‘On This Island Nobody Knows What’s Going To Happen’

It has already been a messy game. The Havana Industriales gave up five runs in the first inning, a short stop had fumbled a ball, an outfielder had failed to hustle on a fly ball that dropped just in front of him, hopped and an easy out became an extra base hit.

Ismael Sené has not yet given up. The Alazanes de Granma had been playing terribly lately.

In large part, Sené says, Granma was struggling because some of their best pitchers had recently defected. They’d left their teams toward the end of the season in order to try their luck in the Major Leagues.

Like the rest of the country, Cuban baseball has been in crisis. With a recent exception in the Caribbean Series, Cuban baseball teams have put up disappointing performances internationally. The money problems that ail the island also affect baseball: the equipment is subpar, the stadiums are in disrepair. The groundsman who takes care of the stadium in Havana said that if it rains, they could not cover the field, because their tarp was unusable.

By the time I turn my attention back to the field, Granma has another man on base and they’re already leading by few runs. The batter positions himself for a sacrifice bunt.

And that’s when Sené has had enough.

“That is the cancer of Cuban baseball,” he says. Even when a team has a clear command of a game, they still play small ball, always absolutely conservative even when the situation calls for a little recklessness, a swing for the fences on a fast ball that’s just outside the plate, perhaps.



Sené reaches into his pocket and pulls out a little leather-bound notebook. Inside, he has sheets of paper, scrawled with numbers and abbreviations.

He has methodically calculated the stats of how many sacrifice plays National League and American League teams had made last year and then compared them to Cuba’s Serie Nacional.

Cuba, he says, is sacrificing at an exorbitant rate and it doesn’t make any sense.

“This is the most dogmatic baseball in the world,” he says.



I ask him if this was perhaps an apt metaphor for the rest of Cuba and he just smiles.

Sené is a revolutionary. He was trying to smuggle weapons to Fidel Castro’s guerrillas years before his triumph and then he went on to be a diplomat and serve at the high levels of the Cuban intelligence service.

I turn to him again, I tell him that after talking to dozens of people, I still didn’t have a grasp as to why things are changing on the island.

The commissioner of baseball told us that Cuba was pretty much ready to play ball with the United States. Economists affiliated with the government said that Cuba was willing to open up economically, that it was willing to introduce market reforms up to a point. Just before we arrived, the country’s vice president and presumed heir Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez said that the party was ready to provide all Cubans with Internet.

What’s more, we saw significant changes on the ground: Cuban players have signed wealthy contracts in Japan and Mexico and they get to keep a great deal of the money. Many Cubans are now running their own businesses — from real estate agents to restaurant owners to taxi drivers and mechanics.

I ask Sené what prompted such a sudden opening? I wondered if it was simply that Raúl Castro had a different style and this was the result.

The Granma batter lays down a beautiful bunt that rolls toward the first base side just far enough to get the runner safely to second.

“Mira,” he says, suddenly switching into Spanish. “On this island, nobody knows what’s going to happen. We knew that after Fidel came Raúl. After that who knows.”



The next batter for the Alazanes hits a single into the outfield. It’s fumbled by the Industriales’ outfielder and it becomes clear that this is a train wreck. The runner on second scores; the sacrifice has worked this time.

Sené shakes his head.

“The pace of change in this country has to pick up,” he says. “There has to be more reform.”



But even Sené, a longtime party member, a government loyalist, finds it near impossible to read the tea leaves.

As night falls, the lights come on. The crowd eventually stops cheering to encourage a strikeout. The men selling fried plantain chips quit making their rounds. And the fans who had been blasting vuvuzelas behind us finally quit at the top of the eight.

The Industriales, the Cuban equivalent of the New York Yankees, ended up losing 11 to 4. They would go on to lose the next two games in the series, putting their playoff berth in serious jeopardy.

— Eyder Peralta