Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports

Cuban athletes have been put on a pedestal since Castro took power, and their achievements on the international stage have swelled the national chest and been interpreted as triumphs over capitalism. Yet as conditions on the embargoed island deteriorate, athletes who complain are banished to oblivion, while others--think Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez of the Yankees and Mets shortstop Rey Ordonez--flee for freedom and cash. Price's reportage on how freedom and money have changed many of the exiles, Ordonez most notably, is stunning. And still, despite rundown facilities and repatched equipment, Cuba keeps turning out remarkable athletes and loyal fans.

Examining the state of sports on the island, Price is in effect examining the state itself, and his own relationship to sports--and the big money of American sports--in the process. While the portrait he paints is not pretty, it is fascinating. There's much poignance in the joy that emanates from Cuba's playing fields, the passion in the stands, and the shabbiness Price observes in the appearance of the great Teofilo Stevenson--the multi-Olympic heavyweight champion and the island's reigning sports icon. Not even an icon can override the revolution's contradictions. --Jeff Silverman

Product Description

In an artful pastiche of observation, personal narrative, interviews, and investigative reporting, S.L. Price, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, describes sports and athletes in today's Cuba. On his journeys to the island, Price finds a country that celebrates sports like no other and a regime that uses games as both symbol and weapon in its dying revolution. He finds Olympic and world champion boxers, track stars, volleyball and baseball players, but he also finds that with Castro's revolution staggering beneath the weight of a great depression, Cuba's famed sports system is imploding. Athletes are defecting by plane and raft. Superstars bike to games and legends like boxer Teofilo Stevenson are forced to lost themselves in a bottle of rum.

Beyond an examination of sports in the hothouse of revolution, Pitching Around Fidel presents a vibrant and realistic portrait of Cuba today, complete with sex-happy tourists, blackouts, Fidel's famous former lover, and a black-power fugitive wanted in the U.S. for murder and hijacking. At once a biting travelogue and a meditation on sports in both America and Cuba, Pitching Around Fidel is a valuable document about a time and place that is close to fading away.

Surely the best part of Pitching Around Fidel is Price's observation that Cuban sports are pure because it is one of the only places on earth whether one can find true amateur sports, where the only reward for a champion is a medal. But he also comes to realize that this pure ideal places a very heavy burden on the island nation's amateur sports stars, who are forever attempting to pitch and run (and even sail) around Fidel.


The Dictator of Baseball   December 31, 2001
peter houlahan (Redding, Connecticut - USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful

It is a strange truth about baseball that, for all its poetry and grace on the field, it remains a game that only achieves its sublime balance under repressive labor conditions.
For most of American baseball history, that repression came in the form of the reserve clause: the congressionally-approved labor practice that denied players the right to sell their services on the open market.
A heinous and unforgivable practice, the reserve clause none-the-less allowed teams to retain their superstars by artificially holding down player salaries. The result was an environment in which each teams had an identifiable personality defined by a core of star players who, for the most part, spent their careers there. With success achieved mostly through trades, talent development, and general baseball acumen, teams from small markets such as Oakland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh could build powerhouses to rival anything ever put on the field by clubs from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
A series of court rulings and bargaining concessions in the 1970's effectively disabled the reserve clause. The effect of freedom on baseball has been devastating.
Entrusted with a national heirloom, neither owners nor players seem willing to make even the smallest concessions for the sake of preserving the integrity of the game. Players switch clubs so frequently that baseball organizations no longer have recognizable personalities or philosophies, not to mention starting line-ups. With gross revenue now the largest single determining factor of success, the fragile competitive balance of the game has been shattered. Make no mistake about it, baseball pennants are now won on a team's wallet rather than its wits.
It is not surprising then that a nation of baseball purists are turning their lonely eyes to the myth, mystery, and dream of Cuban baseball; what author T.C. Price in his new book Pitching Around Fidel calls "...a place where free agency is unknown, where agents are a mystery, where no one gets traded and teams never move." "...one of the last places where athletes play for little more than love of the game."
Well, maybe.
Price peels back the layers of charming wood stadiums, accessible athletes, and cheap playoff tickets, to reveal yet another baseball utopia built upon a foundation of repression; this time in the form of a totalitarian dictatorship that not only restricts the movement of labor, but denies its citizens their freedoms.

Baseball is not the only sport covered in Pitching Around Fidel, (subtitled: A journey into the heart of Cuban sports.) but it offers the most compelling dramas that, like all great sports tales, go much deeper than the on-field action to tell us something about the times in which they are played.
For Cuba and South Florida, these times are all about the head-on collision of opposing social philosophies - the one promising happiness through social equality, the other through material wealth. Having lost this war on all other fronts, the Castro regime, now more than ever, looks to success on the playing field to legitimize their failing system.
Baseball is Cuba's most beloved sport, yet no other Cuban athletes are so tempted by the guarantee of instant riches just across the Straights of Florida. Rafters such as Orlando Hernandez of the Yankees can hardly get the sand out of their cuffs before being offered multimillion dollar contracts. Cuban expatriate sports agents can make a career out of ear whispering at international sports festivals in hopes of getting a star shortstop from the National Team to jump the chain link fence.

A senior writer at Sports Illustrated and columnist and feature writer for the Miami Herald, T.C. Price is one of the few American sports writers to have gone beyond a seat in the press box at Joe Robby Stadium

Equal parts travelogue, athlete interviews, and light socio-political commentary, Pitching Around Fidel reads a bit like a sports writer's version of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" with Price inhabiting his subject, taking meetings with a gallery of oddball characters, and chronicling the absurdities of everyday life in a perposterous social system.


A good story   May 29, 2001
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

If you're a sports fan this gives you a great look into a another world. It appears to be an even handed discussion of the good bad and ugly of Cuban sports

Its worth it.


A must read   September 7, 2000
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

I first heard of this book in Sports Illistrated. It was very moving and very sad. All sports fans should read this and reflect on the differences between American sports and Cuban Sports. The dichotomy is ironic and tragic.