Steve Fainaru - The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba, and the Search for the American Dream

CONTENTS

To Willie

Inside every Cuban theres a ballplayer waiting to get out.

ORLANDO EL DUQUE HERNNDEZ

Cuba produces two things: ballplayers and whores.

Hey, thats offensive. My mother still lives over there.

Oh, really? What position does she play?

MIAMI JOKE

AUTHORS NOTE

T HIS BOOK GREW out of several articles written for The Boston Globe and Newsday on the Cuban governments decision, on October 28, 1996, to ban pitcher Orlando El Duque Hernndez from revolutionary baseball. From the very beginning, both of us viewed this event not only as a fascinating sports story but also as a window into the surreal state of affairs in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

When we started writing these stories, El Duque was living in a cinder-block shack a few blocks from the Jos Mart International Airport in Havana. The governments ban was total: The pitcher was forbidden to set foot on any official government fieldessentially, every ballpark in the country. As we got to know El Duque, a couple of things were striking. One was that he was by far the most resilient, relentlessly optimistic man we had ever met. Another was that the punishment did not fit the crime, for there was no real crime, at least as far as we could discern.

Over time, the saga of El Duque evolved into what certainly was the most dramatic story that either of us covered during our respective tours of Latin America. As foreign correspondents for our newspapers, we wrote hundreds of articles about drug trafficking, epic corruption, guerrilla uprisings, hostage takings, hurricanes, earthquakes, illegal immigration, border wars, free trade, and, in Mexico, a democratic revolution. And yet, to both of us, the one story that best captured what was happening in the region involved a baseball player, a pitcher. With a mixture of admiration and horror, we watched as El Duque stood up to his antiquated governmenta government resisting the tide of historywhich proceeded to torture him, not physically but by stripping him of his very essence.

As we watched the story unfold, we came to see it as a parable of the Castro governments futile efforts to stave off its own obsolescence. Others may not see it this way, which of course is fine. At its core, the following story is about a baseball player chasing his major-league dreams. It doesnt have to be any more meaningful than that.

A quick word about narration. This book is a collaborative effort, reported by Steve Fainaru and Ray Snchez, and written by Fainaru. For reasons of narrative flow, it is written in the first person. The word I refers to Fainaru, at the time the Mexico City bureau chief for The Boston Globe. Snchez, his friend and counterpart for Newsday, is identified as Snchez. The material in these pages comes primarily from our own observations and experiences and from more than one hundred interviews conducted in the United States, Cuba, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Canada.

This is a true story, although even now it seems hard to believe.

Steve Fainaru

Ray Snchez

New York City

October 2000

INTRODUCTION

BEFORE THE ESCAPE

I T WAS THE winter that Fidel legalized Christmas. One would think that such a monumental decision, the reversal of a twenty-eight-year ban on the celebration of Jesus birth, would merit banner headlines: WELCOME BACK, SANTA , perhaps, or COMANDANTE TO PROLETARIAT: FELIZ NAVIDAD ! But the news caused barely a stir. The announcement was buried inside Granma, the slim Communist party daily. On the streets of Havana little changed. A few bold citizens strung lights around their windows. At the state-run dollar stores there was a minor run on plastic trees. One of the most striking changes was the return of Midnight Mass. One thousand people crammed into the restored cathedral in Old Havana to hear the controversial archbishop Jaime Ortega usher in the holiday. We have always celebrated Christmas, Ortega told the crowd. Sometimes we have made great sacrifices to celebrate.

Fidel had brought back Christmas as a gesture to Pope John Paul II, who was to visit the following month. The brittle, peripatetic pope had preached to every other Spanish-speaking country in Latin America, but decades of repression against all religion, particularly Catholicism, had kept him away from Cuba. The trip was shrouded in the richest political symbolism. Two decades earlier, the popes exhortations of solidarity during a visit to his native Poland had helped trigger the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The international media was hyping the Cuba excursion in similar terms, casting the pope as an aging Cold Warrior trekking into one of the last surviving outposts of the Evil Empire. On T-shirts, on posters, on newscasts throughout the world, John Paul and Fidel were paired off like venerable, aging heavyweights: the frail, still wily pontiff, slayer of communism, versus the indomitable Fidel, fallen Catholic, survivor of nine American presidents, a CIA-sponsored invasion, a nuclear showdown and an untold number of exploding cigars.

The papal visit offered a field day for the seers of Fidels inevitable demise. The drumbeat had started with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and had continued, year after year, without cessation. In 1992, Andres Oppenheimer, the veteran Miami Herald reporter, had published Castros Final Houra catchy title for an illuminating book, but unfortunate as predictions go. Since then Fidel had survived some 50,000 final hours and, at seventy-one, seemed as robust and cantankerous as ever. During one particularly hot stretch in late summer, yet another rumor of his death bounced around the hemispherefrom Havana to Mexico City, from Mexico City to Miami, from Miami to Washingtonuntil the Cuban Foreign Ministry was finally forced to deny it. For several days, life in Cuba seemed to imitate art, more specifically The Autumn of the Patriarch, the Gabriel Garca Mrquez novel about the protracted final days of a Latin American despot: [T]he more certain the rumors of his death seemed, he would appear even more alive and authoritarian at the least expected moment to impose other unforeseen directions to our destiny. Sure enough, Fidel finally resurfaced at a ceremony to kick off the school year and delivered a forty-five-minute speech in the driving rain. His olive military uniform was drenched. Beads of rain collected and fell from his beard. Speaking into the antiquated microphone, he looked like he might electrocute himself. Whoever falls may fall! he roared over the limp, miserable crowd. Whoever dies may die! And some of us, they try to kill off on a regular basis.