The country’s still standing, but weary of standing still
Bob Beatty
| Topeka Capital-Journal
Editor’s note: Bob Beatty, Washburn University professor of political science, recently spent 10 days in Cuba researching the country’s history, economy and culture. While most Americans are banned by the U.S. government from traveling to this communist nation, Beatty and other academics who study Cuba are allowed to travel to the island.
In October 1959, a new TV program called “The Twilight Zone” aired an episode titled “Walking Distance” in which a world-weary character named Martin Sloan sets off on foot down a road and finds himself transported back in time. On my trip to Cuba last month — visiting the capital, Havana, along with the eastern town of Santiago de Cuba — I felt like Sloan, arriving in a place where time had seemingly passed it by.
Like Sloan, I set off on foot, down the Malecon, or sea walkway, fronting Havana, and found myself confronting Cuba’s past and stalled future. Interestingly enough, my walk never took me too far away from America either.
THE CUBAN PEOPLE
The first thing one notices is the Cuban people. Like America’s, Cuba’s is diverse, with about 37 percent white, 11 percent black and the rest mixed race. Unlike the people of North Korea, another isolated communist state, Cubans don’t glare at visiting Americans but instead are happy to chat and share a story, laugh or a song. One writer has called the Cuban people “pathologically sociable.”
As I walk, I find a man sitting on the wall playing an instrument. He isn’t a busker; there is no hat out for money. He is exactly what he seems to be, a man playing a horn on a seawall. We have a talk in Spanglish, and eventually he strokes his chin (the signal for Fidel Castro) and says life has been difficult in recent years due to shortages of things like soap, toilet paper and cooking oil.
Cuba is a country of extreme scarcity. I see this more prominently when I visit Santiago de Cuba, where a long line appears outside of a government shop.
“We will wait in line all day,” a man tells me, “just so we can wipe our bottoms.”
The horn-player on the Malecon tells me something I heard repeatedly in Cuba from all kinds of folks. He says Fidel and Raul Castro blame the economic crisis and shortages on the U.S. embargo and “U.S. meddling,” which appeals to Cuban pride and works to bolster support for the regime. He explains to me, as if I was thick-headed, that if the embargo were gone, the Cuban government would have to be responsible for the bad economic conditions, rather than shifting blame to anyone else.
MEMORIALS, MONUMENTS
Leaving my new friend behind, I walk further along until I arrive at an amazing memorial: The masts of the USS Maine, a U.S. battleship sunk (by unknown cause) in Havana Harbor in 1898, an event which the American press whipped into the Spanish American War. The war brought Cuban independence from Spain, but also intense U.S. intervention in Cuba for decades to come.
Later, in Santiago de Cuba, I visit a series of monuments at the top of San Juan Hill, commemorating the famous charge of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. Fortunately, the Cubans have preserved these monuments. When the inevitable day comes that Americans can freely travel to Cuba, they will serve as an important history lesson for Americans who know almost nothing about the war that firmly placed the United States in the international arena.
Walking past the USS Maine memorial, I come upon a long, narrow park that leads up to a giant stage flanked by hundreds of flagpoles. Called Anti-Imperialism Plaza, this is the place where Fidel Castro has made anti-American speeches because it is in front of the former U.S. Embassy, now reduced to the U.S. Interests Section.
Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, this plaza serves to transport one back to the depths of the Cold War, with both the United States. and Cuba dutifully playing now anachronistic roles. For its part, the United States ignores basic modernization theory (which clearly has shown that engagement with repressive governments, rather than isolation, best promotes economic, social and even political change) and bans almost all U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba, while also keeping in place economic sanctions first begun more than 50 years ago.
On the other side, Cuba under the leadership of Fidel Castro and now his brother Raul holds fast to a political and economic system almost completely under state control, even when most others — such as the USSR, China, and Vietnam — long since abandoned the idea that such a system was even remotely desirable.
As I walk past the plaza, I notice an odd assortment of cars on the streets. Many of the cars in Cuba are pre-1959 American Chevys, Buicks, Fords and Plymouths. Some appear almost ready to disintegrate, while others look brand new. Pre-revolution, Cuba was the largest importer of American cars, and since then ordinary Cubans have worked hard to keep them running, often earning extra income as taxi drivers. In Santiago de Cuba, I would see these cars as well, but also pickup trucks being used for buses and horse-drawn carts being used for taxis.
BASEBALL, CUBAN CULTURE
Continuing down the Malecon, I spot a dilapidated sports stadium, run down and in disrepair after its former glory of hosting the 1991 Pan American Games. But something is happening on the battered field inside that would catch my eye no matter where I was.
I cross the street, dodge a 1953 Buick and feel a sense of great joy: I was right. It is a pickup baseball game. No umpires, no coaches, no parents, no backstop, one ball, one bat, about six gloves and T-shirts as bases, but the players, age 7 to 17, don’t seem to care. And so yet another remarkable aspect of Cuba arises: The national pastime of this declared “enemy” of the United States is … baseball.
Baseball was introduced to Cuba in the 1860s, and when the Spanish banned it on the island in 1869 (people were skipping bullfights to attend baseball games), the game came to be a symbol of freedom and independence in Cuban culture.
Teams and leagues thrived on the island, with American Negro League players playing in Cuba since they were banned in the U.S. major leagues, light-skinned Cubans going over to play in the United States, and major league teams even holding spring training in Havana. In 1920, Babe Ruth played in Cuba but was outhit by the great Cuban slugger Cristobal Torriente. Ruth stayed in the Plaza Hotel in Havana, suite 216, and today they’ll be happy to rent out the room to you if you ask.
After 1959, the revolutionary government chose baseball to be a symbol of success and of socialist egalitarianism. So the pre-revolution professional baseball league was disbanded, replaced by amateur leagues and a national team that could compete at the highest level of international competition.
The current incarnation of Cuban baseball is a 16-team league that plays a 90-game schedule from November to March. From this league is culled a national team that features some of the best players in the world. One American scout has estimated that there could be “$500 million worth of talent” in Cuba. It’s not hard to believe: Cuban defector Aroldis Chapman signed a $30 million contract with the Cincinnati Reds just last year.
I attended several Cuban League games and was struck by several things. First, the quality of baseball is quite high, and so is the fan knowledge and enthusiasm. Cubans are passionate about baseball, so much so that there’s a section of Central Park in Havana called the Hot Corner, where every day baseball fans gather to discuss and argue about teams and players. This same sort of passion is evident at games, where fans gather around the salsa band in the stands to sing and cheer (and heckle) their teams throughout the game.
Something is also glaringly absent from Cuban games: consumerism. The players make the same salaries as ordinary Cubans (about $25 a month), and teams don’t bother about generating revenue since baseball is considered the “people’s sport.” Thus, Cubans pay about 10 cents to get in and find a place in the “open seating” grandstand. The most passionate fans sit closest to the action.
There is no souvenir stand and no concession stand. If you’re lucky, you can flag down a woman selling a bag of peanuts for 2 cents a bag. But for the thousands of fans who flock to Cuban baseball, it’s the game that draws their attention.
One result of keeping money out of sports is to lessen the distance between the players and the fans. Most of the players are as poor as the people who are watching them. For anything above their salaries, they depend on the goodwill of the fans. After the games, players will sign autographs and chat about the game before the team bus departs.
Cuba’s dire economic situation serves to make Cuban baseball seem even more old-fashioned. To save on electricity, most games are played during the day, and to save on costs, spectators are asked to return foul balls to the field. This latter requirement led to a spectacle I witnessed where a Santiago de Cuba fan, upset at his pitcher’s performance, grabbed a foul ball, kissed it and yelled, “Maybe this will help!” and threw it directly back to the pitcher. Since spitballs aren’t allowed, the pitcher looked at the fan, shook his head and threw the ball to the umpire.
Young people seem closely entwined in Cuban baseball. Adjacent to the stadiums were smaller ballparks for youth teams to use, so both inside and outside the Cuban stadiums were kids, some in cobbled-together uniforms, of all ages, playing and watching ballgames. One stadium in Havana was the center of an entire baseball complex, with multiple games going on while the “major league” game was held in the big stadium. As a baseball fan, to watch a game with a bunch of teenagers for two hours and not have one of them pull out a cell phone was a unique experience.
MOVING FORWARD
In some ways, Cuban baseball exemplifies the conundrum of modern-day Cuba. There is an innate beauty to the baseball experience hidden beneath the endless trappings of money. For Americans and other visitors, Cuba is a chance to step back into a past most of us never experienced but have been told was a simpler, nicer and better time in this country. Oddly enough, the actual successes of the Cuban revolution — an excellent health care and education system and little distance between the haves and the have-nots (because almost all are have nots) — reinforces that sugar-coated nostalgic cultural memory.
The argument is that America was once like that but moved on, and life became more consumer-oriented, more fast-paced, and the narrative is that we lost part of ourselves in the process. As Terence Mann says in the baseball movie, “Field of Dreams,” “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again.”
This 1989 movie is all about baseball as a yearning metaphor for the day when, allegedly, life was not so complicated and baseball players played not for the money but for the “thrill of the grass,” with one character exclaiming, “I would have played for nothing!” But that wasn’t necessarily true in pre-1959 America, and it’s not necessarily true in 2011 Cuba.
When I talked to Cubans, I did hear a distinct pride in what the 1959 revolution had accomplished. For many of them, Cuba stepped out from under the thumb of U.S. domination, and during the Cold War-era, Cuba’s influence in international sports and politics was vastly disproportionate with its small population. But the world changed when the Soviet Union fell, and Cuba hasn’t changed with it.
Many Cubans are frustrated with the lack of economic and political freedoms in their country, but they also fear the possible chaos and American domination that they think could ensue with massive change. They feel poor, frustrated and stuck.
I ended my walk along the Malecon by returning to the Hotel Nacional (where Al Capone, Ernest Hemingway and Jayne Mansfield once stayed) and prepared to leave. But I was thinking about America and Cuba and, yes, Sloan. At the end of “Walking Distance,” Sloan is told by his father that he must leave, that there’s “only one summer to every customer. … You’ve been looking behind you, Martin. Try looking ahead.”
It looks as if Cuba is at a crucial moment, and there will be some economic reforms and changes coming in the near future as Fidel Castro fades from the scene. But America, too, has to move and allow the Cubans to make changes not because the United States told them to, but because it comes from themselves. In short, like Sloan’s father implored to his son, we too have to let go.
As famed political journalist Walter Lippman wrote in 1959: “For the thing we should never do in dealing with revolutionary countries, in which the world abounds, is to push them behind an iron curtain raised by ourselves. On the contrary, even when they have been seduced and subverted and are drawn across the line, the right thing to do is to keep the way open for their return.”
Source link : https://www.cjonline.com/story/lifestyle/2011/03/12/cuba-treasures-land-scarcity/16473883007/
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Publish date : 2011-03-12 03:00:00
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