By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on August 17, 2023
supporters and baseball fans cheer on the Cuban team in Williamsport, PA. photo: Cheryl LaBash
Cuban children traveled for the first time to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to participate in the Little League Baseball World Series, which has been held since 1947 and which was hostage, like so many events in the United States, to the rigors of the Cold War.
This Wednesday the game was played between the Caribbean team and the Japanese team with players whose ages range from eight to 12 years old. Half of Cuba has been watching these boys, because baseball (without accent, as it is said in good Cuban and has been accepted by the Royal Spanish Academy) is an element of national identity that moves passions and is considered a cultural heritage on the island, with turns of phrase in popular speech that everyone born in Cuba recognizes and uses: “they put him on three and two”, “they caught him swinging”, “stay still on base” or “he doubled for third”, which serves both to describe a daring action and to refer to a person who is dying.
There has been no musician, painter, writer or poet indifferent to baseball, as the national sport is known, which arrived in Cuba in the early 19th century with the intense traffic of sailors and emigrants from the north who disembarked in Cuban ports. After the war of independence against the Spanish metropolis, baseball even became a symbol of the future aspirations of a modern Cuba, now detached from colonialism.
Baseball is also the least belligerent area and the one that has favored the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States during the hard years of the blockade. With Trump in the White House, the friendly games are over and the possibility of an agreement between the Major Leagues and the Cuban Baseball Federation (FCB), forged in the Obama era, which would allow the hiring of baseball players from the island to play in the U.S., died. But the shared enthusiasm for the sport, a subway thread that unites the two shores, has remained unchanged despite political differences and the icy airs of Washington.
Yet it has taken 76 years for the islanders to reach the celebrated children’s competitions dreamed of by little leagues formed in 80 countries. When recently the authorities of this World Series were encouraged to invite the Cubans to send a team to represent them in Pennsylvania, there were hundreds of school competitions all over Cuba. Winning the championship was the team from Bayamo, a city in the island’s Oriente, made up of 12 children and three coaches who attended the official opening of the games in Williamsport on a float with Cuban flags, which received a standing ovation as it passed by. “Welcome to Pennsylvania, it was a long road to get here!” the official Little League World Series account celebrated on Twitter.
In yesterday’s game, the Cubans lost to the Japanese who have won 11 times this world league. In this series, the team that does not win in the first game is eliminated. However, the feeling is not one of defeat. The warm welcome in Pennsylvania, the ovations and the expressions of respect and solidarity towards the visitors, contrasts with the deplorable spectacle experienced by the Cuban ballplayers, some of them emigrants, during the World Baseball Classic held in Miami last March.
The millions of baseball fans were shocked by the aggressiveness in Miami’s Loan Depot Park stadium, which turned into a madhouse of verbal and graphic violence against the players wearing the Cuban national jersey, with the complicity of the local authorities. Instead of punishing the government in Havana, as those who planned this political provocation intended, what happened generated such indignation in Cuba that the feeling of redress was one of the variables that favored the massive turnout for the national elections on the island, held a week after the game, on March 26.
Cuba and Japan congratulate each other at the end of the game.
The beauty of baseball is that no one has to give up what their childhood and environment has made them. Being different is recognized, too, because the same rules apply to everyone when they face each other on the field. That is why it backfired on the ultra-right groups in Miami, a city hijacked by people entrenched in hatred against Cuba, an ideological Mecca of wild right-wingers who forget that baseball is much more than a multitudinous spectacle where a jersey is defended: it is affective memory, education, identity, shared culture, worship and commitment.
Fortunately, Pennsylvania proves, once again, that Miami is not the United States.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English