Baseball has always represented a generous and common space between the United States and Cuba. It has connected Cubans and Americans not only in sport and spectacle, but also through culture, race, religion, politics, geography, and history.
In the wake of the December 17th announcement of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States –the day of Saint Lazarus-Babalú Ayé—it is fitting to recall the notion of “ping pong diplomacy” that a Financial Times journalist defined in the context of U.S. relations with China. In an article for Americas Quarterly, this analyst went on to talk about Cuba and “baseball diplomacy” as another space for contact that has surely contributed to the current rapprochement. The prime example is the well-known exchange between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team in 1999, which Luke Albee, then chief of staff to Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, has recalled as a consequential event in his long and seasoned career in politics: he is now a senior advisor for Engage Cuba – a bi-partisan coalition that lobbies Congress for a definitive change in U.S. Cuba policy. Another game between the Cuban baseball team and the Orioles has been announced for 2015, furthering once again the goals of international diplomacy, now within a new international scenario.[1]
In U.S. Cuba relations, baseball has not been the only sport invested with diplomatic meaning. The always-elitist golf provided a space for the relationship in April 1959. Just a few weeks after the revolutionary victory, Fidel Castro traveled to the U.S. where he was trailed by the press and by crowds of people, and received by Vice President Richard Nixon on behalf of President Eisenhower (Let’s recall that Nixon had rubbed shoulders with Batista, and had also been jeered in Caracas at the OAS one year earlier). In a barely concealed slight, Eisenhower had decided to go play golf in Georgia instead, in a clumsy gesture of misplaced pride, interpreted as such by all of Latin America. This gesture, which could be called “Golf Anti-Diplomacy,” ominously foreshadowed the political differences that emerged between the brilliant revolutionary government and its powerful neighbor to the North. Before long, Golf Anti-Diplomacy was again at play when Fidel Castro, together with Ernesto Che Guevara and other officials, played and posed for the cameras on the golf course at Colinas de Villarreal, East of Havana, in their olive-green uniforms and military boots. It was an obvious reference to the earlier diplomatic dispute, and a satire of the pro-North American bourgeoisie.
As an aside, there are numerous images that link Fidel Castro to baseball, including those recording his frequent visits to the stadium at El Cerro, in Havana, and those in New York, bat in hand, along with North American journalists and U.S. Representative José Serrano. There are others, such as those taken by his personal photographer Pablo Caballero in the summer of 1974, when Fidel sports a Cuban national team uniform with “F. Castro” inscribed on his back and practicing pitches in a palm grove. Or those at a game with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 2002 in Havana, or later in 2011, where he can be seen signing a ball for a smiling Carter.
Baseball has been omnipresent within Cuba and U.S. relations. In a series of articles about the rapprochements and misunderstandings that characterized these, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offers an account of his uncle and father’s politics toward Cuba and their deployment of collaborators and unofficial envoys in the stormy 1960s. It is from these accounts that I take the following excerpt, which I find of great interest in terms of understanding how the intersection of sport and politics shape public opinion: “James Donovan, a New York Lawyer, and John Nolan, a friend and counselor to my father Robert Kennedy . . . developed a cordial friendship with Castro with whom they traveled throughout the Cuba. In addition to a tour of the Bay of Pigs battleground, Fidel Castro took them to so many baseball games that Nolan swore to never again watch that sport, or so he said.” It was when they entered baseball stadiums, that they witnessed the spontaneous standing ovations Castro received. Thus both visitors were able to confirm internal CIA reports about the leader’s immense popularity with the Cuban people.
Cuban historians Elier Ramírez and Esteban Morales have singled out July 9, 1975, as a particularly important moment. Then, “confidential conversations between the two parties were resumed in Suite 727 of the Pierre Hotel in New York, with plans to exchange opinions on topics that could be discussed as part of the process of normalization of relations. On this occasion, representation of the United States fell to Lawrence S. Eagleburger and William D. Rogers” (the latter, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Relations). On the subject of normalizing relations between the two countries, they noted that: “the government of the United States recognized the most recent gestures by Cuba and was ready to allow the celebration of a baseball game between both teams in support of the act that was to take place in San José, Costa Rica: the lifting of sanctions imposed on Cuba in 1964 by the Organization of American States.”[2]
This is why the question “Shall we play ball?” is a fitting subtitle for the book Debating Cuba-United States Relations published by Cuban American political scientist Jorge I. Domínguez along with Cuban political scientist Rafael Hernández in 2011, as relations began to thaw. Baseball is has long been present in the imaginary of both nations.
NOTES
[1] Perhaps a precedent of sports diplomacy was the presence of international chess players, including the Cuban José Raúl Capablanca, in the Moscow Chess Tournament of 1925, thereby breaking the boycott against the young Bolshevik Revolution in what could be considered an instance of “Chess Diplomacy.”
[2] Elier Ramírez and Esteban Morales. De la confrontación a los primeros intentos de “normalización”. La política de los Estados Unidos hacia Cuba (Editorial Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 2014, p. 105).
Translated by the Editors from the original Spanish
This article is based on a talk delivered at Tulane University on September 11, 2015.
Cover image by Carolina Caballero (2009)
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