ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The world will be watching Cuba this week with President Obama’s visit to the island — the first president since Calvin Coolidge in 1928 to be on Cuban soil.
It’s changed since then, but not since 1961, when the United States enacted the Cuban embargo in its battle with Fidel Castro and his Soviet Union allies. He will likely feel like he is stepping into a time machine, full of 1957 Chevys and DeSotos.
That was what it was like when I went to Cuba in 1999, as part of the group of writers covering the Baltimore Orioles trip there to play the Cuban National baseball team in what was a historic event.
Here’s hoping that the group of writers accompanying Obama, including those sportswriters who will be covering the Tampa Bay Rays exhibition game Tuesday against the Cuban national team, have as good a time as I had in the five days I spent there in 1999.
I’ve been fortunate enough in my job to travel around the world for various stories, but the best trip I’ve ever had was to that mysterious island — like putting yourself in the middle of a novel about a far away land.
I arrived there one day before the charter plane filled with writers, making my own travel arrangements. When I checked into the hotel, the clerk told me there was the seventh game of a playoff scheduled for that night at Latinoamericano Stadium. I got a cab — some 1950s Chrysler model — and paid the pennies it took to get into the game.
There I was, sitting in right field, part of the greatest baseball party I had ever seen, full of Bryce Harper flair. Fans brought musical instruments and noisemakers to the game, and played them non stop. They were singing, women were dancing on top of the dugouts, and I was drinking from bags of whatever that were being passed around the stands. It was a wild, exciting night, and I had only been on the island for a few hours.
The next day mysteriously someone from the government showed up at my hotel to offer his services as my guide — fine with me, since I was a stranger in a strange land, even though I had done pretty well for myself in the brief time I was there.
I told him I wanted to find a group of Cuban children playing baseball and write about it, so we drove around until we came upon a field with a youth baseball game going on — a group of Cuban youngsters playing American kids — not just American kids, but a group of youngsters from Montgomery County. That’s coming up with a full house for a column.
Like me, they had stumbled onto a group of Cuban kids playing baseball, and asked their bus driver to pull over so they could play with them.
“We asked him to take us to some ball fields where he knew kids would be playing,” Mike Bryan, who was an 11-year-old on the trip, told me last year. “We just hopped on the bus with no plan and stumbled across a field where some kids were playing. Some of the people on the bus were bilingual, so we stopped, they talked, and in a few minutes we were out on the field playing baseball with these Cuban kids.”
Bryan kept the connections he made long after they left, starting a nonprofit organization to get baseball equipment to send to Cuba. “It made me appreciate my life in America,” Bryan told me last year
Another day I made my way down to Parque Central — the Havana town center — where the daily Cuban baseball debates take place — the “tertulias” — and had some wonderful conversations, through broken English and my fractured Spanish, about the greats of the game, from Martin Dihigo, maybe the greatest player to ever come out of Cuba, to Cal Ripken.
The game itself between the Orioles and the Cuban national team — a 3-2 extra innings win for Baltimore — proved to be anticlimactic. The crowd was by special government invitation only, and had none of the excitement or passion that I witnessed a few days before in that playoff game. There was some talk about the possibility of someday major league baseball having a franchise in Havana — to which I said to Commissioner Bud Selig, “Hey, Bud, what about Washington?”
He replied, “I’ve got too much on my mind to think about the Expos now.”
The highlight of the trip, though, was my visit to Cojimar, a fishing village outside of Havana and once the home of Ernest Hemingway. It was there that I found The Old Man and The Sea — Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s fishing boat’s first mate and the model for both the old man and the young boy in the historic novel.
He was 101 years old (he died three years later) and accepting visitors — for a price. His grandson charged me $1 a minute to interview Fuentes.
“He was a very good friend,” Fuentes said of Hemingway while taking a cigar out of a box and lighting it. “It is very important to have a good captain to fish,” as I looked at photos of Hemingway and Fuentes holding up a giant marlin they had caught.
I had landed a giant marlin of my own with that visit. As far as fishing trips go, it didn’t get any better than my trip to Cuba.
• Thom Loverro is co-host of “The Sports Fix,” noon to 2 p.m. daily on ESPN 980 and espn980.com.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.