SAN JOSÉ DE LAS LAJAS, Cuba — Ronald Hernandez Vega did not come to see a game played with the hands.

There was baseball Monday morning, one and a half innings to complete a rainout in Cuba’s national league. Hernandez Vega did not care. He sat outside the provincial stadium in languid daylight, wearing the jersey not of Yasiel Puig but of Lionel Messi.

Baseball is the sport of Cuba’s revolution, but soccer is the sport of the arriving world.

“I like soccer better than baseball,” Hernandez Vega, 16, said as he headed to a nearby field for practice. “It’s a strong sport, the movement, the energy.”

Baseball seems perfectly suited to this retro island, where the sporting attitudes, like many of the cars, are from the 1950s. But baseball can be static, as inert as radon. Soccer is nonstop, frenetically creative, its passion building from its penury, the rarity of a goal bringing theatrical release to its players and screaming ecstasy to its announcers.