The Cuban cricket connection (8 August 1999)

8 August 1999

The Cuban cricket connection

Earl Best

The slogans are everywhere. "Patria es humanidad" (To be a patriot is to be human) the new terminal building blares at the traveller as he steps off the aircraft at the new Jose Marti International Airport. Leaving the airport two weeks later, he has already put his own spin on the three words. It's been two weeks of problem-solving, of trying, with limited success, to teach cricket to Cubans. A blackboard and a duster, a book of rules, a videotape of "Cricket the West Indian way" and over a dozen more of the 1999 World Cup and Brian Lara make the march down the theory road slow and steady.

On the practice highway, the obstacles are legion; every step forward means at least one backwards. Progress is slower because red tape has held up in Havana the eight bags of implements I've lugged all the way from Piarco through Barbados and Jamaica.

So as I board JM60 for the return trip to Montego Bay, Jose Marti's words say to me "You have to really love this country to survive here."

Two weeks earlier, ignorance was still bliss. And as I leave the airport and make my way into the city, I am thinking of the rich Cuban sporting tradition:

Alberto "El Caballo" Juantorena, Silvio Leonard, Teofilo Stephenson, Ana Fidelia Quirot, Felix Savon, Javier Sotomayor, Norberto Tellez.

I am still thinking about their second place finish in the 1999 regional football tournament when the slogans begin to force themselves on my attention....

"Con el corazon se hace la revolucion" (Revolution comes from the heart), "Socialismo hoy y siempre" (Socialism now and forever), "Fidelidad, unidad, dignidad" (Loyalty, Unity, Dignity). "El partido es inmortal" says another. "El partido" is the PCC, the Cuban Communist Party but I think of Eric Williams and Patrick Manning and "Magnum est PNM et prevalebit" until I see the next one.

It has a completely different target. "Nadie podra quitarnos la esperanza" (Nobody but nobody can make us lose hope), it says, and I immediately wonder if the few Americans who come to this Clinton-forsaken land trouble to take that message back home.

It is the message contained in Clinton's Diamond Diplomacy initiative that is indirectly responsible for my presence here. If baseball has a chance of bridging the gulf that yawns between Cuba's 11 million and America's 250 million, ran the argument, what about the Caribbean? Won't Castro come cantering home to Caricom if we take cricket to Cuba?

Besides, add officials in Guantanamo, you have only to bring cricket back to Cuba. There, as late as the 1950s the game was still played by immigrants from the English-speaking islands.

The Guantanamo Sports Club hosted teams from the Bahamas and Jamaica in 1955 and '56; four years later in 1960, even after Batista had been ousted, the Time Guantanamo de Cricket chartered a plane for a return visit to Montego Bay.

The link with Jamaica went back half a century to the end of the Spanish American War. With the construction of the American Military Base in Guantanamo ("land illegally occupied by the United States," say all the official maps), thousands of Jamaicans made the short trip north.

They stayed on, put down roots all over Eastern Cuba (Oriente) and, like the canes they were soon cultivating, their numbers grew. Now their descendants are estimated to constitute 15 per cent of the population of Oriente, almost eight per cent of the total population.

And they want to get back to roots, to start playing once more the game that they once had in common with the rest of the archipelago.

But these are children of children of immigrants and although in their minds they may be West Indian, their sporting bodies are Cuban.

And for a Cuban a bat is held and wielded horizontally.

Two weeks of tuition may suffice to make clear the distinction between "obstruccion" (lbw) and "obstruccion deliberada" (obstructing the field).

But it is hardly long enough to give would-be umpires the confidence to raise a prompt finger on an lbw appeal. And way too short to make punta derecho en profundidad mean to a guantanamero the same as deep backward point to a teenager from Guayaguayare. The North American overlay pasted on through two or three generations is simply too thick already to let the Caribbean through.

In the classroom, the bowler is "el lanzador"; on the field the instincts take over and he becomes "el pitcher". Likewise the only man on the fielding team with gloves is universally called "el guardian" in the classroom in the morning; in the afternoon on the field, he is almost never anything but "el catcher".

There are two umpires, 10 fieldsmen without gloves, two sets of rough hewn stumps and bails and a 22-yard pitch; in theory, we are playing cricket. But throughout the two weeks I am in charge, the game remains, at the level of the instincts, baseball.

Perhaps that is why the four-day Primer Campeonato Nacional de los Seguidores del Cricket (First National Cricket-lovers Tournament) which was scheduled to end in Guantanamo yesterday was postponed.

With the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies pulling the strings, CCN had supplied enough implements to ensure that the two "home" teams and the four others from Havana, Holguin, Santiago de Cuba and Las Tunas had the wherewithal to play ball. Logistically at least, the six-team limited-overs competition had every chance of success.

Ten umpires had been "certified" from among the 42 who turned up for at least one of the ten training sessions of the two-week course. The "Comandante" Fidel had given his blessing and would have been represented at the event.

It is now rescheduled for November and if it succeeds, plans are already in train to stage an International Schoolboys Tournament at the same venue next year.

Somewhere down the road, of course, it is hoped, there will be a Cuban national team participating in the Red Stripe Bowl tournament and perhaps some day even in whatever is the then current version of the Busta Cup.

After all, Cubans have for half a century braved the rough waters of the Atlantic to sneakin to the USA through the back door; the back door to Caricom is cricket and half a dozen convincing centuries against the right opposition can throw it wide open. But how real are the chances of convincing centuries being scored in November?

And when will the opposition be deemed 'right'? The truth is that as WI skipper Lara is certain never to have an Emilio Vasquez Sosa or a Carlos A Salazar to open the batting or the bowling for him. And something extraordinary would have to happen for his successor to be able to call on Cuban resources by the time the World Cup comes to the region in 2007.

But the extraordinary is always possible in this country of surprises. These are determined people. And ingenious. Witness the 'camellos' (camels), huge trailer-drawn carriages designed as mass transit vehicles to serve Havana's two million denizens. Or the 'bici-taxis' (ordinary bicycles adapted to transport two or three seated pasengers) and 'coches' (horse-drawn carts carrying a dozen or so seated passengers) that are the equivalent of Trinidad's short-drop route taxis.

And they are patient. In Havana, there are orderly queues at the shops, the bakeries, the bus stops and the lines of people waiting to buy icecream outside Coppelia snake for many metres around the corner well into the night.

They have got the energy too. Every Saturday evening in Guantanamo, the street party goes on until early morning-with no visible increase in the police presence or in the incidence of crime.

So it is not entirely inconceivable that some day in the new decade, a Cuban could force his way on to the squad if only for their baseball-inspired wonderfully ambidextrous fielding. So that we may one day hear, amid the West Indian chorus of "How's that?" a rare Hispanic inquiry "Que tal?" But as the traveller, sobered, makes his thoughtful way back to the Jose Marti for the homeward trip, another slogan warns him not to expect the Cubans to fall in line too quickly.

"Siempre rebeldes," it says.

"Rebels," he concedes aloud, "to the end".

Source :: The Trinidad Express