BASEBALLDECUBA.COM

This interview originally appeared on the Red Letter Daze Blog at Cincinnati.com. A preliminary draft of the text was posted on www.BaseballdeCuba.com but then removed in order to honor Mr. Redleg’s request for exclusivity while the series first ran on his own blog site. For the benefit of our own readers and with permission from Cincinnati.com, we now rerun the interview here in its entirety.

First in a series

Cuban Baseball Author, Expert Discusses Aroldis Chapman, Baseball on the Island and More in Exclusive Red Letter Daze Series (Part I)

When the Reds surprisingly won the bidding for 21-year-old Cuban pitcher Aroldis Chapman earlier this month, a wave of excitement rushed over a fan base lulled to sleep by an offseason of team inactivity. The Reds gave the raw, developing fireballer $30.25 million over 10 years and spoke of him hopefully making an impact sooner rather than later.

But long before the Reds signed Chapman, and immediately after, there have been many questions about his potential, makeup and true value. He defected from Cuba last summer with nowhere near the history or success of more experienced Cuban stars. In so many ways, Chapman and the culture of Cuban baseball is a mystery to most American baseball talent evaluators—and fans.

So Red Letter Daze turned to the foremost authority on Cuban baseball, American author and journalist Peter Bjarkman of Lafayette, Ind. Bjarkman has written more than 30 books, including many on Latin American baseball and Cuban themes. He is a regular contributor to BaseballdeCuba.com and his work is seen anywhere from Baseball America to the independent Havana Times.

With over four dozen trips to Cuba, plus covering many of its national team’s worldwide tournaments, no one knows the island’s post-revolution baseball like Bjarkman.

So, in this first of a three-part series, Peter and I discuss the basics of Cuban baseball up close:

RLD: How did you come about your love and passion for baseball in Cuba?

Bjarkman: I had already published several books on major league baseball by the mid-1990s after leaving a long academic career (in 1987)) as, first, a high school teacher and, later, a college English/linguistics professor. One of those books was an academic history of baseball in Latin America, and that particular volume motivated my colleague, Mark Rucker, to contact me on the eve of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics about the possibilities of traveling to Cuba with him to research a pictorial récord of baseball on the island.

I jumped at the chance, and Mark and I launched our project, which resulted in a coffee table volume published in 1999, by following the Cuban national team to the Atlanta Games. We subsequently made our first trip to the island in February 1997. I now have over 50 visits.

All this came at a time when the 1994 Major League Baseball work stoppage had pretty much soured me on the MLB product. Discovering the Cuban version of the game up-close and personal in 1997, as well as first seeing Olympic-style IBAF-sponsored tournament play a year earlier, opened whole new vistas for me.

RLD: How are you able to travel back and forth to Cuba?

Bjarkman: I have long held a series of OFAC-issued (U.S. Treasury Department) travel permits as a legitimate researcher. All my trips to Cuba have been legal. That hasn’t always made getting back and forth to the island easy, given the absence of U.S.-Cuba commercial air flights, but that has all been part of the adventure. I currently visit Cuba either twice or three times annually for usually about 10 days at a time. I have visited all provinces and major cities, as well as all the Cuban ballparks, with the exception of the off-the-coast region of Isla de la Juventud.

My home base in Cuba, however, is the capital city of Havana, where most of my closest friends and contacts live.

RLD: Explain the Cuban League structure to readers.

Bjarkman: The Cuban League consists of 16 clubs divided into two regional divisions—Occidental or Western league, and Oriental or Eastern league. Fourteen of those ball clubs represent the 14 Cuban provinces; an additional two are located in the city of Havana. All players must compete on the roster of their native province; players are not bought or sold or traded, and they never change ball clubs. This does lead to some competitive imbalance and the same five or six clubs usually dominate the Cuban postseason.

But the plus side is that competition is truly between individual cities or regions and thus fan and player loyalties are fierce. Fans can assume that the favorites they adopt will play for their hometown club until they retire. And players are competing for the honor of their hometown and not for whatever company team happens to be signing their paycheck at the moment.

RLD: As we have seen from other Latin American and winter league baseball, the relationships between players and fans are extremely familiar and personal.

Bjarkman: Right. Imagine a competition between the Red Sox and Yankees in which all the Sox were Boston kids and all the Yankees were Bronx natives. It would not be just one company’s rented Dominicans beating another company’s rented Asians or rented Californians. Cuban baseball has a whole different patriotic and non-commercial flavor that is very much to my liking.

RLD: What is the most striking contrast of Cuban baseball?

Bjarkman: This might be only meaningful to the fans of my generation (I am in my late 60s), but imagine returning to the cozy and intimate ballparks of the 1950s—primitive scoreboards, no rock music, seats close to the field for a couple of bucks, yet top-level talent on the field and an atmosphere free of anything but the game itself. That is Cuban League baseball as it still exists today.

RLD: Most U.S. fans might be surprised, but Cubans do have their games on TV, right?

Bjarkman: Oh, yes. Even watching televised games in Cuba is a rare treat. Announcers stick to bare-bones analysis, there are no commercial pitches, only a couple of camera angles reveal the game as it might be viewed from a perch behind home plate, and between innings the camera remains in the broadcast booth for a brief analysis/recap of the previous action. Anyone who wants to see what I am describing—that is, to get a true taste of Cuban League games—can visit our website at www.BaseballdeCuba.com and access nightly feeds of live broadcasts from the island. And you don’t need to understand the Spanish language to capture a sense of what Cuban baseball actually feels like.

RLD: How are you so free to write about Cuban baseball as an American citizen and journalist?

Bjarkman: In the same way that any local member of the Cincinnati sports media is free to write about the Cincinnati Reds. Most of my writing is done here in the USA, where I write principally (though not exclusively) in English rather than Spanish, and mostly for the North American-based www.BaseballdeCuba.com website, which is founded and maintained by my colleague, Ray Otero. But I have also written for a couple of Cuba-based media outlets such as the Prensa Latina English-language website (Latin America’s version of UPI), where I am accepted and recognized as a balanced and authoritative voice analyzing the Cuban League scene.

I have been fortunate over the years to have built up relationships and trust with Cuban media, Cuban ballplayers and Cuban baseball officials. That trust and acceptance has been earned by persistence and hard work over more than a decade.

RLD: Aren’t the Cubans suspicious of American journalists wanting access to stadiums and ballplayers?

Bjarkman: Yes, and justifiably so. Often player agents and pro scouts have disguised their true identities in order to entice players into leaving the island, an activity that violates Cuban law. Also, many journalists have arrived on the doorstep of the Cuban Sports Ministry (INDER) wanting to write stories they swear will be balanced. Some have subsequently been given considerable access but published work in the states that openly slams Cuban baseball as a “slavery system,” or offers no honest portrait of some of the upsides of Cuban baseball, or worse yet, contains numerous distortions and fabrications invented to enhance some particular journalistic motive.

I have built trust on the island by going back time and again, by never hiding my work from Cuban fans or baseball officials, and especially by being around the Cuban national team on the road in Europe and elsewhere overseas so regularly over the last decade.

RLD: How long did it take you to build trust with INDER?

Bjarkman: Certainly, it took quite a while. I have been making either one or two trips annually to other corners of the globe to watch the national team play—this year to the World Baseball Classic in Mexico and San Diego, and the World Cup in Italy, Spain and Holland. I have had to constantly be vigilant of my own image in the Cuban baseball community in order to be seen as an objective journalist and a historian bent on thoroughly revealing the fuller story of their national game to a North American audience.

One big breakthrough came somewhat accidentally in March 2006, when I published several periodical pieces in Spanish on the eve of the first WBC, all predicting that Cuba would likely reach the finals. When that actually happened, I was seen by many in the Cuban media and in the league front offices as doing them a great service by explaining to the outside world and naysayers just how good their national sport actually is. That scored a lot of points for me on the island.

RLD: Is there a common misconception about Cuba?

Bjarkman: Yes, there is a different notion of social freedom and social responsibility in Cuba, but Americans should understand that Cuba is not a country where open speech and open travel is banned or shunned.

In recent years I have been invited on several occasions to appear on television in Havana and have been asked in live interviews to comment on Cuba’s baseball versus the professional version, and also to comment on the careers of players who have left the country for the majors. The latter issue is not harped upon by the Cuban media but it is no longer taboo, either.

RLD: There is a huge difference between social and political freedom of speech and that of baseball or sports.

Bjarkman: This is not the time or place for that debate, but as an American journalist, I have appeared on Cuban radio broadcasts of numerous international tournament games being beamed back to the island from Europe. There is now an open dialogue about the current status of Cuban baseball on Havana radio and TV sportstalk shows, which often rather pointedly criticize the way league officials are running things.

Cuban fans love to debate their baseball and many passionate criticisms reach the airwaves. The latest hot debate is the recent introduction of graphite bats, which have increased home run numbers. So writing and speaking about baseball in Cuba is not that difficult—even for an American.

RLD: Just after the Chapman (above) signing, you wrote an article that was reprinted in the Havana Times and sparked some controversy in Cincinnati. Some fans and members of the local media felt the story had a state-run influence. So, without us getting into specifics of the media controversy because it’s not germane to our subject, was any editing done by the Havana Times from your original submission to give the story a pro-Cuban slant? If so, can you point out any specifics?

Bjarkman: The piece, like many others I have done for HT, was picked up with my permission from the original article published on my own Cuban League website. There was no editing done. Occasionally in the past, my HT pieces have been edited slightly to shorten them or to make them better fit the HT web format. But content has never been changed or given a different slant.

RLD: Having the word "defector" in quotes throws off a lot of readers.

Bjarkman: Regarding the use of “defector” in quotes, that may be a red flag for some U.S. readers and so be it. The term defector, itself, is a red flag for me, and that is why I choose to put it in quotes—simply to show I am using the term that everyone else is using but one I don’t agree with.

I disagree with its use with ballplayers because it is a term usually reserved for individuals departing their homeland (or some organization they belong to) for “political” or philosophical reasons. I don’t believe—at least, in the huge majority of cases—the Cuban ballplayers leave for any reasons other than to advance their careers economically and improve their lives materially. That may be fine, but their departures are not personal blows consciously being struck at the Cuban government.

When a Japanese player leaves the Tokyo Giants for a more lucrative contract with an MLB club, no one refers to him in print as a Japanese “defector” do they? Yes, I know that in the case of the Cubans they are not free to return to their country, so their situation is a bit different. But “defector” is a term than confuses their motives.

But anyway, I am the one who chooses to put the term in quotation marks, not any of my editors.

RLD: Now, Pete, the natural follow-up to that answer is all other foreign players are not renouncing citizenship and thus play in the U.S. with a work visa.

Bjarkman: I once thought of using the term “deserters” instead, but that would be going too far in the other direction, and then everyone really would think I had some overt political agenda. I guess the thing that frustrates me the most is that it seems about the only time the North American media wants to write anything about Cuban baseball is when they have a story about “defection.”

But there is so much more to focus on such as the remarkable event of Alexei Bell hitting two grand slams in the very first inning of the current season, in his first two at-bats of the year. There are some great baseball stories every week in Cuba and they rarely have anything to do with politics.

RLD: Of course, you understand the topic of interest to the American fan is how a Cuban player such as Aroldis Chapman can impact his team and sport in the U.S. But let’s not veer off. People see the words "Havana Times" and make an assumption it's a state-run media organization. It is not, correct?

Bjarkman: Regarding the nature of HT, no it is not in any way affiliated with, sanctioned by, or run by the Cuban government or any other state government or corporate group. The journal was originally launched by a non-Cuban living in Havana, but the current editor of HT is actually operating the journal from a location outside of Cuba. You will also notice that one thing HT stresses is the view of many young, under-30 Cubans living on the island.

I will not speak for the HT staff about their mission since they state that clearly in their own publication. If readers don’t want to believe the publication’s own statement of their mission then I don’t see why they would put any more faith in my own assessment. But I do think if anyone reads the publication they will see that it does provide an “open-minded” view.

Yes, they are opinionated at times but what journal isn’t? HT is often critical of the problems in Cuba, but the fact that they also see some goodness as well as some negatives in the island’s society and its economic system might just be worth listening to.

RLD: I was offered a chance to travel with the Orioles for their series in Cuba in 1999. My company wouldn't pay for the trip so I declined. I have regretted it each time I hear of that series. My friends and peers who made the trip still gush over the experience.

Bjarkman: I don’t know a single American who has traveled in Cuba who does not come home with a somewhat different—often drastically different—view of that nation, a perspective that contradicts the image usually offered in our mainstream media.

Next: Aroldis Chapman and the Cuban baseball talent.

Peter C. Bjarkman is author of A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864-2006 (McFarland, 2007) and widely considered a leading authority on Cuban baseball, both past and present. He reports regularly on Cuban League action and on the Cuban national team for www.baseballdecuba.com and also writes a regular weekly Cuban League report for www.ibaf.com. He is currently completing a book on the history of the post-revolution Cuban national team.