Long before the Buena Vista Social Club beguiled audiences around the world, revolutionary Cuba’s sporting heroes enjoyed global renownOn a warm evening in a Barcelona suburb 24 years ago, the air thick and heavy, the light-grey and gold, Cuba and the USA met in a baseball game that was as much a contest of ideologies as an Olympic semi-final. As the two teams lined up to shake hands before the semi-final, each Cuban presented his opponent with a commemorative pennant. The Americans had come empty-handed.The USA team consisted of college boys, some of them on the brink of Major League-careers. The Cubans were veterans of their domestic league, unbeaten in almost 70 internationals. After a scoreless first hour, it was...
The revolutionary leader’s decision to join a scratch game of cricket in Barbados in 1998 led to one of the more curious British Foreign Office schemes: to take the game to CubaOnce upon a time, they say, Fidel Castro played a game of cricket. It was in 1998, when Castro, then 71, was taking a short tour of Barbados. He and the prime minister of Barbados, Owen Arthur, were travelling from Bridgetown up to Paynes Bay on the west coast, where they were due to unveil a memorial to the men and women who died in the bombing of Air Cubana flight 455 22 years earlier. On the way they passed a cricket match. And, as the one eyewitness account...
The Marlins pitcher is dead at the age of 24. It is a tragedy made all the more painful after the adversity he had overcome in his short lifeThis is the year my son fell in love with baseball and for reasons that are still unclear he declared the Miami Marlins his second-favorite team. He often wears a black Marlins shirt to school with orange pants to match the team’s colors. And each night when we sit in front of the television to watch an hour of baseball before bedtime it is usually the Marlins we see. The most recent Marlins game we watched together was last Tuesday night when the team’s best pitcher José Fernández sliced through the Washington...