This weekend the Miami Marlins will celebrate Cuban Heritage Night and wear special uniforms honoring the old Cuban Triple-A team the Sugar Kings.
Via ESPN:
Miami Marlins’ uniforms to honor former Cuban Triple-A team the Sugar Kings
The Miami Marlins will use their “City Connect” uniforms to honor the Sugar Kings, a fleeting yet monumental former minor league organization with a special connection to the Cuban American populace of South Florida.
The new uniforms were unveiled by the team Monday morning and will be worn by Marlins players for the first time Friday, the day after Cuban Independence Day. The team will wear the uniforms throughout that weekend home series against the New York Mets, which features the team’s Cuban Heritage Night, and in five other weekend series the rest of this season.
The Sugar Kings were a Triple-A team in the International League that was owned by Bobby Maduro and played out of Havana, Cuba, from 1954 to 1960.
Maduro — revered so much in Miami that a baseball stadium was named after him — aspired to turn the Sugar Kings into a major league team based out of Cuba, an aspiration expressed through the team’s popular motto of “Un Paso Mas Y Llegamos” (“One More Step And We Get There”). The team got close, winning the Junior World Series in 1959, but Fidel Castro’s rise to power and Cuba’s deteriorated relations with the United States forced the team to suddenly relocate to New Jersey and ultimately dissolve.
The older generation of Cubans in Miami — many of whom live in Little Havana, site of the Marlins’ ballpark — still look back on that team with great reverence. Cookie Rojas, a Cuban American who played for the Sugar Kings and went on to carve out a 16-year major league career, called the Marlins’ uniforms “a very good, well-deserved representation of the ballclub in trying to give the Sugar Kings what they deserve.”
“I believe it’s one of the greatest things for the fans right now to remember,” said Rojas, who believes Maduro should be honored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “You can very much dream on what could’ve happened.”
Continue reading HERE.
Alas, Cuba took the wrong step, and everything went to hell. The folly, to put it kindly, was epic.