Full Count: Inside Cuban Baseball (review)

Milton H. Jamail. Full Count: Inside Cuban Baseball. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. 182 pp. Cloth, $24.95.

Sometime during the twenty-first century, hopefully sooner rather than later, a Cuba without Fidel Castro and a United States without its embargo policy will be able to enjoy its mutual love of baseball. Until that happy day arrives, Milton Jamail's Full Count: Inside Cuban Baseball is a highly recommended guide to Cuba's ongoing love affair with the game invented by the United States. Cuba's passion for baseball began in the late nineteenth century as an expression of local nationalism against Spanish imperial rule--soccer never flourished in Cuba--and the fever continues unabated, despite what Jamail aptly calls the "singularly bizarre bilateral relationship" (p.48) between Castro's government and its paranoid American adversaries. The sordid tides of politics cannot wash away the Cubans' love of baseball, although the collapse of the Soviet Union has brought in the past decade wrenching economic hardships.

Jamail, a lecturer in government at the University of Texas and a journalist whose reportage from Latin America regularly appears in the pages of Baseball America and USAToday's Baseball Weekly, first visited Cuba in 1979. When he returned in 1992 to witness exhibitions between the U.S. Olympic baseball team and the renowned Cuban amateur world champions, Jamail was "appalled. I saw a Cuba that had come to a standstill" (p. 5). Jamail returned several times in the 1990s during what Castro has called the "special period" of privation. The author attended the historic March1999 exhibition game in Havana between a Cuban national team and the Baltimore Orioles, the first time in forty years that an American professional team had played in Cuba. (The Orioles won a close extra-inning game and were slaughtered in the rematch played two months later in Baltimore, proving what all baseball experts had known: that the best Cubans could more than hold their own against American Major Leaguers.)

Jamail is that rare combination of passionate fan and studious scholar. His book draws on both rich historical sources and the "radio bemba," the street gossip, to make it a scintillating, informative read. Because of his rare combination of passion and precision, he was able to win the confidence of many Cuban journalists and fans who otherwise would see no benefit--and much potential danger--in talking to an American writer. The title for his book comes from an observation of Cuban baseball journalist Gilberto Dihigo that the sport "is facing a full count. Baseball will never die in Cuba, but it needs to be renovated" (p. 11). As the Cuban economy sags and crime in the streets becomes a real problem, attendance at regular season games has sagged dramatically throughout Cuba. "Baseball, which used to be a catharsis, has been converted into a penance, and the people don't want to punish themselves," notes Dihigo (p. 63), who is the son of legendary pitcher-outfielder Martin Dihigo, the only player in baseball history to be enshrined in four national Halls of Fame: Cuba, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela. (Gilberto now lives in Mexico, but he is neither an exile nor a defector.)

Dihigo and Jamail's other informants paint a sobering picture of the dilemma of Cuban baseball players, once the pride of Castro's socialist Cuba, who find their $30-a-month stipend pitifully inadequate to meet even living expenses, not to mention how paltry it is compared to what entertainers and other professionals can earn in the emerging dollar economy of Cuba. "A doctor can get another doctor to cover his job while he goes to his [better-paying] job as a waiter," a perceptive fan tells Jamail. "But a ballplayer can't say, 'Hey, would you play first base while I go do something else that earns dollars?'" (p. 68). Defection has thus become a major problem for...