Romancing the diamond

This ballpark set in a dodgy Havana neighborhood is a verdant stage for a timeless play. In the stands, vendors hawked salted peanuts stacked in thin paper funnels, a fistful of the delicious treats costing mere pennies. An attendant poured coffee, black as tar, into paper thimbles. On the field, the players were reckless in their desire to steal another base, score another run, rob a batter of a sure hit. “It was baseball, undiluted, pure and simple,” Krieger said later. “I found it very appealing.”

Baseball back home has been spoiled by greedy sluggers and rapacious owners. Here, players earn a handsome wage by Cuban standards but not so much as to become millionaires far removed from the everyday concerns of their fans. Some players even bicycle to games, looking in their uniforms like overgrown Little Leaguers. Their workplace, the Estadio, is a museum piece, like so much on the island. Krieger felt he had stumbled upon a baseball Shangri-La.

He fell hard for Cuba’s brand of baseball, smitten as though a boyhood crush had blossomed into an unanticipated but irresistibly exotic romance. Wanting to keep the affair alive, his desire to travel to the island was not matched by his salary as a high school teacher. Over time, like a coach contemplating strategy in the late innings, he hit upon an idea that – to his surprise – has made a businessman out of a union man.

Though he readily admits that his “background in business is nil,” Krieger launched a one-man tour company. He felt he could find American fans willing to pay a premium to see the summer game in a forbidden land. “A baseball trip to Cuba,” in his words, “not a trip to Cuba with some baseball.” But how many would visit a land of sun and sin in search of balls and strikes? Who would tour a Caribbean island known for its beaches when the only sand they would see would be the dirt around home plate?

Krieger opened Cubaball Tours in Vancouver four years ago with a $2,000 grubstake and the springtime optimism of a true baseball believer. Not only would he find customers for pelota, as Cubans call baseball, but he also believed they would return home to tell their fellow Americans that Cuba is not the Caribbean gulag described by the exile community in Miami. Perhaps four decades of political tension could be

Kit Krieger is a fast-talking, statistic-spouting, self-deprecating fellow with a penchant for off-the-cuff, over-the-top pronouncements. He makes for entertaining company, especially when the discussion is baseball, about which he has encyclopedic knowledge. However, these idiosyncrasies haven’t been always beneficial to him as president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, an elected post he held for three years, or as head of the teachers’ association in West Vancouver. (An intemperate email of his comparing school trustees with the Gestapo wound up on the front page of The Vancouver Sun. As a respected Holocaust educator, Krieger should have known better.)

He is not without chutzpah. At age 19, while working as a clubhouse attendant for the Vancouver Mounties baseball club, he talked management into letting him pitch the final game of the 1968 season. The stunt could have been a farce, as the Pacific Coast League was a competitive circuit just a level below the major leagues. Krieger pitched well, surrendering just one run in three innings in what would be his only professional appearance. (As clubhouse boy he had to wash the laundry of the players he faced during the game.) His pitching career, odd and brief as it was, lends him a certain cachet in baseball circles.

On a humid March morning in Havana, the third Cubaball expedition gathers at the Hotel Armadores de Santander. The hotel is the harborside mansion of a shipping magnate recently renovated into deluxe accommodation, such as it is in a former Soviet client state. Among those on the tour are a high-school guidance counsellor from New Jersey; the grieving daughter of a Negro League ballplayer fulfilling her father’s dying wish to return to Cuba; a married couple from Cincinnati who call themselves Reagan Republicans and another couple who are New York Democrats; and a father and son whose shared love for the game was not diminished when an arm injury in college prematurely ended the son’s pursuit of a major-league spot.

Each has paid a steep US$1,999. They have flown here from Toronto, Vancouver, Veracruz and the Bahamas, their luggage loaded with medical supplies and baseball equipment to be donated to non-governmental groups as a condition of a licence issued by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control. The Canadians on tour need only a tourist visa, although they too, are lugging bats, balls, gloves, shin pads and catcher’s masks.

Joining them is 85-year-old Monte Irvin, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The seventh of 11 children – his Alabama sharecropper father was named Cupid, after all – Irvin grew up to become one of the great Negro League players of his age, a versatile athlete whose contemporaries thought would be chosen to integrate the major leagues. (As it turned out, Jackie Robinson got the nod in 1947.) Two seasons later, Irvin joined the New York Giants. He had spent the previous two winters playing baseball in Havana, finding in Cuba a place where he could join whites on the baseball diamond, as well as at the supper table. He has not been back since.

Despite this history of racial equality, the Cuban government shows little interest in preserving the island’s legacy of professional baseball before the 1959 revolution. Castro, who famously was photographed playing pelota as a member of the rebel pickup team Los Barbudos (The Bearded Ones), is not nostalgic for the era of what he has called “slave baseball” in which wealthy owners traded players like chattel. The commandante’s version of pelota revolucionaria has the best Cuban players wearing the uniform of the province of their birth. (Imagine a National Hockey League with Wayne Gretzky skating for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Mario Lemieux for the Montreal Canadiens, and Joe Sakic for the Vancouver Canucks.) The quality of play is high; Cuba uses sport in general and baseball in particular to showcase its Communist system on the world stage.

Irvin was fortunate in his choice of guide for his return to Cuba after a 55-year hiatus. By default, Krieger has become a bridge between pre- and post-revolutionary baseball. He also happens to be a lifelong fan of the Giants, Irvin’s old team. Krieger family lore is imbued with tales of Giant greatness: as a girl, Krieger’s mother lived across the hall from slugger Mel Ott and a distant cousin once patrolled the outfield for the Giants. To escort Irvin in Cuba is for Krieger akin to being an opera aficionado touring Milan with Toscanini.

The tour’s schedule includes six games in seven days, with a road trip to Pinar del Rio in the west where the local team was once known as the Tobacco Cowboys. An overnight journey is made to sleepy Sancti Spiritus amidst sugar-cane fields in the east. Here, at Estadio Jose A. Huelga, named for a star pitcher killed in a car wreck in 1974, the concrete grandstand is filled by a noisy and youthful crowd. As it turns out, they’re not so much interested in baseball as in each other, spending the warm evening flirting in the stands and promenading along the aisles.

Those dedicated baseballistas among them cheer the home side, taunt the Habana opponents and jeer the umpires at every opportunity. They ring cowbells, honk trumpets, bang guitars, blow into shells. Vendors carry a limited supply of treats – jamon y queso sandwiches, fried dough dusted with sugar, cones of salted peanuts. At the end of the fifth inning, two women bring coffee to the umpires and stand patiently with their trays as the arbiters sip their mid-game pick-me-up.

Like every ballpark, Estadio has peculiarities – a lighted foul pole, ‘Home Club’ painted in English on a dugout, bullpens beyond the outfield fence containing actual bulls. The arrival of a mascot at home plate delights the foreigners. Yellow-feathered, red-combed, the rooster wearing the uniform of the Cuban national team bears a curious resemblance to the San Diego Chicken. “Look, it’s the Santiago Chicken,” someone quips. The game slipping away from the home side, the rooster takes his head off to peck at home plate, as though casting some weird voodoo spell. “No, it’s the Santeria Chicken,” another tour member says, a joking reference to the island’s unique Catholic-Yoruba religion.

No programs or souvenirs are for sale; after the game, the more enterprising on tour slip American greenbacks to the players in exchange for caps and uniforms.

The six-hour bus ride back to Havana along Highway A1, a divided route on which one occasionally passes donkey carts traveling against the flow of traffic, provides a chance to play Vivo o Muerto?, a game about the mortal status of old ballplayers. “Milt Pappas?” Krieger asks. Thumbs go up and thumbs go down. “Gimpy Pappas is alive.” Several players are eliminated. “Smokey Burgess?” Lots of thumbs down. Dead. And on it goes, fueled by Bucanero, a cerveza bottled as a joint venture between a Cuban brewer and Canada’s Labatt Breweries. Krieger presents the eventual winner a US$12 tourist replica of Castro’s black-and-red revolutionary banner.

The air-conditioned, Brazilian-made, 30-seat bus with toilet and cooler is a mobile forum for freewheeling political discussion. Manuel Yepe, a former diplomat whose peace group hosted this year’s tour, recounts his experiences as a revolutionary with Castro’s July 26th Movement. At one point, a debate between a Los Angeles filmmaker and the tour’s Cuban guide, no Castro apologist but a fierce Cuban nationalist, threatens to become ugly. Krieger steps in. “In the United States,” he explains, “we have an election and we make leader” – pause – “whoever comes second.” Laughter defuses the tension.

Politics is an inescapable part of Cuban life, even if discussion often takes place in code. Krieger calls himself a social democrat and a Trudeau Liberal, a believer in Canada’s mixed economy where government provides social services while private business is allowed to flourish. He has enough contact with Cuban citizens to appreciate their concealed animosity about current conditions, economic and political, but also feels Cubans are not eager to return to the days when the island was an American-owned subsidiary. His is a delicate balancing act with plenty of parties – his Cuban hosts, American officials, the exile community, pro-Castro support groups – ready to take offence.

The road trips are too grueling for Irvin. He put in enough time on buses in his playing days and prefers to stay in Havana. He rejoins the group for two emotional visits: the delivery of the tour group’s donated baseball equipment to a youth team at the Sports City complex, and a reunion with Conrado (Connie) Marrero.

Known as El Guajiro – The Hillbilly – in his native land, Marrero’s command of a slider and junk pitches earned him five seasons with the Washington Senators of the American League. A 1951 profile in Life magazine dubbed him the ‘Slow Ball Señor’. Marrero made his big-league debut four days before his 39th birthday, a rookie at an age when many players have long since retired.

Cubaball rediscovered Marrero, an old-timer lost in a Cold War time warp. Even as former teammates in the United States reap the financial benefits of selling autographs at baseball-card shows, the 93-year-old Marrero lives in modest circumstances in an unadorned room in his sister’s Havana apartment. Thrilled to be visited by die-hard American baseball fans in a room beneath the grandstand at the Estadio Latinoamericano, he’s also pleased to earn a few dollars signing collectibles.

When the former Almendares teammates are reunited, Marrero tells Irvin in Spanish, “Baseball in Cuba is life itself,” stabbing at the air with a cigar for emphasis. The Hall of Famer is so thrilled by his experience, he wants to invite Negro League star Buck O’Neill and Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe next year. The old-timers might prove an irresistible lure for other fans to join the tour. However, presenting octogenarian celebrities in the equivalent of a baseball petting zoo is not Krieger’s ambition.

Cubaball has been barely a break-even proposition, despite long hours of organization and negotiation. He has earned much reward in anecdote and memory, but blessed little in cash. “I haven’t made any money yet and I suspect I won’t until I’m done with teaching,” Krieger says. At 55, retirement is still at least three years away.

It is something of a miracle his company has lasted even this long. A trip was canceled in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11; the U.S. government has since toughened a travel embargo on its
citizens visiting Cuba; Cuban authorities remain suspicious about the intentions of American baseball visitors at a time when top Cuban players defect for the millions offered by major league teams. And what future does Cubaball face when its star attraction is a former junk-ball pitcher pushing the century mark who smokes a half-dozen cigars a day?

Just how long Castro’s regime will last also remains a puzzle. Should the system collapse, domestic baseball talent will surely be snapped up by agents and major-league clubs. Those players and their families will benefit, but it will end nearly a half-century of baseball whose charms attracted Krieger and others. In the future, perhaps Cubans will only be able to see their best compatriots on television, instead of in person at the old ballpark in a dodgy neighborhood.

As a business venture, Cubaball is at the mercy of political events outside Krieger’s control. He now realizes his field of dreams at the Estadio Latinoamericano is “not as fancy” as he first thought. The poor lighting at the stadium hide the harsher reality evident in daylight – the field is bumpy and pockmarked, not quite the oasis of memory.

One of Krieger’s favorite stops on the tour is at the sprawling city of the dead at Cementerio de Colon in Havana. Homage is paid at an ossuary erected long ago by the Christian Association of Players, Umpires and Managers of Professional Baseball. Neglected after the revolution, the marble structure had fallen into disrepair. Krieger has since helped raise funds for a refurbishment.

“Kit,” a tour member teases, “are you going to be interred here?”

“That’s a matter of debate in my family,” he replies. “My wife says ‘sooner’ and I say ‘later.’”