A liberal discovers Elián's hell through sports.
By Roman Martinez, an editor at the Harvard Salient. National Review. NRO Weekend, August 12-13, 2000
Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports, by S.L. Price (288p, Ecco Press)
The Elián Moment has come and gone and Cuban-American politics in the United States will never be the same. Already the House of Representatives has done the unthinkable, voting to end long-standing trade restrictions on food, medicine, and even tourism to Cuba. To an exile community for
whom the embargo has long served as sacred banner, the upshot of the Elián fiasco has been nothing short of disastrous.
But the embargo's demise is not the most important — or even disturbing — repercussion of Elián's brief visit. The real tragedy was not so much the result (about which reasonable people can disagree) but the way in which the key issues were framed in the American mind. Freedom
vs. totalitarianism? Cold War redux? Hardly. Rather, an absent-minded public in an unideological age, egged on by re-energized apologistas for Castro's revolution, paid little thought to the impact that growing up under Communism would have on Elián's well-being. Most saw the standoff as an
open-and-shut case for family reunification, politics be damned. In a situation without any easy answers, it's a shame Americans were unwilling to explore one of the really important questions: What is life in Fidel Castro's Cuba actually like?
An answer to this query now hails from an unlikely source, a new book examining one seemingly apolitical dimension of Cuban society — its sporting life. In Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports, S. L. Price writes engagingly of his travels throughout the island and
encounters with the past and present heroes of Cuban athletics. Frustrated with the high salaries and spoiled antics of our own athletes, he first looked to Cuba as an antidote to the crass materialism surrounding American sports. Like countless unsuspecting liberals over the past century, Price
was seduced by the promise of revolutionary utopia abroad — only this time an athletic, not political, utopia, a "sports purist's delight," he writes in his prologue, where "athletes play for little more than love of the game."
Cuba's athletic prowess — despite a population of only 11 million, it regularly dominates world competition in baseball and boxing — is well known, and as a senior writer with Sports Illustrated and former columnist for the Miami Herald, Price has witnessed its international
achievements firsthand. He is also aware, of course (if only vaguely) of the ruthless political repression which has plagued the island for decades under Communist rule. But like many Americans attempting to make sense of the Elián situation, Price once thought it possible to compartmentalize
Cuban life, to reconcile the harsh realities of its political system with the wholesome purity that draws him to its sporting life. His book tells the story of how he came to know better.
Price's journey begins, appropriately enough, in Miami, where he watches the first American press conference of defecting Cuban pitcher Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez. El Duque's tale is a sad one: suspected of desiring to follow in the footsteps of his brother Livan (a recent defector
and star pitcher in his own right), he was banned from Cuban baseball for life by the government. Forbidden from ever setting foot on an official ball field, El Duque was assigned to duty as an orderly at a Havana psychiatric hospital. For a superstar pitcher — perhaps Cuba's best ever —
at the zenith of his career, there was only one option: Escape. And so he did, landing in Miami in 1998 after a dangerous journey aboard a 25-foot motorboat. He would eventually go on to lead the New York Yankees to World Series glory the following year.
But for all the drama behind this Cinderella story, Price's idealized vision of Cuba keeps him oddly ambivalent: "I applaud Duque's escape," he writes, "but I'd rather see him pitch in Havana." With that beginning, neatly framing his own mixed feelings (what he calls his "unseemly
standoff between head and heart") about the interplay between politics and sports in Cuban society, Price departs for Havana himself.
He soon encounters an oddball cast of Cuba's great athletes of years gone by. There's boxer Teofilo Stevenson, the Cuban Muhammad Ali who struck Olympic heavyweight gold three times in 1972, '76, and '80. Now middle-aged, Stevenson spends his days sleeping, drinking double-rums, and granting
interviews to reporters willing to pay for his meals. In an interview monitored by Cuba's National Institute of Sports, Physical Education, and Recreation, he lashes out at defecting athletes, telling Price they should be grateful to the regime for all it has given them. When he finishes, he turns
to Olga, the government representative. "How'd I do?" the boxer asks.
Another defender of the regime is Ana Fidelia Quirot, Cuba's best-known female athlete and among the top 800-meter runners in the world. After a kerosene stove exploded in her face in 1993, ravaging 40 percent of her skin and threatening to end her career, Quirot battled back, eventually winning
two world championships and a gold medal in the 1996 Olympics. Named after Fidel himself, she is apparently Castro's favorite athlete.
And for good reason. Unlike Price's countless other interviewees, who spout the party line as if by rote, Quirot is the genuine article, a true believer in a revolution whose aims and slogans have long seemed to ordinary Cubans like nothing more than a series of cruel jokes. "I'd rather
have the CDR watching me so that my children grow up mentally and physically, so I can sleep well," she says, referring to the Committees for Defense of the Revolution, 80,000 of which exist throughout the country to report any signs of "counter-revolutionary" dissent or resistance to
the government. "I'd rather have the CDR watching all day long than live in a society like [the United States]."
The portrait Price paints of Cuba's greatest athletes — men and women who, like Stevenson and Quirot, once stood at the pinnacle of the sporting world as symbols of strength, courage, determination, and defiance — is at once ironic and sad. In spite of their triumphs, their almost
larger than life feats of athletic prowess, all are driven to cower before the specter of the state. Even the more independent-minded among them are sapped of their dignity. The ferocious boxer Hector Vinent, for instance, is reduced to pleading with Price for American dollars. The same is true for
Lazaro Valle, along with El Duque the greatest pitcher in Cuban history. No longer allowed to play for Cuba's national team, he is caught in what Price calls a "depressing limbo — in need of cash but unable to go overseas, officially retired but still capable of pitching, in love with his
life and unsure he can keep it together." He isn't alone.
Pitching Around Fidel offers a devastating look at the regime's influence over everyday sporting life. The methods of state control are astounding, almost unbelievable: children as young as eight years old routinely sent off to state-run athletic training schools; grown men rented out by the
state to foreign baseball teams, their salaries deposited in Castro's coffers; athletes forced to denounce defecting friends and relatives in order to be allowed to compete. Price's message is clear — in a country where baseball stadiums are named after North Vietnamese generals and political
informants act as the first line of talent scouts, nothing can be divorced from politics. The regime even has an official line on which Cuban pitcher was the best ever to take the mound.
The book's strength lies in the fresh perspective it brings to the study of Cuban society. Politicians and intellectuals, of course, have long viewed Cuba as a sort of ideological signpost, separating left-liberals and their support for the island's healthcare system from conservative
anti-Communists and their revulsion at Castro's dictatorship. But as a sports reporter, Price carries little ideological baggage of his own. And so he starts off from the vantage point shared by most Americans when considering issues such as Elián's fate and the future of the embargo.
What's impressive about Price's book is his willingness to change his mind. Originally hopeful that the sporting life could be effectively decoupled from the uglier, political side of Cuban society, Price comes to understand the true meaning of totalitarianism — control over every aspect of
government and civil society, every outlet for individual creativity or achievement, even one so ostensibly apolitical as sports. His dream for Cuban athletics eventually collapses into a nightmare. As he writes in his postscript, "For methe game is over. Castro's country is a place best seen
as a tourist, for from the distance of a decent hotel room it is easy to succumb to its charms. You can enjoy the passionate fans and frenetic play, admire the skill, revel in the Cuban athlete's palpable joy, and allow yourself the luxury of wondering if this is the way sports were meant to be. But
I'm no good for that anymore. I've talked to too many men and women not to understand that the regime will, at the slightest sign of independence, grind even its greatest lives into powder. I left Cuba in December knowing too much and, worse, knowing that there are plenty who love a romanticized
vision of Cuba too dearly to listen."
What Price has learned is that, like it or not, politics matters. It's a conclusion that shouldn't surprise Americans, who have fought to "make the world safe for democracy" time and again over the last century. But alas, it's the key point that the hyperactive Send-Elian-Home! crowd —
with their incessant demand that "politics be taken out of it" — never quite fully grasped. It's a shame Price's book wasn't published a few months sooner.
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The book at Amazon.com
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