The Boys of Winter

The Boys of Winter Roberto González Echevarría (bio) My title is a take on Roger Kahn's superb book The Boys of Summer (1972), which is essentially about the Brooklyn Dodgers in the early fifties but also based on his journalistic experiences covering that team.1 I draw from Kahn the pleasure of baseball reminiscences, which, in my case, are those of a fan of the Cuban Winter League as well as a historian of it. My initial drive was also to highlight that, while baseball in the US is associated with summer, this is not so in other parts of the world, particularly the Caribbean. I always felt that my colleague and good friend Bart Giamatti had a very slanted American sense of baseball that limited his deliberations on the game, marred also by his never having played the game, which is not my case. The historical context of my memories here is largely provided by The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), as well as by the process of research and thinking that led to my writing it, which includes my conversations with former players, many now deceased. Baseball is dependent on the weather, and it was the first sport whose season relied on the seasons. In the US, where the game originated, baseball is associated with spring and summer. As opposed to football, baseball cannot be played when it is raining or snowing, and it is very difficult to practice when it is cold. This is so because the baseball is a relatively small, hard projectile sometimes traveling at a hundred miles an hour. As such, it is impossible to handle unless seen clearly, and if it strikes a player can cause serious injury and even death. Hence the American baseball season extends from spring to fall, and games are regularly suspended or postponed because of rain and, in April, snow. This factor created the American baseball calendar, with a focus on the summer as the most appropriate time to play the game. In the Caribbean, however, where baseball has been played since the mid-nineteenth century, baseball seasons generally go from fall to spring, with winter being the preferred period because of the favorable temperatures, more so than in summer, when the game is also still played, but the climate can be oppressively hot. Growing up in Cuba, for me the baseball season began in October, when the four teams of the Cuban Winter League began to put [End Page 19] together their rosters, which included quite a few Americans who came to the island to extend their baseball season, make some extra money, and enjoy the warm weather. They were, and still are, in parts of the Caribbean other than Cuba, together with the local players, the boys of winter. The Castro dictatorship abolished the Cuban Winter League in 1961, thus eliminating the principal site of Latin American professional baseball. (This was not the worst thing the regime did). The discovery that there was a reasonably accessible place south of the border with good weather and fans was made early on by American teams, and players began going to Cuba before the end of the nineteenth century.2 This was prior to the so-called Spanish American War (1898), when the island was still under Spain's domination. (In Cuba we call it the War of Independence)3. Baseball had been played on the island since the 1860s, and Cubans had been playing baseball in the US in subsequent decades, so much so that when the first African American professional baseball team emerged on Long Island, it was called "Cubans." None of them were Cubans, nor did they speak Spanish. In the Havana and Matanzas area on the northern coast of Cuba, there were baseball fields, players, and followers of the sport, only ninety miles away from Key West. Maritime traffic between those coasts was active, as Cuba sold most of its sugar to the US, and ships of all sizes traveled among Cuban ports and not only Key West but also New Orleans, Baltimore, and New York. It was quite possible to steam from...

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