2023-08-18 03:53:57
Cuban children traveled for the first time to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to participate in the Little League Baseball World Series, which has been held since 1947 and was hostage, like so many events in the United States, to the rigors of the Cold War.
This Wednesday the game was played between the Caribbean and Japanese teams with players whose ages range from eight to 12 years. Media Cuba has been aware of these boys, because baseball (without an accent, as they say in good Cuban and has been accepted by the Royal Spanish Academy) is an element of national identity that moves passions and is considered cultural heritage on the island, with twists in popular speech that everyone who was born in Cuba recognizes and uses: “they put it on three and two”, “they caught it moved”, “stay still on base” or “doubled for third”, which serves the same for describe a bold action than to refer to a dying person.
There has not been a musician, painter, writer or poet indifferent to baseball, as the national sport is known, which arrived in Cuba at the beginning of the 19th century with the intense traffic of sailors and emigrants from the north who disembarked in Cuban ports. After the war of independence against the Spanish metropolis, the ball even became a symbol of the aspirations for the future of a modern Cuba, no longer linked to colonialism.
Baseball is also the least belligerent area and the one that has fostered the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States in the hard years of the blockade. With Trump in the White House, the friendly games are over and the possibility of an agreement between the Major Leagues and the Cuban Baseball Federation (FCB), forged in the Obama era, that would allow the hiring of baseball players from the island to play in eu. But the shared enthusiasm for this sport, an underground thread that unites the two shores, has remained unchanged despite political differences and the frigid airs of Washington.
However, it has taken the islanders 76 years to reach the famous children’s competitions that the little leagues formed in 80 countries dream of. When the authorities of this World Series recently invited the Cubans to send a team to represent them in Pennsylvania, there were hundreds of school competitions throughout Cuba. The championship was won by the team from Bayamo, a city in the Oriente insular, made up of 12 children and three coaches who attended the official opening of the games in Williamsport in a float with Cuban flags, which was cheered as it passed. “Welcome to Pennsylvania! It was a long road to get here!”, The official account of the Little League World Series celebrated on Twitter.
In yesterday’s game, the Cubans lost to the Japanese, who have won this world league 11 times. In this series, the team that does not win in the first presentation is eliminated. However, the feeling is not one of defeat. The affectionate reception in Pennsylvania, the ovations and the expressions of respect and solidarity towards the visitors, contrasts with the deplorable spectacle that Cuban baseball players experienced, some of them emigrants, during the World Baseball Classic held in Miami last March.
The millions of baseball fans were shocked by the aggressiveness at the LoanDepot Park stadium in Miami, which became a madhouse of verbal and graphic violence against players wearing the Cuban national jersey, with the complicity of local authorities. . Instead of punishing the government of Havana, as those who planned this political provocation intended, what happened generated such indignation in Cuba that the feeling of reparation was one of the variables that favored the massive turnout for the national elections on the island, held a week after the game, on March 26.
The beauty of baseball is that no one has to give up what their childhood and environment has made them. The fact of being different is recognized, too, because the same rules apply to everyone when they face each other on the field. That is why the far-right groups in Miami backfired, a city kidnapped by people entrenched in hatred against Cuba, an ideological Mecca of wild right-wingers who forget that baseball is much more than a massive spectacle where a jersey is defended: it is affective memory, education, identity, shared culture, cult and commitment.
Luckily Pennsylvania proves, once again, that Miami is not the United States.
(Taken from The Day. Cover photo: Caleb Craig/ AP).
#beauty #baseball #Cubaperiodistas