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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Most of the time, the boys in categoria pequena--the Cuban equivalent of Little League baseball--play on days when there hasn't been a coup in Latin America, or at least not in a country that supplies a lot of oil to Cuba. Unfortunately, the Ligeritos, a team made up of kids from the Plaza de la Revolucion neighborhood of Havana, had a practice scheduled for the Sunday in April after the President of Venezuela was deposed. The uprising evaporated in a matter of days, but when I went to watch the Ligeritos play it was still fresh news, and many people were staying home and watching television reports on the crisis. Kids who wanted a ride to the practice had to wait out the developing story of the coup.
The practice was supposed to start at nine, but when I arrived there were only a few boys at the ball field. The Ligeritos play at a big and fitfully grassy park called El Bosque, at the end of a narrow neighborhood road. The park is flat and open, bracketed by tall, weary trees, and it has an unevenly paved basketball court at one end and enough room for a few baseball games at the other. That day, a loud game between two government ministries was already under way on the best diamond, and a couple of military police officers were on the basketball court taking foul shots with a flabby orange ball. The handful of boys who'd managed to get to the field had gathered on an overgrown area near the basketball court. One had a ball, one had a bat, and another had the most important equipment for playing baseball in Cuba--some sixteen-inch-long machetes, for grooming the field. While the boys played catch, a few of their fathers stripped to the waist and started slicing through the tall grass.
I had obtained an introduction to Juan Cruz, the Ligeritos' shortstop, through a friend in Havana. Juan is a slip of a kid, eleven years old, with dark, dreamy eyes, long arms, big feet, and the musculature of a grasshopper. His thirteen-year-old brother, Carlos, plays for the Ligeritos, too, but it is Juan who woke up at four every morning during the 2000 Olympics to watch the baseball games and who cradles his glove as if it were a newborn and who always wears a baseball cap, indoors or out. When his stepfather, Victor, is asked about Juan, he says, "Oh my God, this one dreams in baseball." In spite of the morning's news, Juan had persuaded Victor to drive Carlos and him to the ball field at nine. He popped out of the car almost before Victor had finished parking, and ran onto the field.
The morning was soft and wet, just on the verge of summer. In Havana's Parque Central, a daily assembly of old men were arguing fine points of Yankee and Red Sox history and the likelihood of Havana's Industriales sweeping the upstarts from Camaguey in the national series. The Havana baseball mascot--a fat, placid dachshund wearing a baseball shirt,...
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