After our initial conversation, Felix invited us to his house down the street from Palmar de Junco. Neighbors waved at us we walked down the center of the road. From outside the house, “Turn Down For What” by Lil Jon was blaring on his sound system. The energy in his home was high. His wife was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Felix showed me his shrine of championship medals, memorabilia and his personal scrapbook from his playing days. It was filled with newspaper clippings and black and white photos of him in his athletic prime. I took a few photos and portraits all while simply trying to soak up the experience. I knew this was a special moment in my life. We said our goodbyes and he signed a baseball for me. I had nothing to give in return, but I promised to stop by on my next trip to Cuba.

Palmar de Junco is still active and is currently being used by the Matanzas junior team. During games, there’s a guy behind the scoreboard. The balls, the strikes, the outs—there’s a cube he’s rotating, keeping track of the pitch count, looking through holes in the wall to see what’s happening in the game.

isla de la juventud

photography & words by joseph swide

There aren’t a lot of reasons to go to Isla de la Juventud. The sixth largest island in the Caribbean, it isn’t an ugly place. It’s just a strange place, compared even to the rest of Cuba. The island is mostly unpopulated, and the biggest signs of development in its vast countryside are the concrete skeletons of the abandoned schools built back when Fidel Castro envisioned the island as an education hub for communist youth from around the globe. Today, foreigners are rare and tourism to the island is virtually nonexistent. There are beaches, but most of the more attractive ones are far from any towns and difficult to access, given the state of the island’s infrastructure.

It’s the kind of place that when you get back to Havana and tell people that you spent the last three weeks on La Isla, the only explanation they will believe is that you have a wife there that you’re not telling them about. What’s difficult to explain is that in addition to my affinity for the people and low-key pace of life, La Isla feels to me like a distilled version of what draws me to Cuba in general. Without Havana’s beautiful architecture or well-manicured 1950s cars, there isn’t as much to romanticize about La Isla and the experience of the place becomes more about just the strong sense of community and the real effects of isolation. And then somewhere in the middle of that is the island’s baseball team.

Despite being one of the smallest clubs in Cuba’s Serie Nacional, Los Piratas of Isla de la Juventud frequently compete at the top of the league. This is the club that produced Livan Hernandez, and, more recently, Raisel Iglesias, who defected in 2013 and currently pitches for the Cincinnati Reds. In the 2014-2015 season, La Isla made it all the way to championship series before losing in seven games to Ciego de Avila. But this season, the team has struggled after it lost the majority of its roster over the offseason. A coach put the number at 17. And while it’s difficult to confirm the exact number and circumstances of every player’s departure from the team, five La Isla players show up on the reported lists of 2015 defections –- which totaled over 150 by the end of the year, a record high. Another player, longtime star Michel Enriquez, was given legal permission by the Cuban government to play in Mexico.

La Isla’s roster and struggles this season reflect what’s happening on a broader scale throughout the Serie Nacional. Of the players left on the island, there are loyal veterans like 39-year-old pitcher Wilber Perez, who has represented both La Isla and the Cuban national team for the entirety of his career, and rides his bike home to his wife after each game. There are young players from other provinces like 18-year-old shortstop Yolbert Sanchez Zayas, who has represented Cuba at youth levels and was sent to La Isla from Havana to fill the roster and develop. Representative of the younger generation in Cuba, he has a Facebook profile and claims a girlfriend in The Bronx. And then there are players like 20-year-old center elder Julio Pablo Martinez, who was sent to La Isla from Guantanamo as a midseason reinforcement and is one of the most highly rated Major League prospects in Cuba.

On my last night on the island, which also happened to be the last day of the season before the league took a break for the Caribbean Series, I found myself in the hotel room that Martinez shared with catcher Felix Carbonell, also from Guantanamo. The team hotel is a mostly empty tourist hotel in an otherwise remote part of the island about an hour’s drive from the ballpark in Nueva Gerona. Back in their room, Martinez teased the older Carbonell for being clearly engrossed in an episode of Scooby Doo, before settling in to watch cartoons with him. After a short time, the channel was then changed to the news to find out the Cuban roster that would go to the Dominican Republic for the Caribbean Series. Martinez was not picked, though their La Isla teammate Perez was selected as a pitcher along with the usual names of Cuban baseball like Yulieski Gurriel and his younger brother, Lourdes (both of whom would shockingly defect from Cuba after the tournament).

Martinez then switched the channel again and the three of us –– a photographer from New York, a father of two from Guantanamo, and a 20-year-old who would be a multimillionaire if he were anywhere but Cuba –– sat on twin beds in an empty hotel in one of the most isolated parts of the country, drank from a case of orange soda provided by the team, and watched a dubbed movie in which Christian Bale, as Moses, leads the Hebrews out of Egypt.