It was a lot of fun hearing my late parents tell stories of Cuban baseball. My mother, born in Ciego de Avila, followed La Habana. My father, born in Sagua La Grande, followed Almendares. They spent many nights in their hometowns writing each other letters and listening to the games on radio. I guess that I inherited their passion for “beisbol.”
We remember an important anniversary in Cuban baseball:
“On December 29, 1878, the first game is played between two teams of the first professional baseball league in Cuba, later known as the Cuban League. Representing the city of Havana, the Habana club faced off against their greatest rivals, a club from the neighboring suburb of Almendares. Habana, coached by Esteban Bellán, the first Cuban to play professional baseball in the United States, won that inaugural game 21-20.”
The first game eventually turned into the very successful Almendares-Habana rivalry, the Cuban version of the Yankees-Red Sox feud. Eventually, they added teams in Marianao and Cienfuegos.
It all started today in 1878!
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Cuba had an amazing printing/marketing industry. When you look at the covers of magazines like Bohemia and Carteles which were the two top magazines in pre-castro Cuba, you are looking at quality publishing on par with the United States and Europe. Another industry that castro destroyed.
Bohemia goes back to around 1910. Its great success went to its publisher’s head, and he apparently came to see (and use) the magazine as the chief authority on Cuban politics, which had dire consequences because Bohemia went all in for Fidel Castro and his people against Batista. It was as if the magazine were being run by Herbert Matthews. Said publisher wised up fairly quickly after Castro took over, but by then it was too late, and he went into exile in 1960.
Oddly enough, the magazine (or one bearing its name, albeit completely pro-regime) has been kept in circulation in Cuba to this day, unlike practically all other Cuban publications from the pre-Castro era.
You’re right, Bohemia, did a lot of harm. To this day, the lie that Miguel Angel Quevedo cooked up about the 20,000 people that Batista allegedly killed is still believed and quoted. As you may or may not know, Quevedo was gay, and it has been rumored that he was in love with Fidel. Perhaps that was a nasty rumor, as a lot of Cuba’s white establishment hated Batista and Quevedo’s obsession with Fidel could have just been the “anything but Batista” mentality that prevailed in much of the nation. Still, it’s a shame that Bohemia [that was not just the most popular magazine in Cuba, also, I understand, it was the most popular in Latin America] became a mouthpiece for Fidel Castro in the late fifties. However, like everyone else, Quevedo was betrayed by Castro and had his empire stolen once the beast rose to power and no longer needed him. He escaped to Venezuela where he took the coward’s way out and committed suicide shortly thereafter.
That Bohemia is still published by the regime is not surprising, since Castro’s regime never founded anything but a Stasi/KGB-like tyranny. Everything in Cuba worth anything, Bohemia, its medical establishment, its higher education system, its sugar/rum industry, etc… was created under the earlier governments.
Right after his triumph, Fidel Castro declared that the magazine had been his firmest supporter. It issued the now repulsive special edition with Fidel on the cover depicted in Christ-like fashion. And yes, Bohemia went as far as to knowingly and deliberately lie in favor of the “revolution.”
Of course, plenty of influential people, including many rich people, were badly suckered, including former president Carlos Prío and the Bacardí firm, but few if any of them had the kind mass media reach that Bohemia did. Quevedo, the publisher, wound up ruined, but he had done serious harm.