The Quality of Home Runs: The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball (review)

When people think of Cuba, they naturally consider its ongoing fifty-year communist regime under the leadership of Fidel Castro, and more recently Raúl Castro. With greater steps toward diverse foreign investments while forging greater access to their global tourism market, Cuba in the last two decades has become somewhat redefined by the ideals of capitalism and consumerism. Coupled with the proliferation of the Internet, the advent of various technological advancements, and the forthcoming U.S. retraction of the ban on family members traveling to Cuba and remittances to the island, Cuba is becoming less isolated and more susceptible to change. As such, various factions have grown weary of the incremental changes that potentially challenge Cuban cultural norms and the essence of cubanidad. That is what it means to be “Cuban” or simply what defines “Cubanness” as it is embedded in emotions, ideas, and a set of attitudes. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, people in general, and Americans in particular, have associated the embodiment of cubanidad with musicians such as Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan, Dámaso Pérez Prado, Willie Chirino and Desi Arnaz, the singer-actor-bandleader-husband of Lucy of in the television show I Love Lucy (1951–1957). Even though cubanidad is exemplified through numerous athletes and is neither “contain[ed] nor demarcate[d]” by the island’s shores, ethnic Cubans such as “Minnie” Miñoso (the first Latino “superstar” and Afro-Latino athlete to play in Major League Baseball) and Liván Hernández (the 1997 World Series Most Valuable Player) have seldom if ever been connected with cubanidad (2).

Although much has changed within Cuban society, much has remained the same. Indeed, baseball has not only served as a bedrock for Cuban culture, history, and life, but has created local, national, and transnational identities. Shaped and guided through the prism of baseball, these identities are explored in The Quality of Home Runs. An anthropologist and senior lecturer at the Chelsea School at the University of Brighton–Eastbourne, Carter pursues the meaningful theme that baseball is interconnected to the development of Cuban views and values. In doing so, he pays painstaking attention to not only the inseparable dynamic of cubanidad and baseball, but also to the details of processing the concept of Cuba itself as both an island of opportunity and hotbed for internal politics. In fact, the political climate between the United States and Cuba as well as an ongoing political struggle within Cuban sport is an important “reason why it has taken so long” to produce this work (ix). Despite some limitations of access to people, places, papers, and positions within and beyond the stadiums, Carter cogently examines the evolution and sustainability of Cuban baseball.

Carter organizes The Quality of Home Runs around a handful of pivotal questions, which he proceeds to amplify and develop: What does it mean to be Cuban in Cuba (and indirectly how does it compare in the United States)? How can a Cuban baseball culture not only exist but thrive in a country that in part celebrates restricted civil liberties while not embracing ethnic-racial pluralism? The latter query is more implicit than explicit, which is one shortcoming of an otherwise highly interesting, articulate, readable, and well-researched study. Aside from a spattering of pages underscoring Babe Ruth’s cultural insensitivity, the African American experience in Caribbean baseball, and the integration between the lines versus outside the lines, much more could be explored in understanding race, baseball, and Cuban identity. In short, grappling with cubanidad in relation to baseball should treat race and racial ideology with greater scope and significance.

Nevertheless, this book is a successful analysis of baseball as it is understood among Cubans, and it deserves a place on the shelf of scholars and fans who think about the social impact of baseball beyond the diamond. Echoing historian Louis A. P...