El juego de Cuba

For Cubans, baseball is more than just a sport. From the moment it was introduced, in the mid-nineteenth century, the sport already had a political significance: playing the American sport of baseball was a subversive, anti-Spanish act. But for the next century and a half, baseball remained closely interwoven with political events. A few months after the revolution of 1959, the new party leaders posed in a baseball uniform, under the team name ‘The Beards’, to foster goodwill for an amendment of the law. Beating the Americans became a national obsession. The Cuban Sugar Kings made it to the North American first division and became national heroes, but at the same time were betrayed. Only in 1999, after forty years, did the American team visit Cuba again, allowing the Cuban and American flags to fly in seeming brotherly union side by side in the stadium. The film offers a reconstruction of the last forty years, not just illustrated by ample archive footage, such as that of Cuban naval ships on Independence Day, but especially through interviews with a large number of former players. Many have scrupulously preserved the coarse-grained photographs that show them as young sportsmen, made in the time when they still cherished illusions and were paid four pesos a game. Forty years later, they look back on the way baseball survived the turbulent political developments: the Bay of Pigs crisis, the economic embargo, the failure of the sugarcane harvest in 1970 and the exodus to Miami in rickety shrimp boats.