Gonzalo Naranjo can close his eyes and return to his childhood in the La Vibora neighborhood of Havana. Now 84, he still remembers playing "four corners" with a rag baseball, never thinking he would one day play for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Naranjo played baseball for the pure love of the game, because everyone in his neighborhood played, because all his close and far away friends and relatives _ like Uncle Ramon Couto _ and almost everyone else he knew had held a bat in their hands at some point.
"Baseball was at the heart of everything. It was part of everything, of every house," Naranjo said. "Baseball was Cuba, and Cuba was a reflection of baseball. Nothing was more Cuban, even if it was invented by the Americans."
Cuban baseball is going through a rough period now, and if Naranjo returns to the island he will find European soccer _ the shared megalomania of Real Madrid and Barcelona, the jerseys of Messi and Cristiano _ filling plazas and streets.
Baseball will always have an important place in the heart of Cubans, but today that space is nothing like the territory it once easily ruled. Now, there's more debate about the play in the UEFA Champions League that should have merited a penalty than the national selection's performance in the Caribbean Series.
To play baseball was to be modern, idealist and a patriot. No wonder that in 1868 the island's Spanish governor, Captain General Francisco de Lersundi, banned baseball as "anti-Spanish, with insurrectional tendencies, contrary to our language and encouraging dislike for Spain."
It's hard to believe that's happened in a land where baseball was the source of both entertainment and redemption. Ever since the brothers Nemesio and Ernesto Guillot brought the first balls, gloves and bats from the United States, baseball spread like a wildfire as a way of telling Spanish colonial authorities, "I am Cuban."
It was no accident either that many of the players in the early history of Cuban baseball fled went into the woods to fights against the Iberian stranglehold, or that Esteban Bellan was the first Latin American to step on a Major League Baseball field.
Baseball had already been played in Cuba for a decade, but a game Dec. 27 1874, in Palmar de Junco is still taken as a foundational reference _ despite pitched arguments among experts _ because it was reported in newspapers.
Baseball had become part of the nation.
"When we played baseball, it was not just for the happiness of being on the field and wearing a uniform, not just thinking about making it to the big leagues," said Octavio "Cookie" Rojas, a veteran of MLB and the legendary Havana Sugar Kings. "It was something deeper, indescribable. It was life itself."
A huge explosion of baseball followed the birth of independent Cuba in 1902. Legendary players soon followed _ Jose de la Caridad Mendez, Cristobal Torriente, Martin Dihigo, Adolfo Luque _ and Cuban baseball infiltrated other Caribbean islands.
Baseball jumped outside of urban teams and to the countryside, to the sugar mills, the labor unions, to black teams, to amateur leagues like the Union Atletica and the professional league with the four big teams: Almendares, Marianao, Cienfuegos and Habana. It was the zenith of baseball, and the Cerro Stadium was the cathedral. Then came a second wave of stars like Orestes Minoso, Camilo Pascual, Pedro Ramos, Willy Miranda, Conrado Marrero and Cookie Rojas.
Baseball was so strong on the island that by 1950 51 Cubans and only 10 other Latin Americans already played in the big leagues. The first Dominican, Osvaldo Vigil, entered in 1956, when 71 Cubans had already made it to the top.
When the Cuban Sugar Kings won the Junior World Series in 1959 under the slogan "One more little step and we're there," everyone believed Havana would soon host the first MLB team outside the United States.
But something different arrived, which decreed the end of professional sports and with it Cuba's Professional League. Most of the heroes of that time left the island and a new chapter of Cuban baseball started, with new ways and means, managed by the state and totally dependent on it, and its political system.
"I lived through that, and it was a very sad time," said Rojas, now 79. "I was convinced that were going to have a Major League franchise. I was a professional, and I had to leave. My dreams were already somewhere else, far from my homeland."
Decades later, the dreams of many who played and still play in the Majors are still focused on the United States. The absence of the best players, the bureaucratic mistakes, the state controls and the constant exposure of the world's best soccer on TV and other media have conspired to erode the passion for baseball among the new generations.
That's an odd and alien state of affairs for those who grew up knowing nothing other than baseball on every street.
"I find it difficult to believe what you're telling me, that stuff about the same level of love for soccer and baseball," Naranjo said. "In my time, it was impossible to share that love, to betray it. Until the day I die, that will be the only love for me. I cannot conceive of being Cuban in any other way."
