How Baseball Came to Cuba

It came much earlier than I'd thought. Ibsen Martinez surveys the origins of baseball in Latin American in Latin Baseball, A Frontier Story  (Library of Economics and Liberty; January 9, 2006).

Martinez's account of the origins of Cuban baseball draws on The Pride of Havana (Oxford University Press, 1999), by Roberto González Echevarría:

The first Cuban baseball team was founded in 1868 (The first recorded baseball game in the U.S. was played in 1846) by young men who had gone to college in the U.S.:

While today many baseball fans in the Caribbean Basin assume the game was brought to our countries as a result of countless early 20th-century U.S. military interventions in the region, the proven fact is that it was not a U.S. Marine Corps serviceman who first took baseball to Cuba.

Nemesio Guilló, who is believed to have brought the first bat and baseball to the island in 1864—while the American Civil Secession raged and Cubans were still subjects of the Spanish king—was one of three well-to-do young Cuban men sent by their parents to Mobile, Alabama in 1858 to study at Springhill College. One of the other two was Nemesio's brother, Ernesto.

According to González Echeverría, the Guilló brothers and a number of their contemporaries had, by 1868, founded a baseball team—the Habana Base Ball Club— that allegedly defeated the crew of an American schooner anchored at the Matanzas's harbor for repairs. The team did not have much time to celebrate this exploit and actually had to go underground because the first and ill-fated Cuban War of Independence—called "the Ten Years War (1868-1878)—broke out and the Spanish colonial authorities outlawed the game.

The spread of baseball in Cuba was driven, at least in part, by Cuban nationalism:

It is easy to imagine the Spaniards' motives for this ban: Cuban independentist young men and women got to favoring baseball over bullfights. In those times, and at certain precise moments of this ageless ritual, the crowd attending a bullfight dutifully had to pay homage to Spanish colonial authorities.

Putting aside all the fun and excitement a baseball game can provide, Cubans committed to their independence from Spain seemed to find in baseball a symbol of freedom and egalitarianism and, probably, democracy too.

There's a lot more in this fascinating column - read it and learn how baseball came to the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

Comments

[m3 ds]

Hi,
As far as I know Baseball is more Cuba’s national pastime than it is America’s.Cuba has the longest baseball tradition in the world outside the United States, and probably the most deeply felt one as well.

[רופא שיניים]

I fill in those days, and in some moments of this ritual without specific time, the public took part in the bullfighting has been dutifully paying homage to the Spanish colonial authorities.