Foul Ball

How a communist dictatorship and a U.S. embargo has silenced a Cuban historian.

Matt Welch from the June 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

There are many things in Havana to be shocked by: the rotted buildings, the child prostitution, the high price of Cuban beer, the suffocating role of the state in virtually all human transactions. But the thing I found most appalling was the culture of information. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof.

The daily newspaper, Granma, is thin, horribly written, and used primarily for toilet paper (what with the shortages and all). The director of Cuba's sports Hall of Fame could not tell me how many members it had. It took me a week of asking dedicated baseball fans to find out how one could obtain a schedule for upcoming games. Periodical libraries -- filled with glorious back issues of Havana's handsome and competitive round-the-clock newspapers from before World War II -- are off-limits to most ordinary Cubans.

Even though people are generally smart and jaded enough to tune out the government's propaganda, they don't have much of anything to replace it with, except for the odd BBC broadcast -- and contact with foreign tourists. Every conversation with an American about the U.S. undermines Fidel Castro by definition, because it surely contradicts the banal lies he and his media mouth on a daily basis.

For Nieto, you can see the visceral pleasure and national pride in his eyes when he meets someone who knows even a little about Cuba's baseball greats: legendary players such as the pitcher Dolf Luque, who passed for white and won 194 games in a 20-year Major League career with the Reds, Dodgers, and Giants, and managed several of Cuba's most legendary teams; pitcher Jose Mendez ("El Diamante Negro"), who threw 25 shutout innings against visiting big-league teams in 1908; and Cocaina Garcia, a fat little left-handed junkballer who starred both on the mound and in the outfield for decades.

Yet despite his joy at meeting like minds from the United States, Nieto has no way of knowing whether at least some of Castro's depictions of Americans as vicious capitalist sharks are true. Like several people who have met Nieto, I implored him to make me a copy of one of his books on a floppy disk (he has an ancient computer), so I could show it around to people at U.S. publishing houses. He clearly wanted to, but said that his son Eduardo, who lives in Spain, kept warning him about getting ripped off by greedy, back-stabbing Americans. At the end of our meeting, he finally agreed to have a relative of his bring me some disks on an upcoming trip to Los Angeles. I never heard from Nieto or his family again.

Other visitors tell similar stories. "Nieto had a friend who attended the Atlanta Olympics, and I was supposed to meet him on the State House steps, but I was late because of traffic and missed him," said baseball historian John Holway, author of the Complete Book of Baseball's Negro Leagues. "I left messages for him at the press center and wrote to Nieto to apologize, but he didn't answer."

Jay Berman, a retired California State University at Fullerton journalism professor and a charter member of the Pacific Coast League Historical Society, said that he was finally able to bring back five of Nieto's disks a year ago, which he then sent off to McFarland & Co., the baseball book publisher. "I think Nieto and his work could help finish up a lot of questions," Berman said. "But because he is 79 years old there's a very real question as to how much longer he's going to be able to....That's part of the frustration of the whole thing."

McFarland & Co.'s Steve Wilson says that, after "several years of active, fruitful discussions with Mr. Nieto, primarily through intermediaries including his son," his publishing house is now "hopeful that a book may eventually result." No details are forthcoming, though the company plans to bring out two other major volumes on Cuban baseball history over the next two years.

For now, Nieto just continues to get older, while his historian colleagues in the U.S. become far more wary of traveling to Cuba because of Bush's policy of tightening the embargo yet again.

"I talked with a friend in Havana yesterday," Berman told me. "He says he's well aware of the crackdown and is suggesting to American friends that they stay away until after Jeb Bush is re-elected."

Does the diplomatic standoff leave any room for hope? Members of the Cuba Working Group say yes, and plan to reintroduce a bill overturning the travel ban this spring. Maybe a politician running against the Cuban American National Foundation will actually win a Florida election.

Perhaps Severo Nieto's long-suppressed works will finally be published in the U.S. and in his native Cuba, to great acclaim -- the literary equivalent of a last-chance, game-winning home run. But such moments are rare enough in baseball, let alone in life itself.