim that Almendares supporters are naturally blue blooded, with a reference to giving up the position of general in order to be a lowly soldier, the poet is clearly alluding to the social rank of the club and of those who are rejecting Spanish authority. The move from a position of leadership in an army to being a ‘‘lowly soldier’’ mirrors many criollos’ experiences in the Ten Years’ War and would anticipate further experiences of many baseball players in the Second War for Cuban Independence (1895–1901). Since many criollos’ origins were among the minor aristocratic families of Spain —they had been o≈cers, in name and/or deed, in the Spanish forces— abandoning these posts to become lowly guerrilla rebels reflects a perceived loss of social status. This reference to ‘‘blue-bloodedness’’ and nobility also implies a sense that one is noble through one’s actions. By making a reminder that many of the rebel soldiers were of low social standing, including escaped slaves, the poet is suggesting that one’s nobility emerges through one’s actions and not via acknowledgment or a≈rmation by an aristocrat. Finally, all these allusions to nobility also hint that the cause of Almendaristas was a noble one. This passage, then, refers both to the social position of the criollos and the connection being made between Almendares supporters and Cuban nationalists. There is a further meaning of the color blue that needs explication. The lovely ladies’ eyes that swept the poet o√ his feet also allude to how cubanidad is envisioned. His beloved’s gaze is celestial or sky blue, the same shade as the blue of the Cuban flag. Blue eyes suggest that the women were white, and through this allusion the narrator suggests that the Cuban nation, represented as Almendares, is a white, European and, by inference, modern nation. This particular symbolism is evocative, since it comprises an essentialized, nonsexual, and virtuous feminine nation, which radically di√ers from how the Cuban nation was portrayed in contemporary Cuban novels. In such works,∞≤ the nation symbolically emerges through the body of the mulata, a woman produced through the sexual union of Europeans and Africans, and is the object of sexual desire of criollos for the express purpose of reproducing the nation (Kutzinski Talking a Good Game ∞∑∞

1993). The ‘‘Manifiesto,’’ then, is a clear declaration of Cuban nationalism, one which presents the image of that nation in a specific gendered form. The nation as imagined by these peloteros was one that consisted of specific kinds of Cubans. White, upper-class criollos were to be the national leaders and the embodiment of an independent, modern Cuban nation whose characteristics were inherent and visible in the ‘‘national game’’ of baseball.

The Honor of the Capital The continuing importance of poetic performance as part of the practice of baseball became especially apparent one evening toward the end of the 1997–98 Serie Nacional. On this particular evening, Metropolitanos were playing Holguín. Only a few hundred are in attendance, and within the nearly empty stadium the few clusters of fans pay as much attention to their own wordplay as to the athletes’ struggles on the field of play. About halfway through this extremely uneventful game, in which both teams appear to not want to win, Enrique, ‘‘Rico,’’ an older man in a torn and ragged trench coat, with dirt-caked, holey clothes and patent leather shoes, faces the other members of El Círculo and announces that they were disgraceful as aficionados. ‘‘You guys are terrible. All you do is cheer for Industriales. That’s not what real fans do. Real fans follow the best teams.’’ El Círculo erupts with howls of indignation. Chino snaps back, ‘‘Loquito, you don’t know anything; you support Metros not Industriales.’’ Others hurl insults, ‘‘You’re a drunk!’’ ‘‘You are drunk!’’ ‘‘Idiot!’’ Blanquito shouts over some of the others, ‘‘You’re not even a real fan. You don’t attend all the games.’’ Drawing himself up in the face of this verbal abuse, Rico solemnly informs them that he has written a poem chiding their infantile notions. El Círculo react to this proclamation with gales of laughter. Growing indignant, Rico starts berating Chino and those next to him. Cotorro starts quieting the others down and mollifies Rico by demanding, ‘‘Read it to us.’’ Rico recoils slightly and starts to protest. The others instantly echo Cotorro’s suggestion, their chanting growing increasingly louder, ‘‘Read it! Read it!’’ Reluctantly agreeing, he fishes a neatly folded sheet of paper out of his trouser pocket. As he unfolded it, Chino stands and starts shushing the rest of El Círculo in anticipation. Drawing a deep breath, Rico begins.∞≥ Distinguidos narrativos deportivos de la coco

∞∑≤ chapter six

Distinguished sports announcers of [Radio] coco,

le[s] van a servir de poco sus gritos aterradores. perfectos aduladores son [d]el equipo Industriales pero es que en la nacional hay solo un soberano: nuestros Metropolitanos honra de la capital.

you will be little served by your terrifying shouts. You are perfect adulators of the team Industriales But, the fact is, in the national [league] there is only one sovereign: our Metropolitanos, honor of the capital.

Los valientes Habaneros del Comandante Carmona disfrutirán la corona sin tener alabaderos. Son los bravos guerilleros del deporte nacional; podrán perder o triunfar, mas les digo sin zozobra, como vergüenza les sobra, honran nuestra capital.

The valiant Havanans of Commander Carmona will enjoy the crown without having hired sycophants. They are the brave guerrilla fighters of the national sport; they may lose or triumph, but I tell you without anxiety, since shame is unnecessary, they honor our capital.

Con la legión de bocones que tienen los Industriales, en los cuartos de finales les partimos los cojones, y que rujan los leones que Radio coco inventó como el Pica ¿que sé yo? pica mucho en la letrina y lleva a Pedro Molina lo que en la misma encontró.

[Even] with the legion of bigmouths that the Industriales have, in the quarter finals we will bust their balls, and let them roar, the lions that Radio coco invented∞∂ since the Prick, y’know, really stings in the john (latrine) and brings to Pedro Molina what he found in that place.

Bien, amigos narradores deben ser imparciales y de Metros e Industriales sigan siempre a los mejores digo: a lo[s] más ganadores, y los Metros, como tal es el equipo ideal

So, then, my announcer friends, you must be impartial, and between Metros and Industriales always follow the better ones. I mean: those who win most, and the Metros, since such is the ideal team

Talking a Good Game ∞∑≥

por su coraje y valor; no hay un equipo mejor en esta Zona Occidental.

for its courage and valor; there is no better team in this Western Region.

Viendo los Metros jugando al conocer a Carmona mi corazón se emociona sus hazañas recordando, y yo les sigo apoyando con la pluma y el tintero, y este recuerdo sincero de quien aplande [sic] [y] respeta el Periodista y Poeta que terminó en Guerrillero.

Seeing the Metros play on getting to know Carmona, my heart is moved [by] remembering their exploits, and I continue to support them with pen and ink, and this sincere remembrance by one who applauds and respects the Journalist and Poet who ended as a Guerrilla fighter.

Throughout Rico’s performance, El Círculo howled in laughter and clapped in appreciation at Rico’s points. At a couple of junctures, Rico was interrupted as Chino, Rocco, Blanquito, and Rey all argued about a particular stanza’s point. Cotorro had to calm them down and remind them that the performance was not completed yet, cajoling Rico to continue as he stood there watching the arguments burst from his biting commentary. At the end of the performance, El Círculo loudly applauds, briefly attracting the attention of the few other groups of fans in the stadium, and praises his poetry. Rocco shouts that it should be read on the radio. Rico vehemently rejects this idea. Chino snatches the paper from Rico’s hands. The row seats allow Chino to keep the paper tantalizingly out of reach while using his body to prevent Rico from getting a grasp on it. The others start chanting ‘‘¡coco! ¡coco!’’ Rocco tears the paper out of Chino’s hands, and Chino and Rocco both race up the stairs and toward the openair radio booth at the top of the stadium with Rico following in hot pursuit, frantically trying to get the paper back. Rocco and Chino win the race and, laughing, begin to pound on the broadcast booth door to get the radio commentators’ attention. Rico assaults them, trying to get the paper back, berating them at length about how they disrespect him and have no calidad (quality). After several minutes, it becomes clear that the radio announcers are not going to open the locked door, and the two scoundrels reluctantly return the poem to Rico. The trio descend to where the rest of El Círculo is seated. Upon their arrival, Rocco and Chino laugh and make fun of Rico’s reactions, while Rico angrily berates the group. Cotorro asks ∞∑∂ chapter six

for the paper, and after reassuring Rico, reads it through. Nodding thoughtfully, he passes it to Rey, who then passes it to Blanquito, and the poem makes the rounds for each member to read. Rico’s poem itself is direct criticism of the announcers’ blatant and misplaced partisanship. Arguing, first of all, that their shouting detracts from any understanding they may have of the game, they fail to recognize that Los Metros are the better team within the capital, much less across the country. By the second stanza, he is already linking Metropolitanos to nationalist symbolism, calling Los Metros the guerrillas of the Serie Nacional, thereby establishing a direct symbolic link between revolutionary Cuba and that team. Rico’s argument rests not so much on either the team’s history in terms of the outcome of championships, or on each season’s win and loss totals. Rather, he is invoking values important to cubanidad discussed in the following chapter that the team embodies, and it is announcers’ and aficionados’ failure to recognize these important qualities that so piques him. By the last stanza, he links these qualities again to nationalist sentiments by equating the leadership qualities of Carmona (the team manager) with the most important revolutionary of them all, José Martí. Martí was the nineteenth-century poet and journalist who organized the revolutionary movement against the Spanish and is widely considered the father of the Cuban nation.∞∑ Martí was and remains widely referred to as ‘‘Guerrillo,’’ thereby creating a further link between the playing of baseball, guerrilla warfare, and the formation of the Cuban nation. Within Rico’s broadside against Radio coco’s blind partisanship of Industriales without their recognition of the qualities of the younger Metropolitanos, Rico not only draws on symbolism that links Metropolitanos with the qualities of cubanidad but also with those of Cuban masculinity, particularly in the third stanza. That stanza is packed with local history, notions of masculinity, and sexuality. In this passage, Rico predicts Industriales’ loss in the first round of the playo√s, a loss that will metaphorically emasculate them. The linguistic play equating men’s genitalia with baseball equipment is a relatively common metaphor. For example, a song by Los Médicos de Salsa, a very popular Cuban group, was sung to me by Ryan, Robi, and the others in the pescadería. They explained that ‘‘toque la bola con Lola porque Lola está buena pa’un toque de bola (I played ball with Lola because Lola is good at playing with balls).’’ ‘‘Toque’’ in a baseball context refers to the ability to bunt the ball well, to be able to gently Talking a Good Game ∞∑∑

place the ball where the player wants, or as Ryan put it, ‘‘to caress the ball into place.’’ In his poem, Rico makes use of pica to further suggest multiple understandings regarding Cuban masculinity and sexuality. By referring to ‘‘The Prick’’ and implied penetration, where pica also refers to a goad or lance within the context of a public restroom, he slyly challenges hegemonic associations of masculinity within cubanidad that assume a decidedly heterosexual preference (Lumsden 1996). Rico’s suggestion that he would tame Molina (Industriales’ manager) and that Molina would submit to Rico is not necessarily an implication of homosexual relations. Industriales’ nickname is the Lions and rival fans often chant, ‘‘The Lions are submissive.’’ Yet Rico’s reference—in combination with a repeated truism, chanted by Industriales’ rival, Santiago, when a Santiago pitcher is dominating Industriales’ lineup, ‘‘El que tenga el bate corto, que se pegue bien a home (He who has a short [weak] bat best stay [piss] at home)’’— reflects the associations of masculinity, genitalia, and power. Even if Rico is alluding to male-on-male sexual relations, as long as Rico is the active member and not the passive member of the act, his sexuality would not be questioned and in fact, would be demonstrative of a powerful masculine identity (Lancaster 1992: 237–40). Indeed, that the active member is a man’s man suggests there is a hegemonic construction of Cuban masculinity embodied within baseball, which then leads one to conclude that a specific kind of masculinity is part of the discourse of cubanidad informed by the practice of baseball.

Turning Two: Double Entendres and Other Narrative Plays in Cubanidad Rico’s performance is but one of the latest in a long line of Cuban poetic discourse that reaches back to the game’s earliest days on the island. These poetic narratives reflect upon the state of baseball in Cuba and also use baseball to comment upon burning social issues of their time. Similarly, the ongoing, nearly continuous ‘‘sports chatter’’ embedded in the arguments fans create forms a central part of the everyday narrative discourse that informs cubanidad. Their arguments revolve around recent events on the diamonds, decisions made by umpires, strategies pursued by managers, and actions of athletes. Within this constant narrative discourse, information is not limited solely to the previous night’s plays and ∞∑∏ chapter six

scores. Scurrilous gossip and important tidbits of news all get repeated and passed on throughout the play on the hot corners across the island. Contrary to Eco’s assertion that these discourses obscure the discourse of politics, these narratives inform and provide part of the vital, emotionladen cultural intimacy that is required for the establishment of legitimate rule. The elaboration and circulation of such discourse are the work of all aficionados. They are not the only producers of this elaborate and contested discourse, however, although they have been the focus of this chapter. Their emotive and emotional narratives form a central aspect of the politics of passion that pervade the language of contention that is cubanidad: a discourse that is constantly contested, debated, and struggled over in both content and meaning. Verbal dexterity and oral athleticism remain vital aspects of baseball and cubanidad. Aficionados are not the only speakers in this contest, either. Such skill is also embodied by Cuba’s leader himself. Castro’s ability to speak extemporaneously for extraordinary lengths of time has become almost legendary. Alfredo stopped me one morning, asking if I had watched Castro’s speech to the National Assembly the night before on the television. I told him I watched for about forty-five minutes before turning it o√. Alfredo snorted in derision to my query about whether he watched it. Why would I do that? Besides, his speech will be in the newspapers today. Did you hear? He set a world record last night. He spoke for seven hours and thirty-nine minutes without a break. It was hilarious. Three in the morning and [Cuban congressional] representatives were sprawled across their desks, snoring. No one was even awake to hear him, but he kept on talking.

Castro is not the only, much less primary, contributor to the narratives surrounding Cuban baseball. Aside from fans, Cuban o≈cials, through sports journalists’ narratives in the form of broadcasts and print media, provide additional voices. They, along with sports journalists, elaborate narratives about the cultural roles that form the nucleus of national identity embodied in ‘‘the national style’’ of playing baseball. This language of contention is evident in the oratory arts exhibited in the arguments not only in the stadium but on the various hot corners throughout Cuba. Yet, it is one thing to talk about baseball, but it is quite another to play the game. All the various discourses produced in reference to Cuban baseball cannot actually occur without reference to what happens on the Talking a Good Game ∞∑π

diamond. Embodied action by athletes under the gaze of aficionados is required for Cubans to talk a good game. With this in mind, the next chapter turns from the action in the stands to the action on the playing field, and examines how athletes’ actions during the course of a game are understood to embody specific qualities of cubanidad. These qualities are powerful precisely because they emanate from spectators’ (and sometimes players’) own intimate embrace of the game.

∞∑∫ chapter six

CHAPTER

π

The Qualities of Cubanidad: Calidad and Lucha in Baseball It is a gloriously sunny late morning on an anonymous diamond in eastern Havana. It is the regional championship series between Ciudadanos and Provincia in the Liga Juvenil, the under-eighteen youth league. The winner of the best of three series will get to play in the national championship. The diamond is tucked away in a small hollow; banana trees with the sea in the distance form the view past the outfield. A cement factory, its stacks reaching into the sky, is across the road where parents’ cars are parked. A gray Mercedes and a blue Toyota stand out among other vehicles parked along the road. A wooden, J-shaped grandstand curves from behind home plate up the first base line. A steep, grassy knoll provides a natural stand along the third base line and completes the enclosure of the diamond in the center of the small depression. The small crowded grandstand overflows, and people sit on the embankment behind the third base dugout. In all, several hundred spectators are in attendance for this doble juego. Two men, one supporting each team, keep a running dialogue with those sitting around them. Alternately encouraging players and deriding umpires’ decisions, they engage each other in vociferous debate as they pace back and forth along the front walkway of the grandstand. In the fourth inning, the left fielder for Ciudadanos drives the ball into the gap in right center, and running hard, rounds second base and tries for a triple. The relay throw from the outfielder to Provincia’s third baseman arrives as the runner for Ciudadanos slides in high and hard. His Nike spikes catch the third baseman on the inside of his left thigh, shredding his pants and opening a deep, six-inch gash on the inside of his quadriceps.∞ The third baseman collapses in pain yet still hangs on to the ball, tagging the runner out. The ballpark explodes in pandemonium. Provincia’s coaches erupt from their dugout, demanding that the o√ending player be thrown out of the game. Simultaneously, Ciudadanos’ coaches leap out to insist the spiking was accidental. Provincia players also explode from their bench in an

attempt to get to the player who so ‘‘cowardly’’ hurt their teammate. Ciudadanos players race out to defend their teammate. Parents stream onto the field as well. Several fans help the injured player o√ the field, while the injured player’s father also goes looking for the Ciudadanos player who just hurt his son in a questionable play. The o√ending player and his teammates and the injured player’s teammates and his father, as well as other fans in the vicinity, all shout insults back and forth questioning the others’ calidad. The injured player’s father angrily shouts to whoever will listen that the play was a cowardly act and that ‘‘that little faggot should be thrown out of the game. Kicked out . . . O√ the team! O√ ! Banned from ever playing again!’’ Hearing the father ranting at the top of his lungs, the right fielder for Ciudadanos (not the o√ending player) races over from where the athletes have converged to confront the angry father, who is being held back by other parents at the grandstand’s entrance. The right fielder defends his teammate’s actions, while other fans restrain the father. The right fielder shouts, ‘‘Baseball is a violent game and people get hurt sometimes, and if your son can’t handle that then he shouldn’t be playing.’’ The right fielder then accuses the father of not knowing what real manliness is and says he should not talk about things he does not know. The father shouts back that the right fielder is a child and still has not learned to be a man yet. The right fielder lunges at the man shouting, ‘‘Let’s go! I’ll fight you right here. Right now! Right here!’’ Other adults and a few teammates rush over to restrain the right fielder as fans continue to hold back the father, dragging him back to the entrance of the grandstand. Tempers begin to cool, and the father is ushered back up into the grandstand. He continues to shout insults at the coaches and players of Ciudadanos. The coaches and umpires are holding a meeting when Ciudadanos’ right fielder bursts out of his coach’s grasp, rushes up to the screen, and tells ‘‘the coward’’ to come out and back up his words with actions, ‘‘Come down and prove it! I’ll pound you!’’ They continue to scream at one another until a couple of teammates and one of the coaches manage to drag the furious young athlete back to his dugout while friends of the father restrain him once again. The stands buzz in anticipation as the game resumes. The o√ending player has been removed from the game by his own coaches ‘‘for his safety’’ as one coach later explained. When spectators realize that the left fielder had been replaced, Provinica’s supporters transfer their ire to the ∞∏≠ chapter seven

confrontational, emotional, and vociferous right fielder. The next time the right fielder came to bat, the pitcher would ‘‘bean’’ him, deliberately hit the batter with the ball: the fans know it, the players and coaches know it, and even the umpires know it. The commentary of discutir pelota ricocheted across the grandstand. One prominent debate revolved around how the right fielder would fare. Of what kind of calidad was the right fielder? ‘‘How would he face the pitcher?’’ ‘‘How would he respond, knowing he would be thrown at?’’ ‘‘Would the pitcher, in a tight game with a championship on the line, uphold the norms of the game and ideals of calidad?’’ ‘‘Would he throw at him, or would he act ‘without honor’ and not defend his injured teammate?’’ All of these were debatable questions that pointed to the central question: Did the right fielder truly lack calidad as his out-of-control emotional outburst suggested? These debates rage nonstop into the sixth inning. Ciudadanos are losing by two and have lost the first game. They need to come back to force a third and deciding game. The constant arguing abruptly and completely dies as the Ciudadanos right fielder comes to bat with runners on first and second base with two outs. What has been a raucous crowd suddenly grows oppressively silent. The pitcher comes set and throws the first pitch at the right fielder’s head. He leaps back out of the way. Fans yell at the batter, jeer and insult him, and question his courage and calidad. Others berate the pitcher for failing to enforce a baseball norm. Everyone knew that first pitch was coming. What no one knows is how the drama will play itself out. Will the pitcher throw at the batter again? Fans shout advice to the pitcher and to the batter. The pitcher receives the sign from the catcher, comes set, and checks the leads of both runners. He throws another fastball right at the batter, who leaps back again, dropping his bat as he gets out of the way. Provincia’s supporters increase the intensity of their mockery, spit invectives at the batter, and make vulgar references about his parents. Others also shout at the pitcher, ‘‘What’s the matter? Drill him already.’’ With the count now two balls and no strikes, the pitcher has put himself into a di≈cult position. He cannot a√ord to walk the right fielder because that would load the bases, putting the winning run on base and violating a strategic norm of baseball. The pitcher takes the sign, comes set, and looks the runners back. Then, he delivers the pitch. It looks like another fastball coming right at the batter. The batter sprawls in the dirt Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞∏∞

as the ball slices away from the batter and over the plate for a strike. Provincia’s fans continue jeering at the batter for bailing out of the batter’s box too early. ‘‘What are you afraid of ? Being hit by the ball? Hurts less than spikes!’’ The batter glares out at the pitcher, who just stares balefully back at him. The count is now two balls and one strike. Spectators standing next to me continue to argue with one another over what should be done now. ‘‘He should throw another one at him.’’ ‘‘He can’t. That would make the count three [balls] and one [strike].’’ ‘‘He should pitch him inside.’’ ‘‘What?! Are you crazy? He’s thrown everything inside, now he should go outside.’’ The crowd is roaring; the batter steps out of the batter’s box and calls for time out. The tension is great as he waits for the fans to quiet a little. The batter steps back in and awaits the pitch. The pitcher gets the sign, comes set, and throws to the plate. The batter swings and fouls the pitch o√ over the grandstand. Now the count is two balls and two strikes. Spectators continue debating pitching strategy. Supporters for each team continue shouting encouragement to ‘‘their team’’ and hurling abuse at opposing players. The pitcher rubs the new ball down, scu≈ng it a little so he can grip it better. The batter swings a few times in preparation. The fans quiet down again as the pitcher comes set. He checks the runners and delivers. The batter crushes the fastball, sending it over the right-center field fence for a three-run home run. The crowd goes absolutely berserk. People jump up and down screaming ‘‘¡Qué tremenda!’’ and ‘‘¡Increíble!’’ The above vignette illustrates how an athlete’s actions are understood to simultaneously embody his individual personal qualities and reveal the crowd’s expectant demonstrations of the qualities of cubanidad. Occurring during a playo√ game in the Liga Juvenil, far removed from the Serie Nacional, this series of events describes the actions of several players that led to near-violent confrontations between players and spectators. Two aspects of cubanidad that are considered here come to the fore: calidad (quality), and lucha (struggle). Calidad refers to a baseball player’s physical skills, moral bearing, and ability to impose his will on events, shaping their outcome. A baseball player can be an athlete of calidad, but that is not automatically equivalent to a Cuban of calidad. Thus, calidad is multifaceted and constitutes much more than merely an athlete’s physical ∞∏≤ chapter seven

skills. Calidad is the quality of the person. It is indicative in how an athlete plays the game, whether he or she shows ‘‘respect’’ for opponents by exuding a quiet confidence and eschewing showboating, grandstanding, or other self-aggrandizing behavior, and appearing to play the game with a joie de vivre. It makes itself apparent in tense, emotionally fraught moments when self-control is essential for an individual to achieve the desired outcome. In short, calidad refers to the quality of person an athlete is judged to be based not just on whether one is victorious, but also on the manner in which one performs, victorious or not. As will be seen, one can be an excellent athlete but not one of calidad. Another highly valued characteristic of cubanidad embodied in baseball is lucha. Although a long-held attribute, its meaning has changed over time to match the sociopolitical contexts of Cuban society. A second ethnographic example (under the section ‘‘La Lucha’’) illustrates the contradictions involved in fans’ perceptions of how lucha is embodied. This example describes the contest on the part of Industriales supporters over how a player will be perceived. Some initially suggest that the athlete in question should be seen as ine√ectual, but others respond by insisting that this athlete should be celebrated for his determination to succeed despite the odds stacked against him. Both of these qualities form an integral part of the symbolic discourse of cubanidad. While each specific embodied aspect is displayed on the diamond, each also informs the language of contention that is cubanidad. However, before discussing lucha, an analysis of calidad is required, since one’s willingness and ability for lucha informs a person’s calidad.

The Heat of Calidad In subsequent conversations with spectators at that game and when events were later recounted to my journalist friends not at the game, a variety of opinions were expressed about several of the individuals involved in terms of their perceived calidad. Several points were agreed upon. Everyone expressed disgust by the o√ending player’s spikes-high slide. All universally assured me that was not the way to play baseball and it was completely unacceptable for a player to commit, as one fan described it, such a ‘‘debased and cowardly act.’’ Many of the spectators praised the injured player’s calidad for managing to tag the runner out despite such a blatant and painful assault, although none of the journalists did so. This apparent Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞∏≥

discrepancy is, I suspect, due to journalists not actually witnessing the force or intent of the actual violence involved in the collision. In contrast, the journalists universally condemned the umpires for losing control of the game (perder disciplina) after the initial violence, yet the spectators did not. One journalist commented that the umpires should have thrown the parents who came onto the field of play out of the ballpark. A couple of sportswriters also thought that the umpires and league o≈cials should have removed the irate father from the grounds to prevent further incitement.≤ It was their failure to eject spectators who had breached the separation between stand and diamond—a failure to uphold the expected moral norms of the sport—though, that led most journalists to cite the umpires’ lack of calidad. Finally, every spectator and journalist unequivocally commended Provincia’s pitcher for attempting to hit Ciudadanos’ right fielder. His willingness to try to uphold the game’s moral norms demonstrated the pitcher’s calidad, although several also expressed disappointment that he failed to actually succeed in this act of morally sanctioned retributive violence. The injured player’s father provoked the most commentary. While his actions elicited much sympathy—‘‘What father would not want to protect his child?’’—his willingness to violently confront an overly emotional youth who had nothing to do with his son’s injury was a repeated and pointed criticism. As one spectator said after the game, ‘‘Of course he was upset, but he should have maintained control. He had no business going onto the field [He actually did not do so, but he certainly tried]. He should not have been challenging [the right fielder]. Of course, his drinking did not help.’’ The father’s inability to restrain his desire to violently lash out at a ‘‘child’’ was the real indicator of his apparent lesser degree of calidad. Irrespective of his emotional state, he should have been able to maintain some control, since the right fielder who further provoked him was the equivalent to his son in relation to his own social position. It would be as if he were trying to assault a child. It was this relationship in the confrontation and the father’s inability to recognize such a structural relation that provoked peers’ criticism. Ciudadanos’ right fielder evoked the most widely ranging interpretations. Opinions varied wildly as to the player’s calidad. Some argued that the young man in question clearly had the physical tools and the ‘‘balls’’ to meet the challenges and fears inherent in the game.≥ His manner of display and his emotional outbursts during the spiking incident showed ∞∏∂ chapter seven

that he was not yet a person of calidad, although his home run suggested that he was going to be a player of some calidad. He demonstrated his potential calidad as a Cuban by directly facing a threat of bodily harm: standing in against the pitcher when he fully expected to be thrown at. He then proved his calidad as an athlete by providing a timely, powerful response that could not be mistaken or countered. That response, delivered under control and within the rules, revealed a calidad that was all the more powerful because of the timely context of the home run. That home run proved beyond anyone’s doubt that he was an athlete to be reckoned with, one of calidad. In short, the question of the right fielder’s calidad as an athlete was unequivocally and publicly answered. His calidad as a Cuban person, however, was still much more problematic. Ciudadanos’ right fielder would have lessened his tentative claims of calidad, both as an athlete and as a Cuban, if, after having been thrown at, he had reacted with an emotional outburst by charging the mound to initiate a brawl. However, his overwrought emotional outbursts during the heated exchanges that interrupted play demonstrated that he still lacked some aspects of personhood outside the norms of athletic competition. Although he demonstrated in an unanswerable, unimpeachable manner that he was an athlete of some calidad—one who could control his fears while excelling—he did not yet embody the necessary qualities that would make him a person of calidad. Athletes therefore are social persons who are ‘‘made’’ in the sense that they are transformed from one state of social being into another in much the same manner that Michel Foucault (1979: 135–69) describes in the making of an eighteenth-century soldier who is transformed from one state of social being (peasant) into another (soldier). Through intense regimentation, those behaviors that make the soldier an identifiable entity become habitual. Vital to Foucault’s argument is that as the soldier excels in assuming soldierly qualities, the soldier inevitably becomes more obedient to controlling forces and thus ‘‘docile.’’ This docility renders the body passive as a social entity, inhibiting initiative and movement, and thereby rendering it socially inflexible. An athlete would appear, at first glance, to be one of the most physically powerful individuals in society. But an athlete’s body is very rarely one’s own to use physically as one wills. Romanticized, glamorized, and mythologized, ideological representations of athletes encourage young people, especially young men, to willingly experience ‘‘a policy of coercions Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞∏∑

that act upon the body’’ (Foucault 1979: 138). The application of those coercive policies creates seemingly contradictory bodies: ones that are individually active, flexible, and physically powerful, yet socially passive, rigid, and impotent. One of the key valued attributes of bodies, particularly athletic bodies, in the early part of the twenty-first century is ‘‘flexibility’’ (Martin 1994), which makes the paradox particularly striking: athletes are some of the most physically flexible individuals on the planet, yet ironically, their very specialization renders their bodies socially rigid. In a similar fashion to the production of soldiers, athletes’ training regimes create kinds of bodily knowledges that are specific, habitual, and that can only be produced or reproduced in athletes’ bodies. Athletes’ bodies are formed through careful crafting, which can take years to evolve. That formulation increasingly requires disciplinary techniques legitimated through the instrumental rationality that serves as the basis of scientific knowledge. The social production of athletes, however, cannot be broken down into more flexible regimes similar to economic production, whether capitalist or socialist, because the structure of knowledge required di√ers from the instrumental rationality of modernity. Athletes require an alternative form of knowledge that cannot be measured or articulated yet remains evident in athletic regimes. Commonly referred to as ‘‘know-how,’’ ‘‘knack,’’ ‘‘instinct,’’ or ‘‘experience,’’ these specific forms of bodily knowledge are more aptly understood as the Greek term m¯etis (Scott 1998: 311–19). M¯etis is most applicable to broadly similar but never precisely identical situations requiring quick and practiced adaptations that become almost second nature to the practitioner. Useful for comparing forms of knowledge embedded within individual experience with more general knowledge employed via instrumental rationality, m¯etis resists simplification into deductive principles that can successfully be transmitted through formal learning. The environments in which it is exercised are complex and non-repeatable, thereby making the application of formal procedures of rational decision making impossible. Innovations of m¯etis typically represent a recombination of existing elements, similar but not identical to Claude Levi-Strauss’s bricolage (1967). Practitioners employing m¯etis—often expressed as an athlete’s ‘‘flair’’ or ‘‘creativity’’—do not pause long enough to ask why and how what they did worked, that is, to define the precise mechanism of cause and e√ect. Rather, their intent is to solve an immediate concrete problem, not contribute to a wider body of knowledge. Therefore, the litmus test ∞∏∏ chapter seven

for m¯etis is practical success. Whether a particular move or stratagem is successful at meeting an immediate goal is the ‘‘creative’’ aspect of an athlete’s m¯etis, and successful application of m¯etis is indicative of calidad. Much of this knowledge is personally accumulated and practical, two forms of knowledge that have only recently begun to be recognized in institutions and ‘‘scientific discourse.’’ The construction of such sportrelated ‘‘scientific discourse,’’ however, is structured around breaking the body into constituent parts and, in so doing, commoditizing the athlete’s body. Instrumental rationality within scientific discourse about sport gradually began in the late nineteenth century, when it was increasingly believed that a physically empowered body was a social key to wealth and productivity. An overdeveloped body, however, also posed a grave threat as being potentially dangerous and uncontrollable (Budd 1997). Heavily muscled torsos were thought to constrict one’s ability to breathe properly, and heavily muscled individuals were perceived as unnatural rather than admirable (Hoberman 2001: 47–49). Obviously, such social understandings of muscular bodies have changed over the last century as the position of sport has changed in society. Social understandings of the body, such as how the body is represented, comprise calculated manipulations of its elements, gestures, and behaviors that satisfy a society’s use for such bodies. Athletes’ bodies become social standards regarding what a body can legitimately be used for in a given society. As athletes, the public display of their own bodies in performances circumscribed by disciplinary control legitimates specific concepts of the human body. The manner in which athletes are portrayed and the context in which they perform are structured in very di√erent terms.∂ Historically, modern sport began as a masculine practice that excluded women because of ideological constructions which insisted that women’s bodies were too frail and fragile to partake in physical exertion—a belief that kept its currency until the 1970s. Although that belief is no longer salient, contrasts between masculine and feminine athletic bodies remain powerfully evocative, thereby reinforcing socially accepted perceptions of gendered bodies (Higgs, Weiller, and Martin 2003; Messner, Duncan, and Hunt 2000; Messner, Duncan, and Cooky 2003). According to Cuban state discourse, gender bias and discrimination have been removed from sport; nonetheless, it is safe to say that Cuban sport is one of the central sites for the production of masculine identities. Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞∏π

Sport legitimates what Varda Burstyn labels ‘‘hypermasculinity’’ (1999), the social expectation that masculine behavior will be overly and overtly aggressive in certain social contexts, such as athletic competition and heterosexual encounters. Such metaphoric invocations conjure a presumed overt heterosexuality in which the athletic male body penetrates an opposition’s defense. These sexual metaphors, often combined with militaristic metaphors, portray the male body as a weapon, inculcating socially acceptable violent uses of masculine bodies (Trujillo 1995; Messner and Sabo 1990, 1994). Yet the literature on Latin American masculinity makes it abundantly clear that the masculine ideal is not machismo or the hypermasculine behavior Burstyn argues is rampant in sport. Rather, the idealized male is a disciplined, ‘‘tender macho’’ (Klein 1995b) who controls his bodily and emotional reactions allowing him to be vulnerable in certain contexts but impervious in others (Gutmann 1996; Klein 1997). Within this growing literature on Latin American masculinity (Gutmann 2003; Lancaster 1992; Lumsden 1996; Mirandé 1997), it is striking that sport remains a virtually absent topic despite its historical relationships with states’ attempts to shape and control its citizenry. From the very beginnings of the Cuban Revolution, Castro and other Revolutionary leaders asserted the importance of sport in the formation of new social bodies, and a central thrust of this transformation of Cuban persons was the reordering of sport in Cuba. Sport became a right of the people, and numerous programs were initiated to encourage physical activity among those who had been disenfranchised under the old regime. Before Castro’s ascension to power, Cuban sport had been limited to baseball and boxing, and the development of sport was tied to professional sports and racially segregated, elite social/beach clubs. The Revolutionary government reorganized sport to demolish class and racial barriers, making sport ‘‘an expression of the social situation in our country and would certainly give our people pride in the sporting triumphs earned in these international competitions’’ (Ruiz Aguilera, 1991: 126). It was also appropriated to shape what would become the new Cuban Revolutionary Man.∑ At the advent of the Cuban Revolution, the Revolutionary state incorporated mandatory physical education into the Cuban education system in a systematic manner for the first time in Cuba’s history. Baseball was also used as an educational tool for boys who were having trouble ‘‘accepting their masculine role,’’ who were perceived as ‘‘e√eminate,’’ anxious, or ∞∏∫ chapter seven

withdrawn, or who were hyperactive and overly aggressive. These boys were sent to ‘‘the Yellow Brigade,’’ a kind of summer camp cum boarding school where the boys not demonstrating calidad were taught to enjoy ‘‘masculine’’ activities (Leiner 1994: 33–35). ‘‘They are taught to use baseball gloves and balls, pistols and swords, to practice self-defense and to eliminate the fear of being hurt: to enjoy constructive activities’’ (VegaVega 1967: 122). Four decades later, baseball remains an integral part of Cuban physical education. In an interview I conducted, a member of the Comisión Nacional de Béisbol (National Baseball Commission) explained what children learned from baseball, ‘‘The first thing, the first ethical thing children learn from playing baseball is to be loyal, to love their country. [They also] learn to do voluntary work. To practice voluntarily, to work hard.’’ An integral aspect of this educational process is learning a specific kind of masculinity, a heterosexual, aggressive-yet-undercontrol, hardworking man who is equally adept at physically laboring for hours and quickly making ethically di≈cult decisions. As an educational tool, then, baseball teaches the next generation specific values embedded in the state’s moral project of creating new forms of social persons. Baseball continues to play an important role in this attempted reshaping of Cuban persons both in terms of inculcating new forms of body habitus (Bourdieu 1984) and providing athletes who serve as Revolutionary role models. Since revolutions are the usurpation of the supposed ‘‘natural’’ order, an inherent component in the reordering of society is the necessity of making a new kind of person. A key component of the reshaping of Cuban persons was the reconstitution of various aspects of everyday life (Bunck 1994; Medin 1990). Expressed in almost puritanical values in terms of the need to work diligently and make sacrifices, the reshaping of Cuban bodies was first and foremost an ideological mission. The idea of a revolutionary act became the core of Revolutionary consciousness that each individual was to develop with the assistance and guidance of the state. Flying in the face of the usual portrayal of socialist revolutions in which individualism is sacrificed for the greater good of society, Che Guevara denied that the building of socialism meant the abolition of the individual, but instead that the individual was the essence of the Revolution (1992 [1965]). The Cuban Revolution in the form of the state was not ‘‘a standardizer of the collective will’’ as socialist societies are often portrayed; rather it was ‘‘a liberator of man’s individual capacity’’ (Anderson 1997: 478–79). Instead, the state was to be the driving Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞∏Ω

force in the formation of the New Man. In Socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1992 [1965]), Guevara asserted the primacy of moral incentives over material incentives in the formation of the body, in e√ect proclaiming that the socialist body was an ideological construct made manifest in how an individual comported himself in relation to the rest of the world. This New Man would ‘‘combine an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decisions without flinching one muscle. Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize their love for the people, for the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible’’ (Anderson 1997: 636–37). While Cuban authorities expanded the base of Cuban sport’s infrastructure in order to better inculcate the Revolution’s new values within cubanidad, sports o≈cials concurrently focused their energies on developing world-class athletes (Pettavino and Pye, 1994: 67–196). The state’s reorganization and subsequent production of world-class athletes who could win Olympic medals provided a symbolic embodiment of Revolutionary Cuba. Success in international sports competitions would simultaneously demonstrate the vital presence of the Cuban state and Cuban socialist New Man. Olympic champions and other medalists were and remain crucial in the state’s rhetoric of cubanidad. More than any other group, triumphant athletes embody the calidad of the Cuban New Man precisely because athletes do not win gold medals—the Cuban people do. Athletes are merely the embodiment of the principled Cuban nation. As embodiments of the New Man, Cuban athletes demonstrate their socialist cubanidad not only through their physical prowess but via their ideological and mental development. Castro expounded, Sport is not only technical nor is it physical conditioning; it requires moral conditions, conditions of character, spiritual conditions, because between two athletes that have more or less the same physical aptitude, the winner will be the one with more spirit, more character, more willingness [voluntad] for preparation, since training and its capacity [are crucial] to make a supreme e√ort at the moment of competition (quoted in Ruiz Aguilera 1991: 139).

Internationally renowned athletes such as Alberto Juantorena, Teófilo Stevenson, and Omar Linares all emphasized this point when returning from international competitions in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s respectively, by ‘‘giving’’ their gold medals to Castro in welcoming ceremonies at José Martí International Airport and declaring that it was the people’s victory nor theirs. Cuban athletes succeed where capitalist (i.e., U.S.) ∞π≠ chapter seven

athletes fail because of the specifically Cuban values inculcated within their own competitive bodies. In explaining the quality of Cuban baseball players, Castro expounded on the endearing qualities of the Cuban stars that supposedly could not be found among others: These are well known cases, and they [pundits] can frequently mention many more times, how our athletes reflect the spirit of competition and defense of the national flag. This spirit cannot be found in the mercenaries of sport. The sports mercenary fears much, he does not throw himself headlong into home to score a run; does not catch a liner like Chango—as one compatriot said— does not hit a triple in the precise moment like Urquiola, nor a home run of 400 feet like Capiro, [and] in that moment he fails. The spirit of our athletes is admirable: How the honor exceeds any material benefit! How honor exceeds money! This is demonstrated by our athletes in competition because they give maximum e√ort, they give everything, they give before the competitions, in training, and they give in competitions. It is for this that our athletes enjoy such high prestige among the people, enjoy so much sympathy and admiration in the breast of our people; for these qualities, for this spirit, for this purity, for this human condition; for this sense of honor and for this patriotic and revolutionary spirit; because in a country like ours the condition of the sports person is not at odds, nor is [it] much less than the revolutionary condition (quoted in Ruiz Aguilera, 1991: 126).

The central spirit to which Castro continually refers is an invocation of the calidad of a ‘‘good’’ Cuban, a calidad emblematic of cubanidad. That spirit is what motivates and allows Cuban athletes to succeed in the face of what would appear to be long odds. Whether those odds are of a small nation of 11 million competing and defeating a country of 250-plus million in international sports competitions; of winning a struggle against foreign invaders, imperialism, and, more recently, neoliberal political movements; or of winning a struggle to find the basic necessities for survival, the willingness and ability of Cubans to engage in la lucha is another quality of persons of calidad.

La Lucha Loosely translated, lucha means ‘‘struggle,’’ but the contexts of lucha are much more than to strive in a di≈cult situation. To simply struggle for a goal is not worthy of la lucha. To be legitimately deemed la lucha, an Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞π∞

endeavor must involve a process in which a resolution to a particular candela (situation with no clear-cut answer) is extremely problematic, if not improbable. Indeed, many candelas may not have solutions, but to engage in la lucha is to attempt to find one even when there may not be one. It is not su≈cient to merely contest against forces more powerful than oneself; to be engaged in lucha, one must be struggling against the odds. The essential factor is whether one is willing to sacrifice and continue to fight against the odds when success is all but denied, and whether new and unexpected obstacles cause one to give up or remain defiant. Lucha has been a central symbol of cubanidad, changing in emphasis from nationalist politics of nineteenth-century colonial struggles to present-day domestic concerns of everyday life. During the conflicts with the Spanish, lucha emphasized the attempts to minimally achieve equality with the Spanish but more commonly importuned the ambitions of nationalists clamoring for independence. After securing nominal independence, the focus of its force turned inward and outward simultaneously. Lucha remained anti-imperialist, replacing anti-Spanish with anti-American rhetoric in some quarters, while it mostly addressed the endemic corruption rampant throughout successive Cuban governments. Lucha in this context was used by various Cuban factions, all vying for control of the nominal state while concurrently trying to embrace or displace the pervasive neocolonial American presence. The m26 movement led by Castro clearly fell into the latter category. First signifying a nationalist struggle, lucha quickly became synonymous with the Revolution itself as it attempted to build a better society. Lucha remains a key element of the state’s discourse of Revolution building, but the symbol took on new significance with the onset of the Periodo Especial (Special Period) resulting from the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Basic foodstu√s became increasingly di≈cult to obtain; basic individual nutrition and health were threatened to the point that lucha became a struggle for personal survival. For contemporary Cubans, la lucha remains part of everyday life and individuals’ very being, although the extreme threats have been mostly alleviated. The majority of my friends all expressed the sentiment that everyday life in Havana is nothing but one continuous lucha. Lucha for them is no longer so much about international politics than resolving the di≈cult challenges of providing basic necessities for themselves and their families. It is this personal quality of struggling in the face of seemingly insur∞π≤ chapter seven

mountable obstacles, overwhelming circumstances that have little apparent chance of success, that Cubans revere in their baseball. Hitting a baseball has been called the single most di≈cult task in all of sport (Angell 1994: xxiii). Statistically, the success rate of a baseball batter is much less than almost any other athletic endeavor in a team sport. The very best, the ‘‘super stars,’’ only succeed approximately one-third of the time. The rest of the time the best fail. Yet, it is those particular players who do not have consummate batting skills yet continue to strive against the likelihood of their actually putting the bat on the ball in a successful manner who many Cubans cheer for. While prolific hitters are admired for their prowess, the weak hitters, the defensive specialists who are not expected to do well with a bat, are also admired for their work with the bat as long as they display tenacity and doggedness in facing what should be the overwhelming force and skill of an opposing pitcher. Those players who refuse to go quietly, to be an ‘‘easy out,’’ are applauded and appreciated for their embodiment of lucha, whether that player is successful or not. It is these specific understandings of lucha that demonstrate the interconnected, inseparability of cubanidad, spectacle, and emotion in baseball. This was made especially clear one night at an Industriales’ game. Industriales was threatening to score in the bottom of the second inning with two outs. Miguel Domínguez, a very slick-fielding but weak-hitting third baseman for Industriales, was at bat. Members of La Conga de Lucumí started chanting and drumming during Domínguez’s at bat, ‘‘¡Es ‘Willie!’ ¡Es ‘Willie!’ ¡Es ‘Willie!’ ‘‘ (He’s Willie!)’’ Domínguez worked the count to a ball and two strikes. After fouling a couple of pitches o√, he stroked a solid line drive up the middle for a single, driving in Industriales’ first two runs of the game, much to the surprise of pessimists and the delight of Industriales fans. At the end of the inning, Cotorro confronted the chanting fans, blowing his whistle to get their attention. Once he had their attention, he began to berate them, ‘‘¡Oye, compañeros! ¿Porque se llamó ‘Willie?’ ¡Batea bien! ¡No es ‘Willie!’ ‘‘ (Hey, Companions! Why are you calling him ‘‘Willie?’’ He hits well. He’s not ‘‘Willie!’’). The next time Domínguez came up to bat, he again had the opportunity to drive in some base runners. Cotorro started a chant that was soon taken up by several sections, including many members of La Conga. In response to the earlier sarcastic chant, several thousand fans started chanting ‘‘¡Geovany! ¡Geovany!’’ (Sounds like ‘‘Yevani’’). Domínguez again hit a solid line drive, but this time it went directly to the shortstop, who Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞π≥

caught it for the second out of the inning. Industriales’ fans applauded Domínguez loudly, despite his making an out, because even though he did not succeed in driving the runners in, he engaged in lucha and very nearly succeeded again. Cotorro and the fans drew their symbolism from a children’s Saturday morning television show, Los Pequeños Campeones (The Little Champions). The show is about several boys who play baseball and encounter all sorts of di≈culties both on and o√ the diamond. Willie is the main protagonist of the program. He is a small boy with a high-pitched voice who practices and practices, giving all his energy to achieve success, but somehow always comes up short. Despite his coach’s encouragement, Willie simply cannot get a hit when it matters most. The coach, however, never gives up on Willie, because the boy is always striving to get a hit. The coach recognizes Willie’s willingness to lucha and consequently, always leaves him in to bat in critical situations. Invariably, poor Willie fails. Willie’s counterpart on the show is Geovany. Geovany is bigger than Willie; indeed, he is the biggest boy on the team. He is a happy-go-lucky sort who seems to have things come naturally and easily to him. He is Willie’s teammate, but is the opposite of Willie when it comes to baseball and the team. Geovany does not practice, does not work hard at his skills, and seeks out the easiest solution possible. He finds ways to avoid doing the drills in practice that Willie works so hard on to improve. Despite Geovany’s recalcitrant attitude, he always hits the ball hard and always succeeds in the physical tasks the coach gives him. Geovany, however, does not have the willingness to sacrifice time and e√ort in his own struggles to succeed, nor to help others also struggling, such as Willie. Furthermore, when the boys hit some adversity, some challenge that cannot be easily met, Geovany gets discouraged and wants to give up. It is Willie who continues struggling and encouraging Geovany to try again so the team can succeed. In short, Geovany lacks the will for la lucha, thereby revealing that he is not yet a person or athlete of calidad. When the boys get in trouble, it is Willie who struggles to find an ethical way, rather than the easiest way, to resolve the dilemma. So although Willie fails time and again as an athlete, his calidad is revealed in his e√orts and willingness to engage in lucha for the greater good of the team. Although he ultimately fails on an individual level, Willie is the ultimate hero, sacrificing his personal, individual success for the success of the team, thereby further demonstrating his calidad. ∞π∂ chapter seven

On the surface there appears to be a distinct contradiction between the symbolism of Los Pequeños Campeones and the fans’ appropriation of the show’s two main characters. In the show, Willie is the admirable one and Geovany is not. Yet La Conga de Lucumí invoked Willie as an apparent criticism of Domínguez, whereas Cotorro used Geovany to challenge such a representation. La Conga used Willie to convey a public perception that Domínguez was not a good hitter. Cotorro explained that he organized the counterchant merely as a response to the other fans’ mocking chant. Yeah, the show depicts Willie as the hero, but . . . they [La Conga de Lucumí ] were disrespectful. I just wanted Domínguez to know that we actually believed in him. He takes a lot of batting practice, and he is better than when he started. Besides, the show is for children. We’re just interested in a player’s skills.

Cotorro’s comment does nothing to clarify the apparent contradiction between the fans’ use of the two characters and the scripted symbols in the children’s television show. Domínguez clearly struggles and fights, and although he is not a particularly skilled hitter, he refuses to meekly accept defeat each time he confronts a pitcher, making it seem that he most closely embodies Willie. Yet, Domínguez does succeed at critical moments when a base hit is most needed. Cotorro’s recognition of Domínguez’s ability to deliver critical blows when Industriales needs them, reminiscent of Geovany’s athletic prowess, is what led him to initiate the competing chant. Both groups’ chants, La Conga’s ‘‘Willie’’ and the El Círculo’s ‘‘Geovany,’’ were concerned solely with Domínguez’s skills. At no point was his calidad, already evidenced and embodied in the manner in which he comported and dedicated himself to improving his skills, questioned. Both groups of fans explained that Domínguez’s dedication and willingness to engage in la lucha were clear, but not the deciding factor in labeling him either Willie or Geovany. Everyone knew that he was dedicated and worked hard. Rather, the distinction made was that members of La Conga felt that Domínguez simply would never become a good hitter, while El Círculo’s members thought they saw an ability to succeed when it mattered most despite what would be long odds. It is this confrontation of batter versus pitcher that is central to the fans’ discourse of lucha. Baseball embodies this aspect of cubanidad because of its lengthy assoCubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞π∑

ciation with national discourses that first emerged in the late nineteenthcentury conflicts with the Spanish. The ideal of lucha was deeply embedded within an anticolonial construction called ideologisa mambisa. The original Mambises were runaway slave communities in the mountains of eastern Cuba. Later, the alliance between these communities with freed slaves and elite ranchers became the armed Mambises, widely recognized as the embodiment of both a nascent Cuban nation and lucha. The leader of the Mambises, Antonio Maceo, particularly embodied these qualities with his ‘‘Protest in Baraguá,’’ in which he refused to accept the cease-fire, known as the Pact of Zanjón, in 1878. Instead, he continued to wage a guerilla war against a Spanish army that outnumbered his forces one thousand to one. The Maceo-led Mambises continued their guerrilla struggle for two more years before leaving Cuba to plan a larger insurrection in the near future. Simultaneously, Spanish attempts to control Cuban sentiments became more overt as they uncovered further proof of the subversive aspects of baseball. As discussed in chapter 2, Cuban separatists explicitly constructed a distinct moral in playing baseball. They referred to baseball as lucha, in which defeat was temporary and victory was a function of preparation and unity. Playing baseball was the equivalent of military training. It was these discourses that later Cuban leaders appropriated and modified to fit revolutionary discourse. Castro appropriated ideologisa mambisa, the idea of guerrilla struggle against seemingly hopeless odds for national liberation. The eighty men who landed on Cuban soil in 1957 faced a forewarned militarized state. Within a few days, as far as Castro knew, the Revolutionary movement was reduced to three men, two pairs of boots and one rifle, yet he was confident of its eventual success (Szulc 1987: 380–87). Decades later, he explicitly acknowledged the role that baseball played in the guerrillas’ training. Do you know how we learned to fight the war? You can’t believe that we learned to fight the war in the Sierra Maestra; we learned to fight the war when we were young men like you all. Do you know how? Do you want me to tell you? Well, we learned to fight the war playing baseball (quoted in Ruiz Aguilera 1991: 95).

Again, Castro was borrowing from nineteenth-century discourses in terms of both lucha and baseball as inherently part of cubanidad. With the unlikely success of the Revolution, the revolutionary nationalist dis∞π∏ chapter seven

courses further used lucha to draw on the ideals that emanated from the writings of José Martí and his struggles to foment an independence movement against the Spanish in the nineteenth century. Martí recognized that any movement for Cuban independence had to be cognizant of the ‘‘monster’’ to the north, which would devour the newborn Cuban nation if it was not prepared to fight o√ the imperialistic goals that existed in the United States in the mid- to late 1800s. Seven decades later, the target of the struggle had not changed, but now Cold War discourse informed the meanings of lucha. Resisting foreign capitalist exploitation, which was the handmaiden of imperial enterprises, became the new focal point of Revolutionary lucha. Furthermore, this struggle was not only occurring in Cuba but was explicitly exported to other potential sites. Lucha was now a global struggle. The famous e√orts of Che Guevara to export revolution, to have, one, two, many Vietnams in Africa and in South America, were based upon the very idea of lucha. To have a handful of men in a rural area of a neocolonial state foment revolution was the idea of lucha taken to its extreme. Cuban intervention in the late 1970s and the 1980s in Angola also embodied the notion of lucha being taken out of Cuba to elsewhere (LeoGrande 1989: 377–84). At least, it was until the late 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union changed everything: lucha became not so much a Cold War struggle but an everyday struggle for survival on an individual level. The Cuban economy dissolved, and basic necessities became more and more di≈cult to find. What had been a struggle against imperialism and capitalist exploitation became for the Cuban state and the majority of its population a desperate struggle for survival. The struggle for everyday necessities became the Cuban lucha in the 1990s rather than the spread of Revolutionary fervor overseas. Suddenly, where it had been part of the Revolution to cajole and encourage women to take up economically viable jobs outside the home, it was now ‘‘revolutionary’’ for women to return to their homes and leave work so that the increasing numbers of men without work could have their positions. The hunt for everyday necessities became a full-time occupation in and of itself requiring innovative resourcefulness. Such resourcefulness became apparent one afternoon when I stopped by a neighborhood bakery, where the couple of friends who ran it were responsible for providing the daily allotment of bread for the surrounding blocks of Central Havana. The panadería, located just a few blocks Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞ππ

from the main avenues in Central Havana, was one of many small enterprises that had a baseball team in the workers’ league. Carlos, the manager of both bakery and baseball team, and Gordito, the team’s shortstop and bakery accountant, were key members of both organizations. When I pulled up a chair one morning in the driveway of the bright blue and white building, the usually e√usive men were somberly seated in the shade. Carlos’s usually glowing countenance was scowling as I sat down. ‘‘What’s up?’’ I asked. When I first met them, Carlos proudly showed me through his new bakery. Carlos was in his early thirties, his father was a baker, and this was the first bakery of his own. He was determined to do well. The colorful bakery had the newest state-of-the-art dough mixer imported from Spain, along with massive stainless steel ovens. These contrasted with his father’s bakery in Cerro, which still used 1950s equipment that had been imported from the United States prior to Castro’s Revolution, as the imprint on the machines was still legible. Whereas his father’s bakery was oppressively hot and dark with multitudes of flies buzzing around in the high ceilings, Carlos’s facility was a cool, modern, production plant that, although smaller, was more prolific than his father’s massive, antiquated facility. Carlos and Gordito, producing several thousand buns daily, were responsible for ensuring that the surrounding compañeros of Central Havana received their daily ration of bread. Neighborhood residents came by every day or two to purchase their buns. If left any longer than that in the tropical heat without refrigeration, it would go bad, and even then there was no guarantee. Passersby would stop and talk with Carlos, Gordito, or the other men and women who worked at the bakery. The bakery was a focal point of the neighborhood’s social life. Carlos took me inside, and I immediately noticed that the usual drone of the brand-new mixer was silent. Walking into the cement block central room, I asked, ‘‘What gives?’’ Carlos snapped, ‘‘This Spanish piece of shit. The engine burned out.’’ ‘‘Burned out? How?’’ ‘‘The lights. When the lights go out it creates a surge in the circuits, burned them out.’’ Sucking in my breath, I asked, ‘‘Don’t they tell you when the power will be cut?’’

∞π∫ chapter seven

‘‘Those bastards. They’re supposed to. But they usually don’t.’’ Waving his hand at the Havana Libre visible from the entrance,∏ ‘‘[It] never loses its lights. We do three times a week. It’s crap. How am I supposed to provide bread now? Huh?’’ ‘‘Can’t you get replacement parts?’’ ‘‘They’re expensive. Not part of the budget. Even so, it’ll take eight to twelve weeks. The central warehouse doesn’t have the circuits. They have to get them from Spain. Stupid fuckin’ idiots. I don’t meet my quota, it’s my ass, not theirs, but it’s their fault I can’t make bread.’’

A few days later I met up with Carlos and the others at their Saturday morning baseball game. Alfredo, a journalist friend who used to manage Carlos’s team, also attended the match, along with about one hundred spectators. Alfredo did not attend many games anymore, but he was here for a specific reason this morning. Alfredo wanted to repaint his apartment, as it had gotten rather dingy. But paint, like everything else, was hard to come by. Any paint that was available was more readily accessible on the bolsa negra (black market) than via state-run suppliers. Through proper channels, he could get one gallon in the next six months of white/ gray. But if he could arrange it with Javi, who worked on a construction site, he could probably get what he wanted in terms of quantity and color by other means (especially some color other than white or gray). While Alfredo and Javi talked paint, I talked with Carlos at the end of the team’s dugout. I asked whether he had gotten the necessary parts for his mixer. When he snorted in disgust, I asked what he’d done to resolve his problem. ‘‘Stop by on Monday’’ was his only response as he went out to the coaching box by third base. That Monday morning I returned to the panadería. To my surprise none of the fellows were there. Lucia, a portly woman sprawled across the service counter, told those who inquired that bread would be ready that afternoon. When I asked where the others were, she gazed redolently at me. ‘‘They’ll be along. Wait here.’’ After about fifteen minutes of watching various pensioners approach the counter and turn away disappointed, Gordito came up the street shouldering a massive cooking sheet with piles of buns on it. He went into the bakery and dumped the bread on the work table inside. Confused, I asked, ‘‘What’s going on? Where did that bread come from?’’ Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞πΩ

Breathing hard from his exertion in the already-sweltering heat of Havana’s midmorning sun, he simply shook his head and said, ‘‘Carlos said to wait for him here. He should be here in a few minutes.’’ Gordito picked up the metal sheet and disappeared around the street corner. Carlos appeared about twenty minutes later, also shouldering a massive cooking sheet with piles of buns stacked on it. After dumping them on the work table, and mixing them with the pile Gordito had brought, Carlos went back outside into the shade and we conversed about how he had managed to produce bread. It wasn’t easy. We were at my dad’s at four this morning mixing the dough. Then Fidel [one of Carlos’s employees] took us over to this bakery where I negotiated a deal to use their ovens. It’s about a mile from here. We have to carry the bread from that bakery to this one for distribution. But the problem is even then, they have to produce their own quotas as well, which means I can only use their facilities when they do not need them. It puts greater pressure on both of us.

This temporary solution lasted for three weeks. His bakery could not produce bread every day as it had while the machinery in his bakery functioned, but he could produce supplies su≈cient to meet the bare minimum every two or three days. Neighborhood residents had to stop by more frequently to find out when bread would become available and then come back at the appropriate time. So what should have taken two or three hours to produce was taking Carlos two or three days. Carlos’s solution was far from ideal. His father’s bakery was in another district of Havana several miles away. Mixing the dough there required transporting several hundred pounds of bread dough to the nearby bakery. Then, using ovens when the other bread factory was not in production, they had to carry the bread by hand a mile and a half away. His solution created new problems: dough going bad in the heat as he transported it from one bakery to another; buns dropped while being carried from one bakery to another; and other di≈culties that arose because the central planners of bread production allotted a great deal of economic resources for state-of-the-art machinery but not any money for spare parts. Yet despite the struggle, Carlos managed to come up with a solution that would provide bread for the neighborhood while maintaining his quotas, showing that he was a competent manager.

∞∫≠ chapter seven

The Lucha within Cubanidad Carlos faced a problematic candela, one that he had little control over and that had more to do with the positioning of the Cuban economy in global markets, the local context of Cuban tourism, and the bureaucratic power of the state than his ability to produce baked goods. He faced a seemingly impossible task. He could either anger his customer base or his supervisors. Unable to mix bread dough, he could shut down his bakery, thereby losing status in the neighborhood as well as jeopardizing his career by appearing to do nothing, or he could come up with a novel solution that would exceed his budgetary allowance but partially provide basic bread for most of the neighborhood. He did not, however, simply throw his hands up and acquiesce to his fate. He exhibited his calidad and lucha by coming up with a complicated solution that at least meant he would meet some production quotas, albeit at unacceptable overruns, despite the lack of assistance from his supervisors. The context of lucha has evolved over the decades, reflecting the political and economic reality of Cuban society in the broader world. It is one of the personal qualities that is projected onto a Cuban nation that the state has attempted to make ‘‘revolutionary’’ and therefore not only national but socialist. Those same characteristics are embodied in baseball, whether it is through fans’ interpretations of athletes’ actions or fans’ own actions in reaction to events on the diamonds. The embodied calidad of the nation, partly reflected in an athlete’s lucha, is placed on public display through athletic competition—particularly in spectacles like the Serie Nacional—that serves to confirm Cuban beliefs about themselves. The confrontation between batter and pitcher embodies this aspect of lucha, and how one strives to resolve that potentially overwhelming challenge reflects one’s calidad. A batter may not ‘‘survive’’; indeed most of the time he does not and makes an out rather than reaching base safely. Further, a batter can ‘‘sacrifice’’ himself, willingly making an out to advance base runners. This stratagem is part and parcel of the narrative codes of passion Nelson Valdés identified (1992) within Cuban politics in which one’s moral convictions in a lucha are expressed in one’s willingness to die for one’s beliefs. In baseball, it is the sacrifice of the individual for the team’s benefit, a rather obvious embodied metaphor for an individual sacrificing oneself for the greater good of society. Another aspect

Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞∫∞

of that code entails how one comports oneself is perceived as a manner of honor, duty, and dignity. Nothing less than total victory over one’s enemy is acceptable. To refuse to compromise is sign of one’s superior conviction and strength of character. The home run is the ultimate sign of this character as was evident in the right fielder’s confrontation and subsequent blast in the example that started this chapter. Such discursive codes eliminate the potential for pragmatism or compromise. In that game at the beginning of this chapter, the father’s initial concern for his injured son was perfectly acceptable. His initial emotional outburst was clearly within the context of a worried parent. However, his confrontation with the right fielder was a di√erent a√air. The father’s inability to maintain control of his emotions in the face of this verbal attack indicated a lack of calidad, something others, later in the day, continued discussing. Other spectators certainly sympathized and empathized about his worry for his son, but their later comments suggested that they felt that he had no business engaging in actions that could have easily erupted in physical violence. The accusation of his supposed lack of baseball knowledge that provoked such a strong reaction was, in actuality, a coded, accusatory metaphor of his lacking both calidad, for not recognizing the inherent violence and risk in the game, and of his failing to embody ‘‘real’’ cubanidad: the very kind of person that state authorities have attempted to shape since the beginning of the Revolution.

∞∫≤ chapter seven

CO N C L U S I O N

Touching ’Em All: Recalling and Recounting Home Runs The sixth inning ended with Los Metros being manhandled by Habana. The game is threatening to become a nocout, but neither side is playing particularly well. It completely lacks calidad, and lo ambiente is absent this evening. This extremely one-sided game has bored the few fans in the stadium. Rocco, Chino, Blanquito, Cotorro, and the others of El Círculo converse among themselves and only comment occasionally about the events of the field. Abruptly, Cotorro stands up, clambers over a row of empty seats so those sitting to either side of him do not have to stand, and starts to leave. ‘‘I’m going. This [game] isn’t doing anything for me. Besides, I’ve already seen this movie.’’ Rocco and Chino both immediately start teasing him, ‘‘What kind of fan are you?’’ Cotorro waves away their playful criticisms, but the others will not relent. ‘‘Oh, you are a santero now? Know the future do you?’’ Exasperated, Cotorro finally snaps, pointing at the three primary tormentors in turn and asking ‘‘How many crocodiles did Tarzan kill?’’ The seemingly incongruous question brings the rest up short. They smile and nod as Cotorro waves one arm in the direction of the Metropolitanos pitcher warming up in preparation for the seventh inning. The pitcher bounces a pitch in front of the plate that goes past the catcher to the backstop. ‘‘You see?’’ The others chuckle, and Cotorro takes his leave. As the seventh inning starts, Blanquito tries to explain the significance of Cotorro’s final comments. ‘‘You know who Tarzan is, right? You’ve seen Tarzan movies? How many times does the crocodile kill Tarzan?’’ In other words, this game is like an action film. The hero may end up in a dangerous situation, but the audience knows that the hero will eventually triumph. No crocodile ever kills Tarzan, and Cotorro knows that the outcome of this game is a foregone conclusion as well. The outcome was never in doubt. This particular game simply was not spectacular. It lacked the calidad, lucha, and ambiente that Cuban fans desire for it to be included in el espectáculo. In part, this game lacked these qualities because the level of play was groan-inducingly poor on this evening.

But the game also lacked any semblance of the spectacular because there was no audience. A few hundred individuals scattered throughout a stadium designed to hold over fifty thousand prevented any sort of emotional atmosphere from building. Those that were there spent their time talking with each other more than watching the action, such as it was, on the diamond. Baseball, like other spectacles, requires an audience. ‘‘Baseball is like the theatre. Or a movie. Without an audience, a movie is nothing,’’ was how one journalist that covers the Serie Nacional explained the dramatically di√erent experiences of attending a midseason Metropolitanos game and an Industriales game against one of its rivals. Without an audience, a game is simply not a spectacle. As a spectacle, however, baseball is in no way, shape, or form limited to the Serie Nacional and national squads. Down to the youngest children in the numerous youth leagues, the fostering of cultural intimacy is still highly prevalent. The audience sizes are not anywhere near the size of audiences for the Serie Nacional, but the emotion, the passion that induces cultural intimacy, is equally strong. At one field in Havana, multiple groups of kids ranging in age from five to fourteen are in team-sized groups practicing and playing games in a barely green space. The ballpark is enclosed by dull, worn, oatmeal-colored apartment blocks that loom over the edges. Parents peer through and hang on the chain-link fence that separates the ground from the street. Family members shout encouragement through the mesh to their young ballplayer. At the end of the session, the budding athletes step through the door wired shut during practice. Walking home with adults clearly enthused by their little one(s)’ experiences and burgeoning talent, they discuss how he did, what needs to improve, and how much fun it was. Arriving back in the neighborhood, the youngster runs over to join a game of pitén with his friends and neighbors. Older siblings and other residents watch from the stoops. These familial interactions help to build the cultural intimacy of baseball, as values, memories, and emotions are passed from one generation to the next. Baseball is a definitive Cuban spectacle, and the sport attracts interested audiences at all levels.

The Spectacle of Baseball and the Language of Contention As the Argentinean anthropologist Eduardo Archetti noted, ‘‘If sport is to be studied and analyzed it should be in order to demystify its use on the ∞∫∂ conclusion

part of the state and the dominant classes. . . .’’ (1998: 9), and it is in this vein that I have examined Cuban baseball, although there is much more to understanding any sport than the state’s use of it. This sentiment actually understates the significance of sport because the state’s use of sport is not uncontested, nor is it homogenous, and those contests are often as hotly fought as the athletic contests themselves. For Cubans, there simply is no straightforward, given relation between the sport and being Cuban. Cubanidad, the concept of ‘‘being Cuban,’’ constitutes a tacitly agreed upon symbolic framework in which the very existence of a Cuban identity is not questioned. Rather, the contested meanings associated with and that inform this symbolic framework, through which struggles for power and social experience are constituted, are articulated within a language of contention. A core issue in Cuban society today is the question of what is ‘‘truly’’ or ‘‘authentically’’ Cuban. The image of the progressive Hombre Nuevo (New Man) has, for some, begun to represent a dying past, old legends, and dead and dying heroes. Key focal points in the language of contention, such as struggle and sacrifice, are no longer reliable symbols of Revolutionary legitimacy. State propaganda has turned to cultural heritage and values. Hence, the reemphasized articulations over ‘‘Cuba’’ and ‘‘cubanidad’’ emanate from state organs, all the while authorities continue to punish those who embody shallow materialism and greed and reward those who continue to display or represent state-valued characteristics. The relationship between Cubans and the Cuban state reveals how discourses collide, merge, and change over time in a never-ending and ongoing contest over what it means to be Cuban. Within The Quality of Home Runs, the dialectical constitution of Cuban society is analyzed at the level of its historical agents, showing how the internal struggles for legitimacy a√ect popular consciousness and thus Cuban identity. What is at stake here is the formation of the Hombre Novísimo (Newer or Novel Man; Frederik 2005) and how Cubans will compose and comprehend themselves in their worlds. Cubans are in no way frozen in time, although some still portray Cuban society as stuck in dogmatic socialist discourse. Isleños may not be engaged with the rest of the world to the degree that they desire, but they are most decidedly active in various worldwide networks. Increasingly, Cuban interests in the broader world are vigorously pursued using late-capitalist notions of property by both individual Cubans and by the state (Hernández-Reguant 2004; Fernandes Conclusion ∞∫∑

2006). Similarly, Cuban university students make use of their technological access to set up illegal Internet accounts, allowing other isleños greater access to the World Wide Web while earning hard currency for themselves (Coté 2005). Cubans draw on various music sources (WestDurán 2005; Wunderlich 2005) to enter into the discourses regarding their conditions and what it means to be Cuban. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the legalization of foreign currency possession in 1994,∞ remittances from the Cuban diaspora have steadily and dramatically increased (Barberia 2004), greatly a√ecting both local economic situations and the transnational networks of Cubans (Eckstein 2004). Likewise, fans’ illegal pirating of satellite television being broadcast into tourist hotels—indeed, as does the tourist industry itself—demonstrates that isleños, sometimes with the help of others o√ the island and sometimes on their own, are fully contemporary members of the present-day broader world and not ideological marionettes tied to state strings or stuck in a romanticized post–Cold War past. A central force within this language of contention is the state. Much of the discourse structuring and informing cubanidad is state produced. Rooted in nationalist discourses, narratives of cubanidad are central to the legitimacy of the government. This is not to say that such nationalist rhetoric goes unchallenged; indeed, fans and athletes do not blindly accept the government’s articulation of cubanidad. Nonetheless, the role of baseball in cubanidad is vital, for it allows the state to become a takenfor-granted player in the contest over what it means to be Cuban. The current Cuban state was the first to organize and institutionalize baseball on a countrywide basis thereby demonstrating the sport’s inherent Cubanness. The government organized the national leagues, provided for specialized training grounds, educated coaches, and developed the overall infrastructure of baseball into what it is today on the island. Part of the construction of this infrastructure included the erection of stadiums and other sports-related facilities in parts of Cuba that had none. In so doing, these new stadiums, along with the existing ones, became sites where communal sentiments could create, express, and reinforce notions of cubanidad and home. Named after revolutionary icons, these edifices become central sites of the production of cultural intimacy that reinforces the sense of being Cuban, of cubanidad. These initial articulations were further apparent in the spectacular performances in exhibition games staged by Revolutionary leaders to demonstrate their very cubanidad. Not ∞∫∏ conclusion

only was this strategy pursued in the early days of the Revolution, but it continued to be a discursive strategy throughout the past five decades. The 1999 exhibition game held in Havana to demonstrate the ideological closeness between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, drove home the political use of baseball. It, along with the exhibition series against the Baltimore Orioles earlier that year, provided some of the most dramatic instances of how baseball informs government discourse of cubanidad. As the exhibition game in Baltimore demonstrated, members of the Cuban diaspora take a variety of positions in this contest over cubanidad and how they imagine Cuba. The various factions protesting outside Camden Yards brought the language of contention into stark relief. The recognition of the Cuban national team as a symbol of cubanidad but not of the state is a significant shift in the contest over cubanidad. In previous decades, no separation between the team and the state was acknowledged, but now distinctions between the government and the nation are readily made by some. Others, however, still equate the national team with the Castro government and vociferously reject any claims of legitimacy regarding the status of the state or the cubanidad of socialist Cubans. It is amongst these particular groups that the politics of passion become most obviously manifest. Cuban baseball is most assuredly a celebratory spectacle of cubanidad. Yet as an iconic spectacle, baseball, like all spectacles, does more than merely reflect Cuban society. It calls attention to relationships that otherwise might escape notice in the flow of everyday life. In doing so, it accentuates awareness of particular concerns that permeate all of Cuban society all the while providing a space for critical discourse of the existing social, political, and economic circumstances. It is a creative as well as a≈rmative performance that links the past, present, and future based on aspirations and on lived experiences. The open-ended meanings contested in everyday discourse, in the media, and in state ceremony, allow baseball to serve as a model for being Cuban and the imagined topography of Cuba while also conjuring imagery of locality and identity. A spectacle is an obvious attempt to make certain things dramatically visible. It is in part through the manipulation of symbolic objects that performers in a spectacle create meaning, o√er critiques, or suggest alternative readings of social reality. A spectacle ‘‘is about seeing, sight, and oversight’’ (MacAloon 1984: 270) but is also about being seen. In Conclusion ∞∫π

order to accomplish this, spectacles must have an audience, an interactive segment whose role is to perceive and confirm that the vision being publicly portrayed is an event. But exactly what audience members perceive—their meanings, interpretations, and reinterpretations— becomes the points of struggle within the language of contention. While a spectacle is often intensely visual, the emphasis on specific forms and symbols also indicates that a spectacle is, by extension, an attempt to render other things invisible. A spectacle, then, is as much about concealment as it is visibility. Rather than producing harmonious social solidarity, as Turner’s social dramas (1974, 1988) supposedly do, spectacles often result in temporary mediations of social conflict, producing heightened levels of tension between di√erent groups as actors and spectators debate the significance, meanings, and outcomes of particular events. This culture of debate (García Ronda et al. 2004; Hernández 2003b) embedded in discutir pelota is abundantly evident in plazas, cafés, and other public venues. The ensuing arguments are loud, can be divisive, engender passionate feelings in their participants, create intimate relations between antagonists, and ultimately never reach a specific resolution or consensus among the di√erent parties engaged in such discourse. This continuous debate problematizes any potential meaning of any singular performance of a spectacle. Indeed, the outcome of a game is not the central issue here. Rather it is the dialectical relations fostered through discutir pelota, through the ambiguous meanings of spectacle, that are of primary importance. It is the tension, (re)produced in baseball rivalries, that creates the passion and cultural intimacy vital to creative imaginings of cubanidad. One elderly aficionado who used to regularly visit one esquina caliente no longer does so because his main rival had passed away. The argument had ceased without resolution, and it is the exchange, the heated discussions with his rival/friend, that he missed. It is those intimate exchanges, built over regular, sometimes daily, occurrences that constitute the spectacle of cubanidad. The regular yet ephemeral nature of Cuban baseball is what drives its ability to engender cultural intimacy and fuels the politics of passion. The very structure of baseball, its seasonality, creates a recurring spectacle in which the narrative continuously changes yet its eventual outcome is the same—a champion will be crowned at the end of the season. It is the state that constructs the structure of that narrative through its design of the baseball season itself. There is no inherent reason that the season lasts ∞∫∫ conclusion

for as many games as it does; nor is there any reason for only one league or champion to exist. Baseball’s o≈cials are acutely aware of those mitigating factors in the a≈rmation of cubanidad articulated in baseball. Since the formation of the Serie Nacional, o≈cials have adjusted, tinkered, and otherwise altered the number of teams in the league, the number of games played in a season, and the playo√ structure. They have also experimented with the creation, dissolution, and re-creation of a Superleague, the Serie Selectiva (Chosen League [‘‘chosen’’ meaning best and selected]), that amounts to All-Star teams composed of the best athletes from teams in the Serie Nacional and representing four regions of the country. The phantasmal nature of this Superleague, with its periodic appearances and disappearances from Cuban diamonds, illustrates the transient nature of the spectacle. Yet this temporary nature fuels the ongoing arguments that help to construct the generational connections and bring the past into the present. As aggravating as many of the aficionados find the Comisión Nacional’s tinkering, it is this very lack of uniformity that makes the debates over events and the ranking of historical events all the more pernicious. If all seasons had had the same number of games, then it would be that much easier to make comparisons. When arguments require the constant negotiation of parameters in order to make comparisons, it allows for an even greater culture of debate to emerge. Despite, or perhaps because of, this incessant change within the structure of Cuban baseball, the annual repetition of the baseball season provides an a≈rmation of the spectacle of cubanidad. The athletes under the lights and the singing fans in the stands a≈rm, indeed celebrate, aspects of Cuba and cubanidad through the spectacle of athletic competition. Generations of fans young and old gather together to cheer and critique athletes’ actions, managers’ tactics, and umpires’ decisions. In an important way, the fans are the ones who create the events on the ball fields, for they are the ones who determine the meanings and significance of any event in any given game. It is their continual comparison of games within a season, of teams and players from current and bygone eras, that produces the competing discourses of cubanidad and Cuba. What gives nostalgia such resonance is the language of contention’s simultaneous a√ective and narrative dimensions, consequently rendering problematic any conceptual distinction between individual and social memory. While the state establishes the (infra)structure of the spectacle, the Conclusion ∞∫Ω

embodied performances, the environment, the emotions, and the meanings of participants’ actions are much more organic in nature. That is, the fans themselves actively contribute to the spectacle in terms of performance and meanings. In this regard, their role is considerably different than spectator crowds at sports events found in North American stadiums, where the norms of spectator participation are more tightly scripted. In the 1990s, no pop music was blared over the public address system between innings or during a pitching change in Cuban stadiums. There were no large flashing electronic scoreboards informing spectators when and how to cheer. There were no costumed mascots that wander through the crowd throughout a game. None of those direct attempts to script the experience of being at a ball game or in a stadium were part of the Cuban experience. Rather, the spectators organize themselves, producing musical interludes, skits, and commentary on the events on the field. And it is they who determine lo ambiente within the spectacle. The transient nature of the spectacle and of the production of lo ambiente not only creates the emotional space for an a≈rming sense of being Cuban; it also creates the possibility of reinventing both Cuba and cubanidad. The regularity of an annual baseball season and the crowning of a champion a≈rm cubanidad, but it is the unique events of each and every game that inform the recomposition and struggle over definitions of being Cuban. This reinvention is especially true among Cuban fans and how they discuss and argue about rivalries. In short, they determine at what point, to what level, and in what manner they will be involved in the spectacle of Cuban baseball, much more so than the spectator/consumer of professional sport across North America. It is they who are the producers of lo ambiente that is so crucial to the creation of spectacle. Ironically, the emotional energy evident in lo ambiente in stadiums is fueled by a distinct sense of cubanidad that is not homogeneous but consists of competing versions of being Cuban. Baseball rivalries provide an important aspect of the language of contention that is cubanidad, for these rivalries structure the geographic imagination that is Cuba. Fans in Havana do not necessarily imagine Cuba in the same way that fans from Santiago de Cuba or Pinar del Río envision it. More important, fans from the same locality are not a homogeneous group either, as the rivalry between El Círculo Latinoamericano and La Conga de Lucumí demonstrated. Their ver-

∞Ω≠ conclusion

sions of cubanidad and Cuba provide further talking points, informing both the politics of passion and the languages of contention. Baseball talk acts as an additional discourse within the language of contention. Fans gather at esquinas calientes and argue about esoteric aspects of the sport. Their vocalizations form narratives about the events in the stadiums interwoven with their concerns about current events. Their arguments and poetry do not just simply recount baseball games but serve as social commentary on current events and local concerns. They see baseball as the celebratory embodiment of those qualities of cubanidad that are central to being Cuban, even though some of those qualities do not necessarily mirror the government’s socialist or Revolutionary versions of calidad and lucha. Sport is one of the mediums through which particular social relations become inscribed in social reality. By redefining notions of the body, personhood, space, and time—through the complete reorganization and practice of sport—the Cuban Revolutionary state attempted to reinscribe the taken-for-granted shape of Cuba, e√ectively producing a new kind of cubanidad. Cuban baseball players play a pivotal role in shaping the discourse of cubanidad. Their actions on and o√ the diamonds in and away from Cuba provide the raw material for the construction of various discourses regarding cubanidad. Without their exploits, the impassioned discourse surrounding cubanidad would be that much blander. They serve as the inspiration for running commentary and, along with the spectators in the stadiums, create the atmosphere that produces the strong senses of community and cubanidad. All these arguments are engaged with all prior and parallel discourses addressing what it means to be Cuban and how Cuba is to be imagined. Cultural narratives are continually in the process of becoming and are inextricably entangled with other discourses, thereby conflating baseball with cubanidad, national identity, migration, and Cuba. Each engages and takes account of the others in subtly insidious ways, for people do not simply consume symbols as objects: they produce systematic relationships between the articulated discourses that create such symbols. In that way, a shortstop fielding a ground ball, a batter slugging a home run, or an umpire calling a third strike become organized and gain historical significance and momentum allowing them to inform at least a part of the language of contention.

Conclusion ∞Ω∞

Locating the State in the Spectacle Acknowledging and probing the constitution of a language of contention entails an explicit analytical shift away from examining the state as a monolithic entity that acts on individual bodies, to an examination of individuals’ interactions with and around the institutions of the state. State o≈cials’ interest and roles in baseball allow state-based discourse about cubanidad and Cuba to be both a≈rmed and, when changing local or global circumstances require, reinvented. Baseball’s administrators, as bureaucrats who represent the state, rea≈rm the state’s position as a reiterating force in the language of contention that defines and locates Cuba and cubanidad. The Cuban state accomplishes this through the discursive deployment of the politics of passion to produce senses of cultural intimacy within a variety of spectacles: parades, speeches, festivals, opening ceremonies, and sports events. Spectacle is not merely a form of public ritual that societies use to confirm their existence and structure. Rather, spectacle is a crucial technique in modern state formation in which the reality of the state is negotiated. It is through spectacles that national communities are created and their imagined reality is projected and communicated, not just to a state’s citizenry, resident or not, but to the ‘‘community’’ of nation-states as well. An ongoing project that is never actually completed, the production of the state is reified by an ‘‘essentially imaginative construction masking an elaborate ideological project of self-legitimation’’ (Abrams 1988: 76). State formation requires such displays to produce and portray ‘‘its’’ legitimate position as the dominant force in society (Corrigan and Sayer 1985), and that reality is projected through the use of spectacle. The Revolutionary state’s organization of and symbolic use of baseball transformed the game into a discursive foundation of national order and consensus while also creating venues in which all Cubans, if they so chose, could participate in the Revolutionary project. By providing opportunities to become involved in the spectacle of Cuban baseball, the Revolutionary state a≈rmed its own claims to cubanidad. The historical values embedded in Cuban baseball were harnessed by Castro and other Revolutionary leaders to legitimatize their own position and to give Cubans the confidence that they were participating in the Revolution. Trying to ensure that Cubans did not come to feel disenfranchised or remain passive receivers of state discourse, the formation of the Serie Nacional, base∞Ω≤ conclusion

ball’s other infrastructural support systems, and the national teams all provided yet another venue in which people could publicly appear to be participating and performing ‘‘revolutionary’’ acts. In this regard, attending baseball games at the Estadio Latinoamericano was the spectacular equivalent of attending Castro’s speeches in the Plaza de la Revolución or lining the streets for May Day parades. To put it simply, cheering became Revolutionary. Cuban leaders drew upon existing sentiments about baseball and by creating a recurring spectacle, the Serie Nacional, linked disparate localities through the evocation of the politics of passion. The politics of passion generally emerge from ‘‘foundational’’ issues that establish the nature of a community—who belongs and what its core values should be. These emotive politics are fueled by the pursuit of moral absolutes, imbuing them with idealism and intensity by embracing the individual’s and the collective’s sense of self-worth, honor, and dignity, whether this is revolutionary zeal to resist imperialism or cheering the home team on to victory. Modern projects such as nationalism do not exclusively rely upon reason or logic for justification but are, ironically, most powerful when invoked on the basis of feelings. Emotional attachments to a place, its symbols and myths, and the sense of solidarity with strangers (i.e., citizens) are cornerstones of state-based nationalist discourses. Baseball provided an arena for the embodiment of these related yet di√erent notions of cubanidad. Defined by intense a√ectivity and personal engagement, the emotions and performances produced in baseball create ‘‘winners’’ and ‘‘losers.’’ Every baseball game constructs a Manichean structure that shapes the language of contention and informs the politics of passion. It forces supporters into singular categories because of their passion for a club. By the logic of these politics, one cannot be both a supporter of Industriales and Pinar del Río. It makes individuals such as Rocco, who hails from Pinar del Río, suspect. In his case, he appears to be contravening his birthright since he was born in Pinar del Río but lives in the capital and supports Industriales. This discursive structure in which something is either one thing or another with no room for compromise feeds into the production of localities, and it is this form of politics that informs the production of locality that is Cuba. Localities are problematic and, as such, form a crucial aspect within a language of contention. Defined as ‘‘a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community’’ (Appadurai 1996: Conclusion ∞Ω≥

189), locality becomes the subject in whose name political organization is undertaken. Imagined and experienced in various manners, those experiences and the emotions they engender shape how Cuba is produced. While Cuba is clearly not a singular geographic entity but an island that ‘‘floats’’ on the currents of Cubans’ imaginations and discourses, it is not an unvariegated whole either. How Cuba is constructed depends on one’s physical position, ideological position, and political and economic positions, as well as social position. These constructs are empowered through individuals’ life experiences, particularly those powerfully emotional ones. Baseball induces emotive reactions in its participants and elicits running commentary well after the actual event. The prevalence of nearly nonstop debate over baseball demonstrates its ability to regularly produce emotionally driven positions. The rivalries within Cuban baseball, played out annually in the Serie Nacional, help to inform the production of these localities on the island as specific sites of Cuba and cubanidad. It is these emotions, the passionate a≈liation with a club, with the lifeand-death struggle fans experience in the campaign of a baseball season, and the struggle for national supremacy, that engender that sense of belonging which links an individual to a large group identity such as cubanidad. What is especially significant about languages of contention such as cubanidad is that they are not tied to any geographic location; nor are individuals required to be physically proximate to one another for them to engage in such language. As central aspects of hegemonic processes that form the common discursive frameworks in which domination and struggle can occur, languages of contention are a uniquely privileged concept allowing for the exploration of the dynamic tension evident in, but not limited to, ethnic and national identities as well as state legitimacy. The production of Cuban localities, both specific ones on the island and the locality of Cuba itself, is part of what forms a language of contention. Yet it is also the languages of contention, identified here as Cuba and cubanidad that shape how localities are produced. As a central focal point in the struggle over what it means to be Cuban, languages of contention inform and are illustrative of complex interrelated social relationships. Since these relationships are interwoven with each other, each achieves an e√ectiveness while contesting cubanidad and Cuba that it would never be able to achieve by itself. This is evident in baseball arguments them∞Ω∂ conclusion

selves in which one cannot argue who the greatest Cuban slugger is without arguing about related topics. Nor can one argue which team is the best in Cuba without referring to the other teams. Likewise, contests over cubanidad cannot occur without reference to Cuba, and Cuba cannot be imagined and contested without reference to cubanidad. Such relationships are not simply a question of hegemonic domination being superimposed on others. Instead, what provides Cuba and cubanidad their efficacy is their very obliqueness established in the language of contention. What examining a language of contention allows is an analysis of the political consequences of conceiving of social relations as decentered and multi-determined. In undertaking such a task, cultures lose any sort of exclusive relation with a territory. The obliqueness of a language of contention also allows the links between culture and power to be reconsidered. The search for mediations and nonlinear means of managing conflict gives spectacles a prominent role in state formation (García Canclini 1995: 258–61). To the extent that theories have construed states of advanced capitalist nations as the general and desired model of the contemporary state, states organized along other socioeconomic models, when they are considered at all, are represented as truncated, degenerate, or otherwise malformed versions of the presumed whole. Those states that do not meet the ‘‘desired’’ criteria are identified by what they lack rather than by specific historical relations. The state is not just a thing. It is a complex ensemble of social relations mediated by the objectification of social practices. These objectifications are neither independent entities with inherent properties; nor are they solely symbols of social relations. rather, they are the medium through which these relations are constituted (Coronil 1997: 116). The elite and the popular, the national and the foreign, home and exile all become cultural constructions. They have no consistency as ‘‘natural’’ or inherent structures to collective life. Their verisimilitude is achieved through the ‘‘spectacularization’’ of social relations. Understanding how decentralized power is harnessed by the state requires theories of the state that are also decentered. This book has been one such endeavor. It is in the Cuban state’s interest to produce discourses a≈rming and, when necessary, reinventing Cuba as a locality and redefining Cuban identity as it is understood in relation to that locality. The state is not the only player in this particular struggle, but is one of the major forces in such struggles. There are other players as well: the media, for example (even in a state such as Cuba, where media institutions are Conclusion ∞Ω∑

more tightly controlled than in other societies), and intellectuals, including the occasional visiting anthropologist, also inform the representations and interpretations of events. This struggle is also informed by a multitude of other social groups within this locality. These di√erent players all contest the meanings emerging in spectacular practices. The interpretative processes inherent in spectacle are fundamental to the state’s basic definition and e≈cacy as a form of communication and practice. Baseball, like all sports, fires the imaginations and emotions of its participants. It creates senses of commonality and community that cross other potential social barriers, such as race, class, and gender. The locality from which Cubans cheer is no longer a singular Cuba, if it ever was. The state’s interest and roles in baseball serve to both a≈rm its version of cubanidad and, when circumstances dictate, reinvent it. A≈rming its position as the locutor and locator of cubanidad and Cuba, the Cuban state deploys the politics of passion in its discursive use of the language of contention, and, when necessary, reinventing itself, Cuba, and cubanidad in reaction to and to help shift changing social, political, and economic contexts on local and global levels. As this book has shown, Cubans involved in baseball do not necessarily agree on esoteric minutiae, much less on broader political concerns. But even when they disagree, they nonetheless engage in a language of contention in which it is tacitly agreed that there is cubanidad and Cuba.

The Transience of Home Runs Where does this leave Cuban baseball? The Serie Nacional continues as does the national team’s dominance in international competition, although that particular domination has lessened considerably in recent years. In part, Cuban dominance at international tournaments has shrunk because other nations have improved, but it also has lessened because of political and economic circumstances a√ecting Cuba. These changes are part of the evolution of the spectacle. Spectacles simply cannot remain static, or they will die. Other changes, however—changes outside Cubans’ ability to control—have also had an impact on Cuban baseball. One major change was wrought by the International Olympic Committee (ioc). The ioc decided just before the 2004 Athens Games that baseball would be removed from the Olympic festival beginning in the ∞Ω∏ conclusion

games to be held in London in 2012. This decision directly impacts the Cuban state’s ability to project its particular discourse regarding Cuba and cubanidad. The removal of baseball from the Olympics directly impacts the spectacle of Cuban baseball by removing one of the key, if not the preeminent, sports-related stage for the national sport. Cuban Olympism remains a central aspect of the state’s socialist discourse, but to lose one of the events in which it was likely to medal hurts its ability to articulate its message to Cubans, wherever they are, as well as to the rest of the world. However, other circumstances emerged that provided new opportunities for Cuba to contest and be contested on the international field of play. Major League Baseball organized its first World Baseball Classic (Clásico Mundial de Béisbol [cmb]), which was played in 2006. It was an intriguing development, for the cmb is the first international sports tournament explicitly organized by a transnational corporation along the lines of various sport-related international nongovernmental organizations such as the ioc, fifa (Fédération Internationale de Football Association [International Federation of Association Football]), and the International Amateur Athletics Federation. The Cuban government’s initial response was a wait-and-see attitude. Cuban baseball o≈cials were intrigued by the proposed tournament but questioned its purpose. If the tournament was for the commercialization of baseball, which is Major League Baseball o≈cials’ motivation for organizing and hosting such a tournament, then the Cuban government would not send a Cuban national team. The ideological basis for the tournament was extremely important to the Cuban state. At the same time, other forces were aligning to make Cuban o≈cials’ decision for them. As in the Baltimore exhibition series, numerous and various political players became involved in the organization of the cmb, and for some time it appeared that the Cuban national team would not be invited to participate in this international tournament. This first tournament was held in the United States (including some games in Puerto Rico), and the U.S. government attempted to block Cuban participation in this tournament because it would allow the Cuban state to garner public attention. It was a dual threat to Cuban legitimacy in the global structure of nationstates. One part of that threat was U.S. government o≈cials’ initial refusal to issue the necessary visas for the Cuban contingent to enter the United States. The second threat was a proposal that, since the United Conclusion ∞Ωπ

States was banning Cubans’ participation, a Cuban team could be made from the su≈cient number of Cuban ballplayers already in the United States who could form a representative and competitive team called Cuba. Pointing out that citizenship in a country was not the determining factor for an athlete to participate in this tournament, several debates revolved around star transnational players, such as Alex Rodríguez, who was ethnically Dominican but a U.S. citizen, over which team they would play for. In e√ect, mlb, a corporation, was assuming some state powers by declaring who was eligible to represent which nationality based on ethnic identification rather than on citizenship. This was a departure from the standard methods of determining participation in international sporting events, where nationality was determined by citizenship in a state. Ironically and like states, Major League Baseball o≈cials declared that it was not up to the individual athlete to determine which team he would represent but that mlb would determine that status. In making that declaration, mlb o≈cials undermined and directly challenged states’ power to delineate and define nationality. In short, a struggle ensued over whether the Cuban state would be permitted to send its representative team, the national team, as per the norms of all other international sports events, to the cmb, or whether Cubans in the United States could draw upon current professionals and some highly skilled amateurs to form an alternative ‘‘national team,’’ one that denied the saliency of the Cuban state. This debate raged throughout the United States while Cubans in Cuba watched. Stating that Cuba wanted no part of an event designed to simply create new markets for Major League Baseball, Cuban o≈cials quietly marshaled their forces to counteract this attempt at denying their political legitimacy. Finally, only months before the inaugural cmb was due to begin, the U.S. government relented, saying that they would allow the Cuban team to fly to Puerto Rico to participate in the initial round of games and then would make a further decision as necessary, that is, if Cuba would advance in the tournament. Finding this unacceptable, Cuba refused to commit to the cmb until several days later Major League Baseball announced that the U.S. government would, at last, allow the Cuban national team to enter the mainland United States for the entire tournament. The change, which emerged quietly, occurred because the ioc informed U.S. o≈cials that if they prevented the Cuban national team representing the nation-state from participating in this tournament, it would detrimentally a√ect the United States’ participation in all future ∞Ω∫ conclusion

Olympic Games, including a complete and total ban on the United States from ever hosting any future Olympic event. In the end, the Cuban national team flew to Puerto Rico, advanced to the final elimination round of eight, and ended up taking second place in the tournament. The much anticipated confrontational game between the United States and Cuba did not happen because Japan eliminated team usa. Another important result due to Cuba’s participation in this tournament was, like the exhibition series in Baltimore and the Sydney and Athens Olympics, that no baseball players abandoned the Cuban contingent during the competition. Athlete defection has become a concern among Cuban o≈cials because the trickle of athletes clandestinely leaving a√ects the calidad of Cuban baseball. When celebrated athletes decide to leave without baseball o≈cials’ permission, it a√ects not just the state’s authority and legitimacy but also the rivalries that inform cubanidad. Losing talented athletes does concern Cuban authorities precisely because those actions can be interpreted as a rejection of the socialist construction of cubanidad in which athletes succeed because of their love for their patria and for ‘‘the people.’’ Athletes’ actions away from the field of competition still impact the struggle over the meanings of cubanidad and a√ect the calidad and ambiente of the Serie Nacional. Aficionados interpret these actions in a di√erent manner. They understand that the structure of Cuban society is in the process of changing. Those with access to hard currency appear to be raising their class status, while those with more limited opportunities to earn hard currency seem to be slipping. These elite athletes, while still admired, found their economic options limited precisely because of the necessary training regimes to maintain that caliber of athletic ability. They along with their fans were living the lucha that the Periodo Especial engendered. Supporters understood that athletes had to make some di≈cult choices with only a limited number of options. In short, Cuban baseball players were caught in a candela not of their making. Industriales have been particularly a√ected by clandestine departures over the 1990s. A little over a year after fans bequeathed Adrian Hernández the moniker of ‘‘El Duquecito,’’ as discussed in chapter 3, Hernández followed further in his namesake’s footsteps (Orlando ‘‘El Duque’’ Hernández) by defecting and then signing with the New York Yankees. Fans’ desire to christen an Industriales player with a name honored among Industriales supporters, even as that same name was virtually erased from state discourses, reveals that the struggles within the language of contention Conclusion ∞ΩΩ

continues. Changes to the language of contention will continue; new players will emerge in the struggle over whose version of cubanidad and whose version of Cuba will become dominant. Baseball will continue to inform this ongoing spectacular struggle. Players have retired, and new, younger ones are creating their own place in the lore and arguments that inform Cubans’ imaginings of themselves and their place in the world. Some of the other changes to the spectacle that is the Serie Nacional appear to be minor, yet these too could have great ramifications. One minor change is that La Conga de Lucumí has dissolved. It no longer appears at Industriales games. Other groups have appeared, taking La Conga’s place in the spectacle. But exactly how these new groups will engage with Industriales, how they will construct notions of being Cuban in relation to Industriales’ rivals, and how they will negotiate meanings among themselves remains to be seen. These struggles for power among these new groups of supporters will be particularly intriguing because of another change. Sadly, Cotorro has passed away. The other members of El Círculo continue to attend and honored him by naming themselves after him forming La Peña Cotorro. O≈cials recognized Cotorro’s lifelong contributions by commissioning a bronze statue that now occupies his seat in the stadium. El Círculo / La Peña continues to surround Cotorro, but his voice is no longer heard and his skits no longer performed. Whether La Peña Cotorro can maintain its position as the leading group of aficionados in Estadio Latinoamericano remains to be seen. Who the leading voice of critique, social commentary, and spectacular performance to emerge in the vacuum left by Cotorro’s demise also remains to be seen. How the various forces arrayed inside and outside of Cuba a√ect Cuban baseball is something that will have to be played out. There remains an inordinate amount of work to be done on the anthropological study of sport, including the study of Cuban baseball. How baseball informs cubanidad in localities such as Miami or Santiago de Cuba, in comparison is only one of a series of questions that needs to be studied. Indeed, the formation of cubanidad and Cuba from Santiago de Cuba would be a fascinating comparative study, for how the rivalries and Cuba itself are imagined would demonstrate some significant di√erences. Furthermore, the various patterns emerging in terms of Cuban sport migration, legal and illegal, will continue to ebb and flow as circumstances change in a variety of places, most especially in the political circles in Washington and Havana, but also in places that perhaps have yet to be identified. And ≤≠≠ conclusion

in this case Cotorro was wrong. No one has seen this movie; no one knows how this movie will end. The crocodile may just get to devour Tarzan after all. Like everyone else, we’ll just have to see how tomorrow’s ‘‘game’’ plays out. The question is whether we will recognize the climatic moment of this ‘‘game’’ when it happens or only after the next ‘‘game’’ has been played out.

Conclusion ≤≠∞

N OT E S

Introduction ∞ In this single instance, I am limiting the definition of Cuban athlete to

athletes representing the nation-state and not the broader ethnic identification. Tany Pérez and Tony Oliva were but two Cubans who elected to stay in the United States at the coming of the Revolution. Since those initial days, there certainly have been other Cuban Americans, such as Luis Tiant Jr. in the 1970s and José Canseco in the late 1980s among others. But these men learned to play the game elsewhere, a minor yet sometimes important distinction among fans on the island. ≤ The very spaces in which sport takes place suggest this remote, separate nature of sporting experience. A stadium’s strong walls with inward sloping stands focus energies down and in, toward the center, while keeping the outside world at bay. The very physicality of those barriers, keeping the curious and unsanctioned out of its confines, suggests an insular place where the emotions that confuse life’s issues can be resolved. ≥ Never mind that much of early modern capitalism, as well as current capitalist labor outside the postindustrial countries of western Europe and North America, did and does comprise children. See E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1966) and Louise Lamphere’s From Working Daughters to Working Mothers (1987) for two particularly apt historical perspectives among many examples. ∂ I use fiction here intentionally, not to indicate something false or untrue, but to indicate something made up or constructed. ∑ The perfect case in point is the excellent ethnographic film Trobriand Cricket, in which the restrictions on the number of players allowed on the pitch and the reasons for playing have been altered from British ‘‘civilized’’ meanings to Trobrianders’ own cultural logic (Leach 1976). ∏ Partha Chatterjee argues this same point, suggesting that Indian nationalism is, in e√ect, a derivative discourse of European ideals rather than reflecting actual Indian ideas. That such discourses had to be formulated along the discursive logic of European ideas reflect the historical and continuing power relations between the subcontinent and western Europe (Chatterjee 1986).

π The modern Olympics are a prime example of these broader processes.

Olympic sports are, with the singular exception of judo, exclusively of European and North American origin. Missing are the numerous disciplines of the Wushu complex (what we Westerners call martial arts) from East Asia as well as various Southeast Asian ball games, indigenous Central American ball games, and many others; sports that are by no means incidental to the peoples and places where they originate from and are currently practiced.

1 Baseball and the Language of Contention ∞ Spatialization refers to the integration of the social production of the built environment with the everyday routines and ceremonial spectacles bodily experienced by individuals (Low 2000: 33–37). ≤ For a discussion of anthropology in such contexts, see Laura Nader’s essay in the same volume (Chomsky et al. 1997). ≥ For a prescient critique of the various discourses that conceptually calcify isleños, see Rafael Hernández (2003a). ∂ The term is a play on the island pejorative gusano ( gusano is Spanish for ‘‘worm’’) used by Revolutionary ideologues to repudiate those who left the island. I first came across this linguistic play in an essay by Lillian ManzorCoats (1995). ∑ Family spectacles are those rituals acknowledging and a≈rming membership in the kin group, for example, weddings, funerals, quinceañeras, baptisms, and others. ∏ There have been, in the last few months of this writing, several quiet acknowledgments that race is still an issue in Cuba.

2 Baseball, Migration, and the Nation ∞ Patria is more usually translated as ‘‘fatherland’’ in the Cuban context, which is indicative of the gendering of nations that is quite common in the construction of national identities. Unfortunately, there is insu≈cient space here for a critical analysis of how the Cuban nation is gendered at this time. See Vera Kutzinski (1993), Begoña Aretxaga (1997), and Carlos Sandoval-García (2005) for various discussions of the politics of gendering nations. ≤ I use American here in its narrowest sense, as a referent to the United States. ≥ The Pact of Zanjón was the peace treaty signed by Cuban and Spanish generals in 1878 ending the hostilities of the Ten Years’ War. ∂ In the actual account, skun refers to a team not scoring any runs in one

≤≠∂ notes to chapter two

inning of the game and not for the entire game itself. This di√ers from the contemporary meaning of being held scoreless for an entire game. ∑ For additional nineteenth-century commentaries on the Cuban passion for bloodsport-based spectacles, see Louis Pérez (1992: 16, 53, 147, 152, 156, 158, 165, 210, 222–23, and 226). ∏ The Ten Years’ War is also known as the first Cuban War for Independence and was formally fought from 1868 to 1878 and ended with the aforementioned Pact of Zanjón. π That first modern Olympiad had fourteen nations participate. The second, held in Paris in 1900, was so obscure that many of its participants died without knowing they had participated in the Olympics because the Games were held simultaneously with the Paris World’s Fair, were stretched across five months, and the fair’s organizers deemphasized the Olympic component of the fair (http:// www.olympic.org/uk/games/past/index—uk.asp?olgt=1&olgy=1900, accessed 20 June 2003). ∫ For photographic evidence of the racial mixture of Cuban baseball teams, see especially Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball (Rucker and Bjarkman 1999) and La historia del Béisbol cubano, 1876–1976 (Torres 1976). Ω For discussions on the various hierarchical perceptions of various racialized groups in Latin America and the Caribbean, see John Johnson (1993) and Robert Berkhofer Jr. (1978). ∞≠ Peter Bjarkman provides the best brief histories of Dihigo’s career (Bjarkman 1994: 218–23; Bjarkman 2001). For those who can read Spanish, there is a biography of Martín Dihigo by the Cuban author Alfredo Santana Alonso that includes the social contexts of Dihigo’s career with a (understandably) Marxist slant (1997). Roberto González Echevarría also discusses Dihigo in his massive history of Cuban baseball (1999).

3 The Spectacle of and for Cuba ∞ The home plate umpire had not made an initial call on the pitch because he was waiting to see if there would be an appeal on the swing. ≤ Ironically and in a further mirroring of El Duque, Adrian Hernández defected approximately two years after the game described here. Further mirroring his namesake, he initially signed with the New York Yankees. Adrian has not had the same success as Orlando, however. ≥ Industriales and Metropolitanos both represent the capital and share the Estadio Latinoamericano for their home field. Consequently and obviously, only one can play at Estadio Latinoamericano at any given time unless, of course, they are scheduled to play each other, which happens twice each season. Strangely, the

Notes to Chapter Three ≤≠∑

potential intercity rivalry does not produce lo ambiente, because of Metropolitanos’ historical lack of success in the Serie Nacional, which is rather ironic since the greatest rivalry before the Cuban Revolution was between Habana and Almendares, two teams based in Havana. ∂ The latter was not yet a member of the Confederación del Caribe, a panCaribbean organization of professional baseball controlled by mlb. Hence, the Dominican League was not yet under the ‘‘protectorate’’ (control) of mlb and the U.S. corporate owners. ∑ See Alan Klein (1994) for a discussion of this transnational, politically tinged, and economic struggle over the baseball industry. ∏ It was only after the end of the Cold War and collapse of socialist states in Eastern Europe that the extent to which sporting success was a state-driven program became evident. It became clear that the Eastern European states, especially East Germany and the Soviet Union, ran explicit ‘‘training’’ programs that would ‘‘develop’’ athletes through the use of chemical ‘‘enhancement’’: the state-sanctioned use of steroid programs, banned by all international sporting bodies, to ensure that their athletes would achieve victory and provide the necessary symbolic demonstration of their system’s superiority (Hoberman 2001: 193–228). π See Susan Faludi (2000: 153–223) for a particularly poignant account of Cleveland Browns fans. There is no denying the power of nostalgia and baseball fans’ desire to take a physical piece of that emotional experience with them in the form of a souvenir, as Charles Springwood makes all too clear in his study of the geography of baseball nostalgia in the United States (1996). Nonetheless, the impetuses for their purchases are emotional experiences that occur before fans ever reach for their wallets. ∫ By ‘‘mythical’’ I am referring to the cultural myths that all societies have regarding its members and their place in the world. In this sense, I am using the idea of mythologies along the lines of Roland Barthes (1957) in which everyday objects and ideas can become signifiers for wholly new and powerful messages.

4 The Politics of Cuba’s National Sport ∞ The umpiring crew for each game was divided between Cuban and Major League umpires, with a visiting umpire filling the most important role of home plate umpire, who is responsible for calling balls and strikes. ≤ At the end of the 2002 Major League Baseball season and in the first months of the 2003 season, there were incidents of drunken individuals leaping out of the stands and attacking coaches and umpires. Roundly condemned

≤≠∏ notes to chapter four

in the press, many baseball players expressed similar sentiments that any person foolish enough to come onto the diamond and attempt to harass or assault someone deserves any violence perpetrated upon them. ≥ The most famous of this extreme form of politics was the suicide of Eddie Chibás. Chibás was a Cuban congressman who famously shot himself at the end of his weekly radio broadcast in protest of the corruption of the 1951 Carlos Prío government (Salwen 1993). Castro was a member of the same political party as Chibás during the late 1940s and early 1950s. ∂ Whether embargo or blockade is used depends on the position of the speaker, thus making the definition of U.S. policy yet another focal point in the discursive struggle over Cuba.

5 Fans, Rivalries, and the Play of Cuba ∞ This is one of several references to boxing, similar to the nocout homerun discussed earlier, found within Cuban baseball discourse. The expression reflects a much more confrontational understanding of the encounter between batter and pitcher than how it is described and understood in the United States. While certainly a confrontation, the interaction is not seen in the United States as personal combat, which is what the Cuban language suggests. ≤ The growing social science literature in the United Kingdom on soccer fans documents the enormous variation of soccer fans throughout Europe (cf. Armstrong 1998; Brown 1998; Bromberger 1994; Robson 2000 as a small selection). ≥ The seats in Estadio Latinoamericano have numbers on them but Cuban tickets do not, except in the vip section immediately behind home plate, which is reserved for journalists, o≈cials, and visiting dignitaries. Seats in the vip section are also available for purchase, but at a much higher price than the seats for the rest of the stadium. ∂ A fan making a statement about a color is referring to a specific team. In the pre-Revolutionary Cuban Professional League, the two main rivals were Habana and Almendares. Each had a specific color: Habana’s was red and Almendares’ blue. ∑ It also signifies a baseball game in which the victorious team has pummeled its opponent, beating it by ten or more runs, invoking the ‘‘ten-rule’’ that declares a team a winner if it leads the other by ten or more runs at any time after seven innings of play, as discussed in chapter 2. ∏ There are no advertisements during Cuban baseball broadcasts, so the breaks in the action often end up with the camera showing either an empty diamond while the announcers talk about some aspects of baseball’s local

Notes to Chapter Five ≤≠π

history or about current events. If someone in the crowd is doing something of interest, a camera will often focus in on that individual and the announcers will comment on the fan’s actions. π The Regla de Ocho is Santería, a syncretic religion that permeates Cuban identity and social life. I do not intend to engage in a lengthy discussion on Santería. However, the connections between baseball, and religion, magic, and spirits are relatively unexplored topics that could provide another avenue for insight into a particular society. For example, George Gmelch examined the use of magic among professional baseball players in game situations in which the outcome of an athlete’s action was less likely to produce a desired result (1984). The connections between baseball and Santería would lead to a particularly powerful understanding of Cuban society and worldview, but will have to remain a topic for another time. ∫ Historically, this stretch on the western side of the city is where elite residents and social clubs dominated before the Revolution. It remains an area of status and greater wealth because of the embassies and o≈ces as well as tourist hotels and the Hemingway Marina. Miramar is also the location of the first shopping mall to open in socialist Cuba (in 1995). Ω This equates to approximately us$6+ per gallon in an economy where the average Cuban salary is approximately us$20 per month. These prices were calculated at a time when the U.S. dollar was legal currency in Cuba. The Cuban government discouraged the possession of U.S. dollars in 2004 by changing the peso’s a≈liation from the dollar to the euro and penalizing anyone changing dollars into convertible pesos. ∞≠ There are several kinds of taxis in Havana. There are state-run enterprises for specific kinds of workers and their families. These types of taxis are supposed to charge Cubans prices in pesos, although drivers often attempt to first charge in dollars. There are also o≈cial tourist taxis that charge fares only in dollars. Unlicensed taxis exist as well, which charge in either currency depending on who their fare is. Often cheaper than state-run tourist taxis, they have more di≈culties with overhead because they do not have access to gasoline rations that the o≈cial taxis do. Nonetheless, the net economic rewards are relatively greater, and many of the o≈cial taxis moonlight as uno≈cial ones. Indeed, the driver for a city council representative often drove for me. He would check into work in the morning and if the representative did not have to go anywhere, he was free for the rest of the afternoon. When I needed transportation, he was often one of the first people I would contact because he wanted my dollars and he was reliable. ∞∞ What was particularly galling about this incident was that, unbeknownst to me, another friend, Fulano, had somehow obtained a car and gone looking for me to go to the game in Pinar del Río.

≤≠∫ notes to chapter five

∞≤ This is particularly true for professional sport franchises in the United

States. For example, the current major professional teams in Minnesota—the Twins, Vikings, Timberwolves, and Wild—all call upon the imagery of a mythogeographical past. The Wild and Timberwolves both invoke the North Woods, the Vikings invoke a mythological past of Scandinavian colonization prior to Columbus, and the Twins are the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Teams in Minnesota’s past include the basketball Lakers (which moved to Los Angeles), ice hockey’s North Stars (which moved to Dallas and dropped the ‘‘North’’), and baseball’s Minneapolis Millers and St. Paul Saints. Minneapolis was a major grain distribution center for the Upper Midwest, and St. Paul has been the seat of the archdiocese of the Upper Midwest for many years. The current edition of the St. Paul Saints draws upon fans’ baseball nostalgia of the earlier team than on any known regional religious reference now. ∞≥ Four years later, Scull transferred to Industriales. I have yet to hear Cotorro and the other members of El Círculo refer to him in the same manner now that he plays for Industriales. ∞∂ Informal observations of how fans classified players at the start of each game appear to validate this assertion. I used this approach at the start of each half of the first inning, when the nine players playing defense were all readily observable in one swift glance. A formal study needs to be conducted to verify such a pattern.

6 Talking a Good Game ∞ A jinetero is a person working outside the sanctioned employment of the

socialist Cuban state and implies that acts by such a person are ambiguous and morally dubious. ≤ Since the time of this conversation in 1997, Tany Pérez of Cuba was inducted into the U.S. Baseball Hall of Fame. Tany Pérez is often called Tony Pérez in English-speaking areas; his actual name is Atanasio and, hence, the appropriate short form is actually Tany, not Tony, which is a diminutive of Antonio. The rather insulting Anglicization of Spanish names by English-speaking Americans is extremely common throughout professional baseball. ≥ This conversation occurred several years before the 2005–6 steroid scandal in Major League Baseball. Palmeiro’s apparent positive test would have almost certainly a√ected opinions. It would be interesting to hear what Ryan and his friends would have to say about this scandal. There is no doubt Palmeiro’s positive test and the current mlb environment are topics of debate on the Hot Corners. ∂ Por la situación is a reference to the post–Cold War economic crisis Cubans

Notes to Chapter Six ≤≠Ω

faced after the collapse of comecon, the socialist trading bloc dominated by the Soviet Union. ∑ Robi and Ryan are, according to their father, named after two U.S. Hall of Fame baseball players, Brooks Robinson and Nolan Ryan. ∏ This poem is taken from Diez Muro, Raúl (ed.), Historia del Base Ball Profesional de Cuba: 3a. edición de El Base Ball en la Habana, Matanzas y Cárdenas (Havana: n.p., 1949), 17–18. Unfortunately, the author of this poem is not given. If anyone knows who wrote it, I would be most grateful to receive this information. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Elaine Fuller Carter and James E. O’Neill in translating and interpreting both poems. ∫ This is a reference to Fé. The club’s team color was yellow and its nickname was Los Caramelos, hence the author’s tolerance of that color only in chocolate. Ω The hyphenated a-su-lado is a standard wordplay based on the identical pronunciation of a su lado (at their side) and azulado (bluish colored). It recalls a common joke about a cousin, friend, or someone whose eyes are of two different colors: ‘‘uno negro y el otro a-su-lado.’’ ∞≠ This is another play on ballplayer. The hyphenated form of beisbolera suggests that it could also be understood as bolera, as one who participates in the bolero, a nineteenth-century song and dance form, a meaning that would reflect the bourgeois status of ballplayers. ∞∞ This last stanza uses a wordplay on a traditional ending for a fairy tale (‘‘Y colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado’’) and a literal meaning of colorín colorado. Since red was the color of Havana, an Almendares partisan would naturally prefer to end his tale with his own club’s color, blue. ∞≤ The classic example of this portrayal is the nineteenth-century novel by Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés (1984 [1882]). ∞≥ Rico’s poem is reproduced here exactly as he wrote it, grammatical errors and all. The English translation is my own. ∞∂ The lions Rico mentions here are a direct reference to commentators’ attempts to link Industriales with the pre-Revolutionary professional era, when the team Habana played. Habana’s mascot was the Lions; thus the Lions that coco invented will be ruined with their impending defeat. ∞∑ Although cf. Lilian Guerra (2005) for an explanation on how the myth of Martí has been created and contested.

7 Cubanidad’s Calidad and Lucha ∞ Spikes are the shoes worn by baseball players that have metal blades embedded in the soles in order to provide better traction for the athlete. The fact that he was wearing Nike spikes is not that unusual. Most of the players

≤∞≠ notes to chapter seven

either wore Japanese spikes, such as Mizuno, or, if they could get them through family members in Miami, American spikes, such as Nike. That young athletes were using imported equipment is indicative of the embedded position that Cuban sport has within the global flows of international sport. Unfortunately, there is insu≈cient space here for fully addressing this point, and any such indepth analysis on this topic will have to wait until another time. ≤ It would have been a problematic exercise if o≈cials had indeed attempted to bar individuals from the grounds. There was no fence restricting access and while such an act would have had moral authority, it would have been virtually impossible to physically enforce any order of banishment. ≥ There is a clear association between Cuban masculinity and baseball found in popular metaphoric speech that equates male anatomy and baseball equipment, often euphemistically referred to as ‘‘bat and balls.’’ This is discussed in further detail later in this chapter. ∂ For example, race played and continues to play a pivotal role in the perception of athletes’ abilities (cf. Entine 1999; Hoberman 1997; St. Louis 2003, 2004). ∑ I use Man here because of the discourse of the New Man discussed later in this chapter. However, in this context, it should be understood as a referent to all persons and not solely those Cubans subscribing to early Revolutionary ideology. ∏ The Havana Libre is a luxurious tourist hotel, originally built by and owned by the Hilton Corporation; it was finished just months before the coming Revolution.

Conclusion ∞ The U.S. dollar was the currency de jure for the Cuban economy until 2004, when Castro shifted the valuation of the peso from a dollar-based currency to a euro-based one, thereby significantly devaluing the U.S. dollar in Cuba.

Notes to Conclusion ≤∞∞

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INDEX

Abakuá societies, 72 aesthetics, 37–38, 125 aficionado, 119, 124, 128, 139–43, 152, 189, 199–200; discourse and, 156–58; discutir pelota and, 188; rivalry and, 188. See also fans aficionismo, 125–26, 141, 145 Africa, 15, 49, 120, 177 African, 151; as ethnic group, 134–35, 151; heritage, 120; region of Cuba, 135 Alarcón, Ricardo, 90–91 Almendares, 45, 52, 54, 81, 130, 206n3, 207n4; fans of, 115, 151, 210n11; manager of, 18; in poetry, 147–50 Almendares Base Ball Club. See Almendares Almendares River, 150 Aloma brothers, 50 ambiente. See lo ambiente Anacaona, 147 Angelos, Peter, 90 Antezana, Luis, 138–39 anthropology, 6, 28, 99, 204n2; anthropological writing and, 21, 29 anti-Castro protestors, 90–96, 103 Apache, Western, 20–21 Aparicio, Luis, 142 aplauso de ponche, 111 Arango, Arturo, 142–43 Archetti, Eduardo, 184 Argentina, 138 athletes, 5–6, 14, 19, 24, 37, 47, 53, 64, 78, 85–87, 93, 96, 103, 109, 144, 184, 186, 189, 199, 210n1; American, 57; black, 55–56; as Children of the Revolution, 101; Cuban, 2, 60–62, 79, 82– 83, 104–5, 170; East German, 83; fans and, 111, 113, 117, 152, 156, 158, 181; production of, 130–31, 133, 165–67,

206n6; race and, 135; as role models, 169–71. See also baseball players authority, 10, 24, 99, 199; fans and, 118, 123–24; figure of, 19; moral, 101, 118, 124, 211n2; Spanish, 151 Azucareros, 81 Bale, John, 14 Baltimore, 88, 90–91, 93–95, 97, 102–3, 187, 199; police in, 91, 94, 96, 103 Baltimore Orioles, 77, 89–90, 92–93, 96, 108, 110, 187 Banco de la Habana, 45 baseball: arguments over, 137, 140–45; arrival of, 41–49; banning of, 146–47; Cuban Revolution and, 79–84; cultural intimacy and, 32; cultural meaning and, 13–14; migration of, 51–59, 61–62; home and, 37, 40–41; informal games of, 1–2; internal politics of, 129; in Japan, 36; language of contention and, 15, 19, 25, 34–35; life and, 5, 84–85, 121; observation and, 4; place and, 19–20; poetry and, 137, 145–56; political appropriation of, 104–10; as resistance, 42–48; Revolutionary leaders and, 105–7; as spectacle, 24, 184, 187–90; spread of, to Caribbean, 50–51; structural changes of, 80–82, 130; symbolic discourse of, 14, 42–43; transnational links and, 24, 30, 42–43, 196–201 ‘‘baseball diplomacy,’’ 92–93, 96 baseball players, 37, 47, 53, 64, 78–79, 85, 87, 93, 96, 103, 109–10, 113, 130, 156, 158; African American, 55; clandestine departures of, 2, 65–66, 199; migration of, 53, 57, 60–62, 203n1; production of, 130–31; race and, 56, 133–35

‘‘Baseball War,’’ 80 Basso, Keith, 20 batea, 2–3 Bauman, Richard, 138 Bellán, Esteban, 43, 45 Belle, Albert, 93 Big Leagues. See Major League Baseball blood, 32, 41, 149, 151 blood sports, 44–45, 47, 205n5; cockfighting, 44; corrida, 44, 47 blue, 115, 150–52 blue bloodedness, 151 body, bodies, 3, 7, 104, 119, 151, 154, 191–92; of athlete, 17, 61, 65, 132, 171; discipline of, 9, 165–67; of government, 60, 98, 129, 206n6; habitus and, 169; language of, 136; masculine, 168; politic, 99; socialist, 168–70 bolsa negra, 179 boxing, 25, 36, 55, 115, 123, 168, 207n1 Bragan, Ralph, 18 Brazil, 72, 84 British Empire, 13 Brothers to the Rescue, 90–91 Buford, Bill, 112 bullfight. See blood sports Burstyn, Varda, 168 cabildos, 72 calidad, 36, 160–65, 167, 171, 174–75, 181, 191, 199; lack of, 154, 164, 169, 182–83 Camagüey, 71 Camden Yards, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 102, 187 Canada, 142 candela, 172, 181, 199 Canseco, José, 142 Capetillo, Enrique, 48–49 Caracas, 51 Cárdenas, 49 Carew, Rod, 142 Caribbean, 15, 25, 75, 103, 112; baseball in, 53, 55, 80; Cuba and, 29; migrants in, 30, 33, 40, 50–51, 60–62; race in, 57, 205n9; spectacle in, 67, 69–70, 72; studies of, 14, 26, 70 Caritas, 91 Carnaval, 67, 69–70, 72–73; liminal in,

≤≥≤ index

70; ludic in, 70; organizational groups and, 73 Carpentier, Alejo, 25 Castillo del Hacho, 49 Castro, Fidel, 59–60, 62, 79, 90, 97, 102–9, 157, 168, 170–72, 176, 187, 192, 207n3, 211n1 Castro, Raúl, 106 Cauto, 50 Cayo Hueso, 46, 51 Centrales, 82 Centrales, 134 Cerro, 1, 61, 178 Cervecería, 50 Céspedes, Benjamin de, 47 Céspedes, Carlos Manuel de, 146 Chávez, Hugo, 108–9, 187 children, 6, 50, 82, 146, 167, 174–75, 184, 203n3 Children of the Revolution, 99, 101 choteo, 124–25 Cienfuegos, 63–65, 81–82, 132 Cienfuegos, 56 Cienfuegos, Camilo, 106–7 Cincinnati Reds, 79 Ciudad de la Habana. See Havana Ciudad deportiva, 24 Ciudadanos, 159–61, 164–65 civilization, 5, 8, 11–12, 44–45; bad, 55; clash of, 13; lack of, 55 civilizing processes, 7–9, 11–13, 15, 55, 133 clandestine departure, 2, 199 Clásico Mundial de Béisbol (cmb), 197–98 class, 11, 33, 113, 121, 196; baseball’s origins and, 45–47; boundaries of, 47, 72, 112, 168; di√erences of, 126; dominant, 9, 185; middle, 44, 60; status and, 199; upper, 45–46, 150, 152; working, 47, 49, 97, 112, 128 Clemente, Roberto, 142 Cleveland Indians, 1 clubes de verano, 49 ‘‘codes of passion,’’ 100 Cold War, 62, 91, 107, 206n6; discourse of, 33, 177; ideology of, 27–30; politics of, 60, 93, 96; post–, 13, 209n4; as romanticized past, 186

Colombia, 51, 85 colonialism, 13, 15 Comisión Nacional de Béisbol, 60, 169, 189 Commissioner: of Major League Baseball, 41, 79; National (Cuba), 129 Communist Party (of Cuba), 72, 91 communities of memory, 5 Concha, José G. de la, 146 Confederación del Caribe, 206n4 Cramer, Emilio, 51 criollos, 44–49, 51, 73, 145–46, 148, 150– 52 critique: of announcers, 155; of authority, 127, 129; of fans, 151–52; of players, 117, 132, 173–74; of umpires, 63–64, 117 Cuba (U.S. baseball club), 46 Cuba: as baseball game, 34–35; capitalism and, 78; as colony, 26, 41–51; discourses of, 16; global links to, 25–27; idea of, 30–31, 33, 40; imagined mappings of, 129–35, 187, 190; as language of contention, 16, 24–30, 35, 90–97, 102–4, 185, 187, 189–92, 194– 95; as locality, 2, 30, 41, 192–94, 195; as lo real maravilloso, 25; lucha and, 177; memory of, 25–26; MLB tours of, 51– 53; post-socialist, 26; race and, 132– 35; scholarship on, 25–30; tourism and, 25–26; U. S. connections to, 26, 42–43, 45, 49–56 Cuba Baseball Club (Mexico), 50 Cuban Americans, 90–92, 203n1 Cuban Constitution, 78 cubanidad, 2, 88, 97, 151, 162–63, 170– 73, 175–76, 181–82, 188–96, 199– 200; as concept, 5, 16, 30–35, 87, 185–86; as discourse, 75–77, 105–10, 129, 137–58, 170, 186–87, 189, 191– 92, 197; as identity, 25, 128–35, 141– 43; as language of contention, 30–35; masculinity and, 155–56; memory and, 66–67; migration and, 40–42; race and, 52–54, 133; of Revolutionary leaders, 104–7, 186, 192 Cuban identity, 13–14, 16, 30–31, 33, 37, 62, 76, 85, 96–97, 106, 113, 120, 145, 208n7; discourses of, 68; as ethnic

identity in United States, 40; as language of contention, 25, 102–3, 185; migration and, 39. See also cubanidad ¡Cubanismo!, 92 Cuban League, 57, 79–81 Cuban nation, 5, 33, 48, 52–53, 83, 87, 133,155, 181, 187; athletes’ embodiment of, 170, 181; discourses of 100– 103; gendered, 204n1; lucha and, 171, 176–77; in poetry 150–52; race and, 54. See also Cuban state Cuban national team, 2, 48, 82–83, 87– 90, 93, 96, 109–10, 136, 187, 193, 196– 99 Cuban Revolution, 1, 4, 29–30, 73, 77– 78, 106–8, 110, 115, 182, 187, 192, 203n1; baseball and, 59–61, 206n3; lucha and, 172, 176–77; politics of passion and, 100; scholarship of, 26–27; sport and, 168–70 Cuban state, 11, 33, 40, 48, 61, 83, 102, 105, 108, 170, 177–78, 185–86, 191, 195–98, 209n1. See also state Cuban War of Independence, 46, 49 Cueta, 49 cultural intimacy, 3–4, 32, 36, 186, 188, 192; narrative and, 138, 157; spectacle and, 67, 76, 110, 184 culture, 7, 11, 23, 25–28, 33–34, 55, 75, 195; of baseball, 43; cubanidad and, 30, 32; of debate, 188–89; home and, 37; locations of, 20–21; loss of, 39; sporting, 13; study of, 4 DaMatta, Roberto, 72 Dance of the Millions, 45 defection, 66, 91. See also clandestine departure Diario de Cárdenas, 147 Diaz-Balart, Lincoln (U.S. representative), 92 Dihigo, Martín, 56–59, 142, 205n10; El Inmortal, 56; El Maestro, 56 discourse, 6, 10–11, 14, 19, 26–28, 30, 33–34, 37, 41–45, 51–52, 55, 62, 66– 68, 71–72, 75–77, 83; academic, 26, 28; colonial 12, 14; Manichean, 5, 13; narrative and, 16; nationalist, 4, 41,

Index ≤≥≥

discourse (continued) 60, 71, 77, 97, 100, 134, 186, 193; nostalgic, 26; sport-related, 13, 22; state-based, 5, 33, 66, 75–76, 84, 88, 97, 105–10, 167, 172, 192–93, 197, 199 discutir pelota, 143–45, 167, 188 disrespect, 124, 154 doble juego, 136, 159 Dodd, Christopher (U.S. Senator), 91 dollar (U.S.), 2, 126, 208n9, 208n10, 211n1 Domínguez, Miguel, 173–75 Dominican Republic, 50, 56–57, 60, 79– 80, 142 Dunning, Eric, 7, 14 El Artista, 43 El Círculo Latinoamericano, 113–19, 121–29, 131–32, 134, 152, 154, 175, 183, 190, 200, 209n13 El Figaro, 146 El Gran Estadio de Cerro, 58–59, 78. See also Estadio Latinoamericano Elias, Norbert, 7–9, 12 emotions, 4, 15–16, 38, 68, 85–87, 96, 100, 117, 147, 173, 183–84, 190, 193– 94, 196, 203n2; cubanidad and, 32, 75; of fans, 59, 65–67, 75 England, 12 esquina caliente, 141–45, 188, 191 Estadio Latinoamericano, 4, 31, 58, 59, 110, 124, 128, 136, 139, 143, 193, 200, 207n3; El Círculo Latinoamericano and, 113–14, 118; Havana Sugar Kings and, 78; Industriales and, 71, 131; La Conga de Lucumí and, 118–19, 121, 126; Radio coco and, 125; Serie Nacional and, 71, 85, 205n3 ethnicity: a≈liations of, 23, 39; characterizations of, 114; groups based on, 134–35; identity and, 22, 40, 194, 198, 203n1 Europe, 119 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 99 exile, 41–42, 46, 49, 51, 90, 146, 195; cubanidad and, 31, 40; concept of, 38– 40; Martín Dihigo and, 57, 59

≤≥∂ index

fans: authority of, 123–24; of Cleveland Browns, 206n7 Fé, 48, 147–50, 210n8 Fé Baseball Club. See Fé Fédération Internationale de Football Association (fifa), 197 Fernández Alarcón, José Ramon, 90–91 Fin del Siglo (baseball club), 52 Florida, 92; Cubans in, 33, 46 Florida Marlins, 1, 2 Fordham University, 43, 45 Fortes, Meyer, 99 Foucault, Michel, 165 Francisco, Juan, 50 Frick, Ford, 79 Gálvez y Delmonte, Wenceslao, 47, 49, 142–43, 150 Georgetown University, 45 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 41 Giles, George, 55 globalization of sport, 8, 13–15, 210n1 Gómez, Juan Gualberto, 49–50 Gramsci, Antonio, 74, Grito of Yara, 147 Guevara, Ernesto ‘‘Che,’’ 60, 73, 106–7, 169–70, 177 Guilló, Ernesto, 45 Guilló, Nemesio, 43, 45 Guttmann, Allen, 14 Habana, 45, 48, 71, 81–82, 116–17, 130, 147, 150, 183, 206n3, 207n4, 210n14 Habana Base Ball Club. See Habana Habana Baseball Club (Mexico), 50 Habaneros, 133, 153 Hall of Fame, 142, 209n2, 210n5 Havana: city of, 42, 46, 49, 81, 114, 126– 27, 130–31, 177–78, 180, 208n10; conferences in, 26, 30; everyday life in, 172; migration of African American ballplayers to, 55–56; mlb in, 51, 53, 79, 90, 93, 187; urban spaces of, 2–3, 19 Havana Sugar Kings, 59, 78, 105 Hebdige, Dick, 21 hegemony, 27, 74, 77, 84 Helena, Montana, 61

Hernández, Adrian, 65–66, 199 Hernández, Liván, 2 Hernández, Orlando ‘‘El Duque,’’ 65–66, 199 Hernández, Rafael, 26, 137 hierarchy: concept of, 27; of rivalries, 71; social, 47, 70, 74, 76; time and, 38 Holguín, 152 Hombre Novísimo, 185 Hombre, Nuevo. See New Man home: concept of, 37–39; as locality, 38 home runs, 36–37, 43, 54, 89, 162, 165, 171, 182, 191; game-ending (el nocout), 36; hitter of, 143–44; sayonara, 36 Hot Corner. See esquina caliente Huizinga, Johan, 6–7 Ibar, José, 116 identity: cultural, 3, 70, 106, 138; emotions and, 75; of fans, 112; location of, 16, 20–21, 133–34, 187, 195; masculine, 156; narrative and, 98; politics of, 19–20; production of, 32; state and, 76, 84 ideologisa mambisa, 176. See also Cuban identity inder (Instituto Nacional de Deportes, Educación Física, y Recreación), 59– 61, 129; o≈cials of, 101, 130 India, 28 Industriales, 17, 19, 36, 63–66, 71, 81–82, 131, 156, 175, 184, 205n3, 209n13; El Círculo Latinoamericano and, 114–18; fans and, 74–76, 111, 113, 121, 128– 29, 133–34, 136, 152, 163, 173–74, 193, 199–200; in poetry, 153; La Conga de Lucumí and, 118–19, 122–25; Radio coco and, 125, 155, 210n14 International Amateur Athletics Federation (iaaf), 197 International League, 59, 78–79, 105 International Olympic Committee (ioc), 196–98 invented tradition, 77 Isla de la Juventud, 71, 82 Isla de la Juventud, 81 isleños, 2, 27, 40, 185–86 Italy, 24

Japan, 24, 87, 199 jinetero, 141, 209n1 Johnson, Jack, 55 jonrón, 37, 43; nocout, 36. See also home runs Juantorena, Alberto, 170 Juego de Estrellas, 117 Junior World Series, 78 justice, 102 Key West, 42, 55 kinship, 31–32 Klein, Alan, 14 Knight, Franklin, 26 La Conga de Lucumí, 113, 118–26, 128–29, 131, 134, 173, 175, 190, 200 La Peña Cotorro, 200. See also El Círculo Latinoamericano Lage, Carlos, 108 language of contention, 5, 10, 16, 19, 22, 24–25, 27, 34–35, 77, 102, 135, 137, 140, 145–46, 157, 163, 184–96, 199–200 Latin America, 15 Lefebvre, Henri, 86 Liberal Party, 45 Liga Central, 80 Liga Juvenil, 159, 162 Liga de Zulia, 80 Linares, Abel, 51, 53–54 Linares, Omar, 89, 111, 170 lo ambiente, 67–73, 183, 190, 199, 206n3 localities, 20–21, 187, 190, 196, 200; connections between, 24, 193; production of, 2–3, 15–16, 193–95 lo cubano, 29, 32, 107 López Lemus, Virgilio, 30–31 lo real maravilloso, 25 Los Barbudos, 106 Los Cubanos, 52 Los Médicos de Salsa, 155 Los Metros. See Metropolitanos Los Pequeños Campeones, 174–75 lucha, 162–63, 171–82 Lucumí, 120 MacAloon, John, 68 Maceo, Antonio, 176

Index ≤≥∑

Machado, Gerardo, 57 Macía, Carlito, 142 Macías, Oscar, 117 Maesti, Amado, 18 Maguire, Joseph, 14 Major League Baseball (mlb), 1, 19, 41, 55, 78–80, 96, 118, 197–98, 209n3 Malkki, Liisa, 39 Mambises, 176 Mañach, Jorge, 124 manager: arguments and, 17–19; of Cienfuegos, 63; Castro and, 108; of Havana Sugar Kings, 79; of Industriales, 17, 19, 63; Martín Dihigo and, 56, 59; of Metropolitanos, 155; spectacle and, 115–16. See also Molina, Pedro Manichean ethics, 5, 13, 15, 101, 193 Manning, Max, 56 Maracaná Stadium, 84 Marianao, 81, 130 Marianao, 53 Marichal, Juan, 142 Martí, José, 33, 49, 73, 155, 177 Martí Society, 51 mascot, 118 masculinity, 155–56, 169, 211n3; Latin American, 168 Matanzas, 45, 48, 52, 82 Matanzas, city of, 42–43, 48–49, 133 Matanzas Base Ball Club. See Matanzas Matanzas Baseball Club (Mexico), 50 McGraw, John, 53 media, 2, 16, 20, 66, 75, 85, 112, 146, 157, 187, 195–96; in United States, 2, 90, 96 memory, 26, 37–38, 40, 50, 67, 189 Méndez, Javier, 36 Mendoza y Ponce de León, Samuel, 50 Menendez, Bob (U.S. Representative), 92 Mérida, 50 m¯etis, 166–67 Metropolitanos, 71, 81, 113–14, 131–32, 152–53, 155, 183–84, 205n3 Mexican League, 61, 80 Mexico, 2, 50, 55–57, 59–61, 107, 142; Yucatán, 50 Miami, 2, 31, 40, 119, 200, 210n1 Middle Ages, 7, 9

≤≥∏ index

middle class. See class: middle migration, 26, 30, 37, 39–42, 59, 61, 191, 200 Miller, Ray, 93 Minneapolis Millers, 59, 78, 105, 209n12 Minor Leagues, 61–62, 79 Minoso, Orestes, 60 Miramar, 126 Miranda, Aurelio, 47 Mizuno Corporation, 24, 210n1 modernity, 11–13, 15, 39, 42, 166; Cuban, 52–53; urban, 128 Molina, Pedro, 64–65, 115–16, 153, 156 moral: absolute, 4, 193; artifact, 112; authority, 101, 118, 124, 211n2; bearing, 162; behavior, 118, 164, 206n1; concepts, 29, 40; conviction, 100, 170, 181; education, 48, 169; incentive, 170; judgments, 100; norms, 164; order, 11, 45; as story, 176 Morales, Andy, 89 morality, 12, 45, 100–101; state-based, 3 m26 movement, 172 mulata, 151 narrative, 2, 16, 40, 66, 100–101, 110, 157, 181, 188–89, 191; of Cuban Revolution, 73; cubanidad and, 16, 137–40, 186; experiential tropes of, 97; history as, 27; poetic, 145–46, 156; statebased, 97–100, 104 nation, 3, 23, 77, 93, 150; building, 11, 73, 110; discourse and, 98, 105; as home, 37–40; narrative and, 138; race and, 42; spectacles of, 68, 73–76; as team, 47–48. See also Cuban nation national identity, 30, 33, 42, 70, 98, 140, 157, 191; spectacle and, 67 nation-state, 16, 33, 48, 87, 90, 93, 130, 146, 198, 203n1; community of, 60, 83, 192 Native American, 55 ‘‘Natives,’’ 28, 49 Negro Leagues, 54–56 New Jersey, 92 New Man, 170, 185, 211n5 New York, 49 New York Giants, 51, 53

New York Mets, 113 New York Mutuals, 43 New York Yankees, 53, 113 Nicaragua, 60, 62, 80 nickname, 106, 114, 125; of teams, 130– 31, 156, 209n12, 210n8 nocout, 36, 115–17, 119, 122–23, 183, 207n1 norms, 7, 32, 72, 75, 90, 119, 123–26, 128, 144, 161, 164–65, 190, 198 nostalgia, 16, 189, 206n7, 209n12 Nuevo Hombre. See New Man Occidentales, 81–82 Occidente: as division of Serie Nacional, 81– 82; as geographic region, 133–35 Oliva, Tony, 60, 203n1 Olympics, 82–83, 89, 197, 199, 204n7; Athens, 48, 196, 199; London, 197; Paris, 205n7; Sydney, 199 opec, 108 Orientales, 81 Oriental Horse Racing Track, 53 Orientalism, 13 Oriente: as division of Serie Nacional, 81–82 ; as geographic region, 71, 118, 131, 133–35 Orioles. See Baltimore Orioles orisha, 119–20, 122 Ortega, Daniel, 62 Ortiz, Fernando, 29–30, 32–33, 44 Other, 29, 34, 42, 113, 133; Othered, 112 out por regla, 144 pachanga, 74 Pact of Zanjón, 42, 176, 204n3, 205n6 Padilla, Juan, 17, 133 Palmar de Junco, 48 Palmeiro, Rafael, 142, 209n3 Palmié, Stephan, 34 panadería, 1, 177–80 Pan American Games, 87 Panama, 51, 55, 60, 142 passion, 4, 19, 45, 51, 74, 84, 88, 99– 102, 121, 134, 184, 188, 205n5; of athletes, 130; of fans, 97, 112–13, 128–30, 193; of Revolutionary leaders, 106–7 passion play, 40, 67, 101, 110, 113

patria, 31, 40, 99, 104, 149, 199, 204n1 pelota, 2, 141. See also baseball pelota vasca, 47–48 pelotero, 147 perder disciplina, 164 Pérez, Tany, 142, 203n1 Pérez Roque, Felipe, 108 performance, 68, 70, 75, 115, 119–22, 124, 187–88, 190, 200; athletic, 2, 66, 87, 111; oral, 138; poetic, 152, 154, 156 Periodo Especial, 172 pescadería, 143–44, 155 Philadelphia Athletics, 51 Pinar del Río, 71, 76, 81–82, 111, 113–14, 130, 193 Pinar del Río, 81, 114, 127, 129, 131, 133– 34, 190, 193, 208n11 Pinareño, 129–30 pitén, 2, 184 place, 16, 20–22, 29–31, 33, 37–40, 50, 130; emotional attachment to, 4, 67, 75, 193; stadium as, 74, 128, 203n2 play, 6–7 Playa, 126 Plimpton, George, 37 poems: Honor of the Capital, 152–54; Manifiesto al pais pelotero, 147–50 poetics, 67, 137, 140, 145–46, 152, 156 Pogolotti, Graciella, 29 politics, 74, 98, 104, 137, 156, 193, 204n1; of Cold War, 60, 96; in Cuba, 57, 100– 101, 181, 146, 207n3; cultural, 40, 137; of identity, 19–20; international, 90, 110, 172; state, 11, 73 politics of passion, 4, 35, 76, 87, 100– 101, 157, 187–88, 191–93, 196 por la situación, 143, 209n4 power, 3–5, 14, 22–24, 27, 34, 37, 73, 98–99, 102, 106–7, 134, 195; athletic, 56, 109, 132–33, 165–67; of baseball, 79–80, 137; calidad and, 158–59; of concepts, 22; economic, 54, 83; electrical, 178; of emotion, 15, 52, 67, 87, 193–94, 206n7; masculinity and, 156, 167; military, 83; political, 59, 62, 78, 109, 129, 150–51, 168; of play, 7; production of locality and, 15–16, 21, 30, 98; relations of, 8, 15, 28, 49, 52, 70,

Index ≤≥π

power (continued) 84, 200, 203n6; spiritual, 119–20, 122; of sport, 47, 60, 86, 101; of state, 9–11, 75–76, 82–84, 99, 181, 198 Progreso, 50 Protest in Baraguá, 176 Provincia, 159–60, 164 Puerto Rico, 50–51, 55–57, 197–99 race, 32–33, 42, 54, 57, 113, 121, 133, 196, 204n6, 211n4 Radio coco, 125, 152–55, 210n14 Raton, New Mexico, 61 Regla de Ocho, 119, 208n7 Remedios, 147 respect, 56, 108, 118, 124, 154, 163; disrespect and, 124, 154; ‘‘lack of,’’ 127, 129 revolution, 78 Revolution, the. See Cuban Revolution Revolutionary state, 168, 192–93. See also Cuban state; state Rio de Janeiro, 84 rivalries, 84, 113, 188, 194, 199–200; of fans, 122–25, 129, 190; lo ambiente and, 71; between teams, 71–72, 121, 134–35 Rochester, New York, 79 Roseberry, William, 10, 22 Ruth, ‘‘Babe,’’ 53–54 Saavedra, Francisco, 43, 45 Sabourín, Emilio, 45–47 Said, Edward, 40 Sánchez, Federico, 45 Santana, Pedro Julio, 50 Santería. See Regla de Ocho Santiago. See Santiago de Cuba Santiago de Cuba, 71, 113, 156; fans of, 71 Santiago de Cuba, 49, 130, 134, 190, 200 Scull, Antonio, 132, 209n13 Serie Nacional, 1, 60, 71, 73, 85, 93, 136, 141, 144, 145, 162, 181, 192, 196, 199, 206n3; Radio coco and, 125, 146, 152–55; rivalries in, 128–31, 194; as social drama, 66, 75; as spectacle, 69, 86, 101, 115–18, 126, 184; structure of, 81–84, 113, 189

≤≥∫ index

Serie Selectiva, 82, 189 sexuality, 155–56 Shaughnessy, Frank, 79 Sierra Maestra, 106–7, 109, 176 Sixto de Sola, José, 52 soccer, 15, 84, 138–39; fans of, 207n2; hooliganism and, 112 social drama, 66, 73, 75, 188 socialism, 107, 169 socialist states, 23, 28, 60, 62, 99, 206n6 Soviet bloc, 27, 107, 172 Soviet Union, 27, 83, 108, 177, 186, 206n6, 209n4; U.S. relations with, 91, 107 Spain, 31, 44–45, 48, 87, 150–51, 178–79 Spanish identity, 42 spectacle, 19, 46, 59, 68–70, 104, 173, 181, 204n1, 205n5; Cuban identity and, 51–52; emotion and, 25, 66–67, 86; fans as part of, 112–26, 128–29, 132, 184, 200; kinship and, 32, 204n5; language of contention and, 35, 184– 91; lo ambiente and, 70–71; of the nation, 73–76; organization of, 72; as political discourse, 104–10; sport and, 5, 68, 72, 83–85, 87–88, 90, 138–39, 197; the state and, 76–80, 87, 191–95 spectators, 36, 44, 47, 68–69, 71, 103, 111, 159–62, 179; calidad and, 163–64; as citizens, 75, 105; discourse and, 112, 139, 182, 188; emotions of, 14, 67, 101; fans and, 125–26, 129, 131; lo ambiente and, 190; as producers of identities, 84–87, 191 spectatorship, 3, 87, 111–12 sport, 5–8, 11–16, 22–24, 32, 34, 55, 60– 62, 77–78, 101, 120, 167, 170, 173, 184–85, 191, 203n2, 204n7; emotion and, 67; masculinity and, 168; political use of, 97, 104–6, 109; Revolutionary use of, 168, 170–71; spectacle and, 5, 68, 72, 83–85, 87–88, 90, 138–39, 197 ‘‘sports chatter,’’ 137, 145, 156 state, 16, 48, 82–85, 97–102, 104, 108, 133, 137, 146, 172, 176–78, 181, 185– 89, 192; of baseball, 156; building of, 3, 77–78, 84; leaders of, 104–5, 110;

legitimacy of, 22, 60, 194; o≈cials of, 87, 97, 105, 137, 192; power of, 83, 99, 198; pre-Revolutionary, 33; shaping of citizens and, 168–70, 182, 198; socialist, 96, 131; spectacle and, 72–75, 109, 189, 192–96; theories of, 8–10, 76, 195; transportation, 113; working class youth and, 112 State Department. See U.S. State Department Stevenson, Teófilo, 170 supporters. See fans Tabares, Carlos, 17, 19 Tampa, 42 team colors, 150–51, 207n4, 210n11; blue, 115, 150–52 teammate, 144; baseball, 41, 142, 160–61, 174; concept of, 85–86 television, 85, 87, 103, 117, 128, 157, 174–75, 186; cmq and, 80 Ten Years’ War, 42, 45, 49, 146, 151, 204n3, 205n6 tiempo muerte, 49 Torriente, Cristóbal, 54 transnational, 14–15 transportation, 126–28, 208n10 Troy Haymakers, 43 umpires: arguments with, 17–19, 63–64, 191; as authority, 41, 144; fans and, 65, 117, 139; lo ambiente and, 71. See also Valdés, César United Fruit Company, 45 United States, 2, 14, 26–27, 33, 40, 42– 45, 48–49, 51, 53–57, 59–62, 78–80, 89–90, 92, 102, 109, 146, 177, 197–99, 203n1, 204n2, 206n7, 207n1, 209n12 upper class. See class: upper

Urzáiz Rodríguez, Eduardo, 50 Urzáiz Rodríguez, Fernando, 50 U.S. State Department, 90–91 U.S. media, 90 USSR. See Soviet Union Valdés, César, 94, 96 Valdés, Nelson, 100, 181 Valenciaga, Carlos, 108 Veblen, Thorstein, 6 Vedado, 43 Vedado Tennis Club, 43 Venezuela, 50–51, 55–57, 59–60, 62, 80, 108–10, 142, 187 Venezuelan Revolution, 108 Vietnam, 177 Villa Clara, 71 Villa Clara, 131, 134 Villena Fiengo, Sergio, 139 Violence, 8–9, 50, 57, 101, 112, 164, 182, 207n2 War of Independence, 46, 49 Washington, D.C., 45, 200 Willard, Jesse, 54 Williams, Eric, 26 working class. See class: working World Baseball Classic. See Clásico Mundial de Béisbol (cmb). World Series, 1–2, 91 World University Games, 83 World Youth Games, 83 Yara, 146 Yellow Brigade, 169 Yucatán, 50 Zaldo, Carlos, 43, 45 Zaldo, Teodoro, 43, 45

Index ≤≥Ω

Thomas F. Carter is an anthropologist and senior lecturer at the Chelsea School at the University of Brighton, Eastbourne. He is currently writing a book on the politics of transnational sport migration. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carter, Thomas F. The quality of home runs : the passion, politics, and language of Cuban baseball / Thomas F. Carter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-9223-4253-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4276-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Baseball—Cuba. 2. Baseball—Social aspects—Cuba. I. Title. gv863.25.a1c365 2008 796.357097291—dc22 2008026451