I have been looking into Cuban baseball for my research project here, and on Wednesday I spent the afternoon with Javier Dreke, a scout for one of the top clubs in Cuba, Los Industriales. He met me at Ciudad Deportiva, a gargantuan athletics complex where sports of all kinds are practiced and played. I jumped into his beat up, open top yellow jeep, and we sped off to La Lisa neighborhood to watch some youth practices. He immediately informed me that the games I had been watching at Ciudad Deportiva were not the real Cuban baseball struggle, and that what we were about to go watch was. Arriving at a run down youth field, he said it was on fields like this one where the good players separate themselves from the rest, and in his stern tone of struggle and discipline, where the men separate from the boys. We hopped out of the jeep, and I followed him around as he sauntered through the practice. He introduced me to coaches, and maintained his intensity of the man in charge, interrupting drills to instruct what he thought was the better way to run things. Various parents and young players came up to shake his hand, reinforcing his reputation as someone who had made it to the big time in Cuban baseball.
After about an hour and a half of observing practices, we got back in the jeep, and headed for his home. I was expecting a wealthier Havana abode, as he had frequently reiterated the status of glory, and the money that came with it, that he had accrued from years of struggle in Cuba’s national pastime. When we got there I was struck by how much his living situation contradicted this image. His home was in one of the more crowded and apparently poor neighborhoods I had been to, on the outskirts of the city. He raises pigs in his tiny backyard, rents the in progress bottom floor of his small home, and has a barebones living space. We sat on his porch and talked baseball and life for another hour, and he introduced me to his two small turtles, one of which he brought back in his shirt pocket from a baseball trip to Venezuela. The entire experience was a powerful indicator of what success means in the Cuban struggle, and how it contrasts with my perspective as a privileged extranjero.