Armando Marsans: A Cuban Pioneer in the Major Leagues (review)

Having completed Peter T. Toot's thorough chronicling of the U.S. baseball life of Armando Marsans, we understand that the Cuban star is definitely more of a known quantity. We are presented with Marsans's baseball career on this side of the Straits of Florida and not the one in his native Havana. This is no doubt due to the lack of easy access to Cuba for research trips, the lack of periodical accounts from Cuba during these years, and the dearth of oral history or diary material in either country. Consequently, we see Marsans through the eyes of the American press, whose attitudes toward him ranged from celebration to bigoted scorn. This, in combination with the author's sociological commentary, presents a character who is at once admirable and untrustworthy, in North American terms. In the year-to-year exhaustive research presented, we learn a lot about how Americans looked at Marsans, and this seems to be the major focus of the book.

Within this particularly xenophobic period in American history, with waves of immigrants swelling city populations decade by decade, the story of Hispanics in 1910s society is a compelling one. Toot has explicated Marsans's career and baseball activities in America as much as second-hand research can allow, with newspaper accounts, notes from biological files in Cooperstown, and related material from various books. He also makes a point of showing, through numerous examples from chapters early and late, how Marsans's love of baseball was paramount. We really don't know the person Armando Marsans much more than before, but we know more about his place in baseball history and what he had to go through to achieve it.

More than an apologist, Toot attempts to turn a spotlight on Marsans's career to raise him above his present status, sometimes being quick to forgive a character flaw or putting the best spin on an incident involving the fleet-footed outfielder. Toot is greatly concerned with the stereotyping Marsans was subjected to in the United States and the prevailing public attitudes that judged him. We are presented with a talented and temperamental athlete, misunderstood by his North American bosses as well as by sportswriters and fans, especially when not playing well. Though the standards of the day in the United States allowed bigotry and abuse, a momentary examination of Cuban culture and the standards with which Marsans lived could have been useful.

Marsans was expected to live up to American standards in the ways he honored his contracts and how he performed on the field and off. Toot also tries to place Marsans's attitudes against those same standards, to justify his actions or inactions within this context. Cuban and North American cultures are fundamentally different in many ways. A deep-seated, puritanical belief in work does not exist in Cuba as it does in North America and Europe. Cuba was not settled by religious zealots, like the Puritans, whose stringent social order of labor and reward infused the culture of the United States in perpetuity. Whereas Marsans seemed out of step with American society in the ways he interacted with team officials in the various clubs he played for, in Cuba this would not always have been the case. For a Caribbean, Marsans's work ethic was excellent. For Cubans work is a part of life, but only a part, whereas with many, if not most, in North America, life is determined and governed by work.

Toot's story is told as a chronicle, interspersed with quotations from newspapers and other citations. This use of quotations for certain pieces of information is combined with a running narrative, sometimes detailed, including many people and events. The documentation, as cited in the footnotes, must certainly be the same for the fact-strewn narrative, and the reader carries that assumption through the book. But this is never made clear, and this reviewer is still in doubt as to whether...