At Baseball Stadium, Cubans Feel Free to Argue More Than Bad Calls

HAVANA —  It was well into the seventh inning during the opening game of Cuba’s national baseball finals earlier this month when more than a dozen police officers lined the right-field fence, apparently to keep the crowd off the field:

“Palestinians! Palestinians! Palestinians!” thousands of fans began to chant, using a derisive nickname many in this capital have for the island’s provincial easterners.

Suddenly, the umpire suspended play between Havana’s Industriales and their opponents from Santiago de Cuba and gave the officers a choice: Leave the field or the game will end.

And, to the roars of the crowd, the police marched off.

“I have not seen something like this in 40 years of coming to the games,” said Ismael Sene, a die-hard 61-year-old fan.

In a Communist-run nation that U.S. officials often call a police state, the crowd’s open protest and the umpire’s power over the officers seemed to reflect a newfound boldness that has been growing within Cuba’s highly disciplined society since Pope John Paul II toured here 15 months ago, calling for democratic freedoms.

The venue was appropriate in a nation where baseball is venerated as a religion and Havana’s Latin American Stadium has been, through the years, a stage for viewing social change. And for fans such as Sene, the stadium also is a traditional sanctuary where the police officers had overstepped their bounds and treaded on hallowed ground.

Apparent Openness Clashes With New Law

Indeed, there are conflicting signs of change in Cuba today.

The verbal challenge to police during the game came at a time when Fidel Castro’s government also appears to be cracking down on dissent: The U.S. government was joined by Japan, Canada and several of Cuba’s European allies last month in condemning the trial here of four political dissidents. The four were tried March 1 on charges of inciting sedition against Castro’s regime, convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to five years.

Those governments also criticized Cuba’s new Law for the Protection of Cuban National Independence and Economy, which outlaws and toughens penalties for crimes ranging from drug trafficking and money laundering to “collaborating with the enemy.”

Cuban officials deny that they are targeting political dissent. In a lengthy statement to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva on March 22, Cuba defended the law.

The Cuban government, the statement explained, views the nearly 40-year-old U.S. embargo of this island nation as “economic warfare.” The statement justified the trial of the so-called “Group of Four” by citing court testimony that they had been secretly paid by the U.S. government, although Cuban officials have declined to make the trial transcripts public.

“This law typifies crimes of collaboration with the enemy, not crimes of opinion as some have wanted to make you believe,” Cuba told the human rights body. “No one is punished in Cuba for thinking and offering opinions.”

Opinions Abound at ‘Hot Corner’

In interviews with average Cubans throughout the capital, it appeared that neither the new law nor the trial has had much effect on a trend toward more open public debate.

Although some asked that their names not be used for fear of reprisal, others readily offered them--especially within the confines of Latin American Stadium and in the leafy section of the city’s Central Park known as the “Hot Corner,” where men gather daily to debate and dissect sports and chide the managers and coaches of their state-owned national teams.

Tempers flared, insults flew and dissent flowed freely for days after the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Cuban national team, 3-2, March 28 in the first appearance by a U.S. professional baseball team on the island in 40 years. The target of many of the critiques was Alfonso Urquiola, the state-appointed manager of the Cuban team.

But, just as the fans had booed the police at the stadium, most at the Hot Corner directed their harshest criticism at the massive security presence during the Oriole game--and the government’s decision to invite only Communist Party loyalists and members of state organizations to the stadium that day.

“The biggest conflict here is that the stadium was so militarized and politicized for [the Oriole] game,” said Sergio Girat Estrada, 34, who does not work for the state but attended the game with a friend who does. “There are lots of points of view here, but almost everyone is angry about that.”

The massive police presence in the stadium during the national finals is mirrored daily on Havana’s streets as part of the crackdown on crime, which Cubans have met with mixed feelings. Most are overjoyed that it has reduced the number of robberies and even murders driven by Cuba’s new dollar economy and an emerging class society. Higher police salaries and status, though, have fostered a tougher attitude among the mostly young police officers toward their people.

And at the stadium during the finals, the crowd drew the line.

“Traditionally in Cuba, the baseball stadium has been a demilitarized zone,” explained Tom Miller, author of a book and several articles on Cuba.

But Miller and Sene stressed that some of the most politically symbolic moments in modern Cuban history have taken place in the Havana stadium.

They recalled how, in the 1950s, University of Havana students used the stadium to protest dictator Fulgencio Batista’s regime, which Castro’s forces overthrew in 1959.

At one game in 1956, Sene recalled, police brutally beat students who had taken their demonstration onto the field. The scene, broadcast on national television, helped turn Cuban hearts and minds against Batista. And a year later, Havana’s pro-Batista mayor was booed out of the stadium by crowds chanting: “Viva Fidel!”

Predictably, there were no such protests when Castro, 72, clad in military fatigues, took a front-row seat behind home plate looking every bit the general marshaling his forces for the Oriole game.

Exchanges Seen as Breakthroughs

Yet many Cubans saw the Oriole game and a musical exchange last month that brought 100 U.S. composers to Havana as breakthroughs in a process that is opening this nation to their powerful democratic neighbor.

“The baseball game and the ‘Music Bridge’ activity are proof of what can take place between the U.S. and Cuban people when no desire of illegal interference in each other’s affairs exists,” said Ricardo Alarcon, the president of Cuba’s National Assembly.

And as in the pope’s visit last year, during which the pontiff urged Cuba to open itself to the world and the world to be more open to Cuba, the activities served as a signal for many here that their government is continuing to permit new and important contacts with a nation that Cubans have been told since birth is their enemy.

So powerful was the baseball game’s symbolism after nearly four decades under the embargo aimed at isolating and driving the Cuban regime from power, that most said it overwhelmed the impact of a dissidents trial that few, in fact, said they had followed.

After a nine-year struggle to survive the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc and the loss of billions of dollars a year in Soviet aid, most Cubans said they are too busy just getting by to focus on such events.

“Who had time for that?” one teacher said of the trial. “Besides, our television is busted. It’ll cost $20 to fix it, and we’re just barely surviving on what we’ve got.”

But baseball is something else. In a city where the streets were empty from the first pitch to the last, the teacher said he joined millions of Cubans in watching the Cuba-Oriole game on television.

“The date of March 28 will stand out in my mind as a landmark,” said Girat Estrada at the Hot Corner. “It marks the beginning of a new era for us in baseball. And now, on May 3, our team will go to Baltimore for a rematch.

“First we had the pope. Now, baseball. Who knows what will be next.”