Cuba's All-Stars

One enormous kitchen at the training center feeds three meals a day to 766 students. Birds fly into the kitchen, over the vats, then back out. The steam table has been sent out for repairs, and the staff does not seem to expect to see it back anytime soon. As a result, the cooks heat up food for Cuba's future international competitors using firewood foraged by students from the nearby woods.

The kids go home on weekends, and parents are encouraged to visit on Wednesdays. The province also provides for a psychologist to help young players who are trying to be adults too soon, who are having trouble adapting, or whose home problems are affecting their school performance.

The young baseball hopefuls get promoted--or weeded out--every two years until, at sixteen or seventeen, if they still qualify, they are sent to play on provincial development teams, the squads that feed Cuba's top teams. Beyond that, the opportunities become more restricted. "With only twenty spots on the national team, too many good young players are stuck on the island," says University of Texas political science teacher Milton Jamail, America's leading expert on contemporary Cuban baseball. "Rey Ordonez of the New York Mets had been considered only the third best shortstop. The chance to play was one reason he defected."

Attending a game in the western city of Pinar del Rio, at Capitan San Luis Stadium, I watch a perennial on the national team step up to bat. He is third baseman Omar "El Nino" Linares; the crowd stands and cheers his first appearance in three weeks, after an absence due to injury. Play stops while the batter, with a .373 lifetime average, reaches over to shake hands with the home plate umpire. Then the fifteen-year veteran shakes hands with the opposing team's catcher. These civilities and kindnesses are not showboating; they are characteristic of Cuban baseball and, for a foreigner, take some getting used to. Finally Linares faces the pitcher and grounds out down the third-base line.

Pinar del Rio is in a fight for the national title, a race it will eventually win. I have the misfortune this evening of sitting with the city's pena, the booster club that cheers on the local teams for every moment of every sport. I say "misfortune" because they have a piercing pump-action horn and an ear-splitting siren, both of which sound off at the slightest provocation. Rosendo Prieto, a retired truck driver and the pena's vice president, explains between horn blasts that it costs three pesos (about fifteen cents) to join. With all the ecstatic, rhythmic drumming and whistles, there are times late in a game when a ballpark feels more like a salsa nightclub than a stadium.

The pena siren goes off for twenty-five-year-old Pinar del Rio pitcher Pedro Luis Lazo. Eight years ago, when I last saw him, he was a skinny rookie. At that time, he was pointed out to me as a future star; now, playing against the Metropolitanos of Havana, he shows how accurate that prediction was. Once Lazo reaches his sixth strikeout, the crowd begins to count them off, beginning the chant each time with "One!" By game's end, the count is up to sixteen.