IT STARTED WITH A CASUAL discussion and ended with the trip of a lifetime.
During the summer of 2004, the Red Sox were in the early stages of their historic run to a World Series title. By this point Luis Tiant was back at Fenway Park on a regular basis, greeting fans at the El Tiante Grille on then-Yawkey Way and schmoozing with them during ballgames in the luxury boxes above home plate. One day at the ballpark, Tiant struck up a conversation with Kris Meyer, a Quincy, Massachusetts, native working as a movie producer with the brother directing team of Bobby and Peter Farrelly. The Farrellys were at Fenway filming scenes for an upcoming film.
“Luis said he wanted to go home [to Cuba] before he died,” Meyer recalled of their chat. “I asked, ‘How long has it been?’ He said, ‘Forty-two years.’”
Much of Meyer’s job with the Farrellys was finding those stories that might translate well to the big screen. Tiant’s, he and the brothers agreed, was one. They all knew the pitcher’s compelling background. What if they were to help Tiant return to Cuba and used that journey as the centerpiece for a film about his life?
There were significant obstacles to such a plan. Although in failing health, Fidel Castro was still very much in control of Cuba. Travel to and from the country remained heavily restricted for Americans. But in true Hollywood fashion, the Farrellys and Meyer, along with documentary filmmaker Jonathan Hock, found a way to make it work.
The film that resulted—The Lost Son of Havana—combined footage from their trip with old family photos, baseball clips, and interviews including Tiant’s Red Sox teammates Carlton Fisk and Carl Yastrzemski. Premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2009, it went on to win numerous awards and shed new light on modern Cuban-US relations and the challenges faced by those living under Castro a half-century after his ascent to power.
Most importantly, The Lost Son of Havana enabled its star to return to the family and homeland he had yearned to see for forty-six years.
WHEN I GOT OUT of Cuba, I swore before God I didn’t want to come back as long as Castro was there. But then the time goes by, goes by, goes by, and you start wondering—when am I going to come back? I’m not getting any younger.
Other than my parents, I had not seen my family—or my country—since 1961. That’s a long time. Sometimes I’d think about it, and it hurt. I realized I had to go to Cuba before I died, even if Castro was still in power. That was going to complete my life.
As an American citizen, I couldn’t travel to and from the island without a special license issued by both countries. I had applied for the license before and was turned down by both countries. My name didn’t matter.
Then, in 2007, there was an opportunity. The movie directors Bobby and Peter Farrelly, famous for making comedies like There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber, were big Red Sox fans who grew up in Rhode Island during the 1970s. They even made a movie about a guy obsessed with the Sox called Fever Pitch that came out right after Boston won the ’04 World Series. The Farrellys knew my life story and wanted to produce a documentary about me that included my return home.
The Farrellys were used to making comedies, so they got Jonathan Hock, a documentary filmmaker from New York who did a lot of sports stuff, to sign on as director. Kris Meyer, a Boston native who had been with the Farrellys for years as a producer and worked at Fenway Park in college, filled out the film’s senior staff.
There was a goodwill baseball game in Cuba each year between American amateurs and retired Cuban players that the documentary team heard about. All the American players had permission to travel to and from the country freely, and somehow they found a way to get their film crew onto the team. The crew’s baseball experience was pretty shaky, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was that by signing on as their coach, I could legally go with them to Cuba and be in the movie.
I packed for the trip on my sixty-seventh birthday: November 23, 2007. By this point I had not seen my Cuban relatives for forty-six years. I was not sure who was alive, who was dead, and whether my childhood home was even still there.
One of the things I took with me was an old black and white photograph of my father, in uniform, taken during his playing days. I thought if I came across anybody who knew of Dad as “Lefty” Tiant—the great Cuban and Negro League pitcher—they might enjoy seeing it.
Just before leaving, I visited with an old friend of my parents who remembered me from when I was a little boy. She made me some of her wonderful Cuban coffee, and I shared with her the story of the letter my father sent to me in Mexico City in 1961 telling me not to come home because Castro had outlawed all professional baseball on the island.
“You remember, I was their only child,” I said to her. “They knew they might never see me again. I was all they had. But they wanted me to go pursue my dream. The dream that he had, to pitch in the major leagues someday.”
Then she told me of her last trip to Cuba and how much it had pained her to see the conditions under which people lived.
“There’s so much misery. You can tell the people are hungry!” she said. “They don’t have anything to wear. The kids walk the streets barefoot. And even if you don’t want to cry, tears come out of your eyes. Because what’s there, Luis, it’s so bad, so bad.”
She said my family’s house had still been there as of her visit, and then asked if my family there knew I was coming. I told her they didn’t.
“What a surprise you’re going to give them! And what a surprise you’re going to get, my child!”
The film crew flew out of Miami together on a small plane, but I sat by myself. Plane rides had always bothered me during my playing days, and I used to fight my fears and crack my teammates up by yelling things like “C’mon, Get up! Get up!” during takeoff. But on this day, a strange sense of calmness came over me—like nothing I had ever felt before when flying. Looking down at the countryside as we flew in to Jose Marti Habana Airport, this was just one of many emotions I was feeling. I crossed myself as we landed, something I always did, and then the flight attendant came over the intercom:
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Havana.”
I had waited so long to hear those words. All the years I had been away.
The game against our Cuban hosts was held on the first day of our visit. It was in Pinar del Río, a small rural city west of Havana, and to get there we drove through villages that looked like they had not changed since I lived on the island. Almost all the cars we passed were from the 1950s and ’60s because no one could afford anything newer. There were plenty of horse-drawn buggies and barefoot kids playing in the streets and very few stores or markets of any kind. It was like going back in time; it was like I never left.
“You know, I’m happy to come back,” I said during the drive. “Good or bad, it’s still my country.”
The only thing that looked new to me was Estadio Capitán San Luis, the baseball stadium in Pinar del Río. It was actually nearly forty years old, but it was obviously kept up for the Cuban League team that played there. It was funny; this was my first time on a Cuban baseball diamond since I was pitching for the Sugar Kings in the winter of 1961. It was mostly younger fans in the stands, with kids running around, and nobody seemed to recognize me. That was fine. Our club was no match for the national team, but everyone had a lot of fun.
When we went back to the hotel, I met up with Juan Carlos Oliva, whose older brother Pedro was a Pinar del Río native and had been one of my teammates with the Twins. Like me, Pedro was not able to return to Cuba after Minnesota signed him and helped him get out in 1961 just before Castro locked things down. Pedro couldn’t even use his real name in the United States; because he didn’t have a birth certificate, he had used his older brother Antonio’s name to get a passport.
Known from that point on as Tony Oliva, he became one of the best hitters in the major leagues. He won three batting titles, helped lead the Twins to the 1965 World Series, and later became a coach. If it wasn’t for terrible knee injuries that cut his career short, he’d be in the Hall of Fame. He’s still a hero in Minnesota, where his number is retired by the Twins and there is a bronze statue of him outside of Target Field.
Juan Carlos was just a little kid when Castro came to power. By the time he was seventeen and a great pitching prospect, it was too late. Cuban players could no longer sign with a big-league team and leave the island.
“You look just like your brother, same face,” I told Juan Carlos as we shook hands and hugged hello. “I know you also played. He told me you were good.”
“I represented the Cuban national team for ten years,” he said proudly.
I responded with a smile.
“Tony said you were better than him,” I replied, and now he smiled.
“No, that’s not true. He lied about that. But you were great, and you’re still great. You look young.”
“It was time for me to return after forty-six years, that’s what I was telling Tony. Years are easy to say, but those are days and nights.”
“Years, thinking and suffering,” he replied. “And in the name of all Cubans, we wish you the best time here. We want you to feel like a good Cuban, as you have always been.”
It was nice of Juan Carlos to say that. Maybe he sensed the guilt I felt about having been away so long.
He drove us to his house that night for dinner. Juan Carlos worked for the government now, as a coach, and he lived comfortably. But seeing me surely brought up a lot of his own strong feelings about what could have been. Over drinks, he got very emotional.
“Tony Oliva, my brother”—that’s what he calls Pedro, like everybody in the United States—“I hope he lives a million years. I think there’s no one in the world like my brother. We used to live in the country. Tony was the head of our household. And one fine day, what came, came. He left for the United States, along with other athletes.
“Then the revolution came, and the counterrevolution at the Bay of Pigs, so they went and told him, ‘If you go back to Cuba, you can’t play professionally any more, but if you stay in the United States you have an open door—if you can make it.’
“So Tony said, ‘Well I’m already here.’ Many others came back. And honestly, Tony moved on. Our family suffered much when he left. But we also rejoiced…because he decided to seek out his future. He sought out his future, and he got it.”
I took out the photo of my dad to show to Juan Carlos, and he started to cry. He was too young to have seen my father pitch, but he knew of his greatness and had grown close to him in later years.
“Your old man was my friend,” he said as he continued studying the photo. “We hung out and went everywhere with our [Cuban national] teams in the ’60s. We always talked about you. He’d tell me, ‘My kid is playing really well over there. He’s stepping into the major leagues and fighting for his chance.’
“He’d say you were coming home, that you wanted to come back. He always made excuses for you. ‘It’s not that he doesn’t want to come,’ he’d say. ‘He wants to come!’”
“I did want to come,” I said.
“But you couldn’t. It’s the same thing that happened to my brother Tony. You see?”
Then he looked again at the photo.
“This man [Luis Sr.] was out of this world. You see, we need to laugh. What a guy.”
I tried to make him feel better.
“They say he was better than me,” I said of my father. “That’s what the old guys told me. ‘You’re good, but your dad was better.’”
Juan Carlos smiled.
“That’s a lie. You were better. They said I was better than Tony. That’s a lie. I was a crab next to him.”
The next day I went to Havana to see my cousins and my aunts—my father’s sisters—for the first time since leaving in ’61. At first I didn’t recognize anything, but as we drove closer to the area where my family had all lived, things started coming back to me. We went by the park where I skated as a kid, and then, a little further up, the narrow alley down which we had lived.
I couldn’t believe how much it had changed; I remembered it being so nice, but now everything from the outside looked worn and old. I wasn’t even sure my family was still living there, but my driver asked a man across the street who said yes, they were still in the area.
“Who was it?” I asked the driver.
“He says he knows you.”
So we went over, and yes, I knew him. It was Fermin, a guy I had played ball with growing up.
“I defend this place…because I personally have missed you a lot,” he said. He walked me over to where I used to live, knocked, and introduced me to the man who lived there now.
Fermin said he was angry with me, angry because he believed I had forgotten my family and the old neighborhood.
“You don’t understand, that’s not how it was…” I said softly. I explained that I had sent clothes and money and other things home through the years, but it had always been confiscated. My father never got it.
Fermin listened, but he didn’t seem to believe it. Then he quickly got on me again.
“We were both right there as players,” he said. “Damn, Luisito! I’m pissed as hell! Shit, you have no idea!”
I realized nothing I was going to say could make him feel better, so I just tried to be as nice as I could and pulled him in for a hug. That seemed to melt some of his anger away. He cried a bit and then saw some young guys and called them over.
“This is Luis Tiant,” Fermin told the young guys, still near tears. “We played hardball as kids. My uncle was the one that signed him. When we used to practice he’d say, ‘They are going to sign you for sure!’ Everybody thought I’d sign first. But he signed. And me, well…”
I eventually broke away from Fermin by telling him the truth—I needed to go find my aunts. It turns out they had already heard I was there and were all together waiting.
“It’s Luisito!” one of my aunts yelled. “Luisito! Look!” Then they all came over and hugged me; my aunts and my cousins. Everybody cried.
They lived in tiny apartments with old, beaten-up furniture. The government only gave them enough staple goods to last them half of each month, and things like toothpaste and soap and skin lotion were like gold. I brought them a suitcase full of such things, along with clothes for all of them. They seemed to appreciate it, but it didn’t feel like nearly enough. I didn’t know if I should cry for joy or for sadness; I ended up doing a little of both.
To lighten the mood, I joked around with them about my dad.
“When my father went there, to the United States, in ’31, he threw so hard that he would knock the catchers down,” I said. “So sometimes the catcher had to put a steak inside the glove on his hand. And when the game was over, the steak would be cooked!”
We laughed a lot, but we cried too. They told me how much my parents had missed me and how proud they were of my career.
“He left Cuba happy,” my cousin said of my father, remembering when he and my mother went to Boston in 1975. “‘I’m leaving,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be back.’ He was so pleased.”
“He was pleased, eh?” I said. “He told me he wanted to go back to Cuba. I told him, ‘No, you’re not going back. Forget about that. Fidel says he doesn’t want you back there anymore!’”
Everyone laughed again, but then I assured them that my father—and my mother—had really enjoyed their time in America before my father got sick. They tried to convince me that I should not feel bad about leaving for the United States in the first place. One aunt showed me a scrapbook she had made that was filled with newspaper clippings of my playing career, including when my parents moved to Boston.
“You can see that we’re all very happy, right? Because you’ve come back, thank God,” said my cousin. “And even if you didn’t know it, here in this country, everybody, everybody in the neighborhood, would hear about you. About all the things Luisito would do.
“And with regard to your family, you’ve been away for a long time from Cuba. But what we know, and what I want you to know, too, is that always, always, always, we adore you, we miss you, and followed what you’ve done. And the love of your father and of your mother. They talked about you and how proud they were.”
It was hard to take it all in. I still felt bad.
“Family is the most important,” I said, “and because of that I’ve felt uncomfortable.”
“You can’t feel uncomfortable because you had your obligations and work. In any given moment, you have your obligations and work. And look, you’re here now!”
“But too much time has passed that I shouldn’t have let go by. I thought I would be able to see you again. I was going to come in ’61, but my father sent me a letter saying not to come because there was no more professional baseball. You know, they gave their lives for me so that I could succeed—so that I could be someone. It’s so hard. It’s so hard.”
“The time that needed to go by has gone by. And you can’t beat yourself up about it because life is hard.”
“But when you’re talking about your family, that’s something different,” I said to her, “And the problem is that we’re all going to die one day or another. And people that you left healthy and safe, and now you come back, and you run into all this.”
Now another cousin spoke up.
“But don’t worry about that, cousin, what we want is for you to be happy! It was their time, the ones who died. It was their time. You don’t have to blame yourself for any of that.”
It went back and forth like that throughout the trip.
Along with the film crew, I drove around the Havana area to point out what I remembered and see how much had changed. At one point we went to a place called Esquina Caliente—“The Hot Corner”—where baseball fans had been gathering every day for decades to talk and debate about their favorite teams, players, even lineups. While I stood off to the side, one of our guys got right in the middle of a big group of men and asked in Spanish who they thought was the best Cuban pitcher to play in the U.S. major leagues.
Immediately, men started screaming out their favorites:
“Jose Ariel Contreras!”
“El Duque! Orlando El Duque Hernández!”
“El Guajiro from Pinar del Río!”
When one man who looked much younger than the others quietly said “Luis Tiant,” our guy told him, “Luis Tiant? He’s right over there.”
Within a few seconds everybody was crowding around me, shaking my hand. Most of the guys were probably born after I played my last game in the majors, but one elderly, white-haired man came up and said with a big smile that he had seen me pitch in Cuba during 1960 and ’61.
They all started asking questions:
Who had I played for in Cuba?
Who did I play for in the majors besides Boston?
How long had I been away?
How fast could I throw now?
My answer to the last one got a big laugh: “Now I just throw myself in to the bath!”
One man said he had read an article about how there used to be more Cubans in the big leagues than any other Latino group—which is true.
“I think that if relations were normal with the United States,” he said, “there would be more Cubans than Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, anyone, because Cubans are ballplayers from birth. Cubans are playing ball in their mother’s bellies.”
I shook my head in agreement. It was good to see this level of pride still existed, and that baseball was still the national pastime of Cuba even if nobody could play there as a paid professional. Then, when somebody asked if it was true that my father had been a great pitcher too, I passed around the same photo I had shown Juan Carlos Oliva. It was like I was bringing Lefty Tiant back to life after all these years.
After leaving Esquina Caliente we drove around some more. The gas station where my father worked after his playing days was still there. So was the Route 28 Field where he watched me pitch on Sundays while hiding behind the columns of the bus station across the street, thinking I didn’t see him. The ballfield had been turned into a park, and there was a swing set where the mound used to be, but the bus station looked the same. The mound faced directly toward it, which is how I used to catch him sneaking peeks at me.
“Coming back and seeing all those things I used to do as a kid,” I said, looking at the field, “to me, I feel like I am born again now.”
While I was visiting with my family, some of my old teammates came by who heard I was there. We joked around about the old days, and the memories came rushing back. When I was at the airport, ready to go home, I thought about everything I had been through—and how I had finally gone full circle in my life.
This, Cuba, is my country. I don’t know nothing about politics, and I don’t care about politics. I was away too long from my family and my country—forty-six years—and that’s crazy. I felt better; my heart was better; my head was better. I guess I could close my book now if I wanted. If I died, I would die happy. Now I was a free man. I felt free inside me; I felt good inside me.
“That was a feeling nobody could take away from me now.”
Returning to my homeland once fulfilled a longtime dream. Going back a second time was an honor.
As part of ongoing diplomatic efforts to strengthen relations between the United States and Cuba, President Obama announced he was leading a delegation to the island in March 2016. In the group would be representatives from Major League Baseball, including the entire Tampa Bay Rays club, set to play an exhibition game against the Cuban National Team in Havana. Baseball had linked the two countries for more than 150 years, and I was invited to accompany them as a representative of the “old” Cuba—a ballplayer who had left the island in the early days of the Castro regime, made his way in the U.S. against the odds, and never forgotten where I came from. They also asked me to throw out one of the ceremonial first pitches before the game alongside Cuban National Team pitching great Pedro Luis Lazo, whose father I had played against in the Cuban League.
I did not say yes right away, because I knew that there were still Cuban-Americans who felt my going back even the first time had dishonored those living under Castro. The conditions were still bad now; the United States trade embargo with Cuba remained in place and very few people were ever able to leave the island. But in speaking with my family, and friends, I felt that this trip held the promise of better things for all Cubans. By going as a representative of both my country of origin, and my adopted land, I could hopefully play a small role in helping us reach that better place.
It had been nine years since my last time home, and three of the four aunts I visited when we were making The Lost Son of Havana documentary had died. I was not able to see the fourth aunt on this trip because we came in and out of the country so fast—the only things we did were go from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the ballpark for the game, and then back to the hotel. You could sense things had gotten a little better, though, because our delegation was allowed to invite Cuban family members to the hotel for dinner. I was able to have six cousins come, which was very nice. In 2007, none of them could visit me at my hotel.
The game was held at Estadio Latinoamericano, the same ballpark where I had pitched in the Cuban League in 1959 and ’60. Once we got there, we lined up to meet the dignitaries. President Obama and the First Lady were very nice; the president asked, “What’s happening?” and the First Lady said she was very pleased to meet me. This was actually my second time meeting an American president, as I had golfed and talked baseball with George H. W. Bush in the past.
Then, suddenly, I found myself standing in front of Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother. Fidel was nearing ninety years old, and no longer appeared much in public, so he had made Raúl the acting president.
Raúl stuck out his hand. Although I felt uncomfortable, I shook it. Tony Perez said later that he never would have shaken it, but I didn’t see what else I could do. This was an official diplomatic event, with millions of people watching there and at home. I wanted things to be better between our two countries, and showing that level of disrespect, even if it was deserved, did not seem to me a way to make things better. I went with my gut, and did what I felt was right. That’s how I have lived my whole life, and it’s carried me to this point in good shape. If it offended anybody, I am sorry.
Less than a year later, in late November 2016, Luis Jr. texted me the news that Fidel Castro was dead. Even though we knew it was going to come at some point, it hit me hard.
A lot of emotions went through me. There was, of course, anger. Castro could die a million times, and he would never be able to pay for what he did—or what he was. Not just for me, but for all the Cubans over there and here in the United States. I never wish anybody to die. I think that’s wrong, no matter how bad they are or how much you hate them. But that’s what we expected; most of the Cubans expected him to die a long time before he did.
It had been hard, hard for all of us, during those first years under Castro. We don’t know how many people died on rickety boats trying to cross the Gulf of Mexico and escape—maybe one hundred thousand, maybe a million. We just don’t know. Think of all the children, and all the separated families. I knew friends who lost loved ones that way, and their pain is what came back to me when I heard the news.
Then, once I had a little time to take it in, what I really thought about was what was to come next. How were things going to be for Cubans after Castro? It was unclear then, and it is still not clear now. Americans can visit Cuba freely, and I have talked with my family of bringing them there. None of them have seen my homeland, not even Maria. Maybe I could finally give her that honeymoon on the southern coast on Island de Pinos—the one she should have had in 1961.
It is true that Cuba is where my family and millions of others endured much hardship and pain, and where many still live in poverty. But it is also where I experienced great love. Where I saw my father treated as a hero, and where he and my mother worked long and hard to provide for our family. Where I laughed and broke bread with grandparents, uncles and aunts, and cousins who all helped each other in challenging times. We were poor, but we were happy.
It is where I formed the friendships that gave me strength and confidence, and brothers for life, even when time and distance separated us. And it is where I learned to play the game that gave me my livelihood, and led me to all the joy in my life—thanks to my parents and the sacrifice they made for me. I would like my family to meet their Cuban cousins, walk the streets I walked, and see the ballparks where I played and dreamed.
But whether or not they get there, they know where my true home lies. It is at the houses in Maine and in Florida where we gather together. It is at Fenway Park, and Fenway South, where I swap cigars and stories with old teammates and work to help today’s Red Sox players forge their own dreams. It is in my heart, the heart of a man who has seen much and with God’s help has reached a point of peace and contentment.
Home is not really a place. It is a feeling. A feeling you’ve lived a good life and done your best for yourself and those you love. That is what I’ve always done, on the field and off. It’s been a good ride, and I’m still in there pitching.