Now we’re going to have to switch around in this story for it to make any sense about the way it turned out in the end. Raul Guevara told me all this much later, but at the time I was in Houston, trying to fix things up with Charlene, and George was running a fire sale on the team, Raul was having his own adventures.
I can tell you for a fact that Havana is not the way I expected it to be, not when I finally saw it. It had the old American cars and it had a lot of crummy-looking buildings, but it had something else, something about the people. They still have style, Raul explained. Even if they wear rags, they wear them with style. He was right there.
Raul said about this time — we are talking about at the end of the World Series in late October —- he was playing ball.
The way Raul explained it later, I got the picture. Playing ball in Cuba is like waltzing on a battlefield with the orchestra going on despite all the gunfire. Not that there’s gunfire in Havana. It’s just so fucking poor is all, yet the Cubans got this thing about baseball — it just goes on and on and it’s glamour, it’s probably like the way it was in the 1930s here when Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were doing their dances at Yankee Stadium and the country was outside the walls, selling apples on street corners to itself.
Raul. I can see him on that hot, humid Cuban night with the sweat soaking his uniform and that limber-easy swing of his. Not a big dude, don’t have muscles on muscles. Just all the muscles he needs. And the eye. He sees a thing on the ball and he don’t have to wait to communicate it to his arms or wrists or his back, with the way his back rears back and slouches into a reaching swing.
On this night, he hit two home runs and drove in four runs. I could even hear the bat, the way he described it to me. Ever notice how some ball players start out trotting toward first base even before the ball is halfway out of the park because they know it’s gone? It’s because of the sound and the feel of the bat on the ball. You hit the ball square and it just implodes on you, on the bat, just takes the wind out of itself and goes thump or something. I don’t have that swing — thank God I’m a pitcher — but I seen it in plenty of others. Raul said he was hitting that way that night and his team won and they were all falling over each other on the way out of the dugout to the lockers. He was feeling good when he got back to the clubhouse to strip off his uniform and take a shower.
The good feeling did not last as long as it should have. Raoul said there were two men waiting in the clubhouse and they said he was going to go with them after his shower.
They had cards that said it didn’t matter what their names were, they were from government house.
What a miserable shower that must have been, with two goons waiting for you, both of them still wearing sunglasses even though it was nearly midnight.
After his shower, he shaved slowly and then put on his clean clothes. He wore his clothes with style, even though he was a poor kid from the outback, Havana had taught him style in the two years he was playing there. Raul has big square shoulders and a slight build and sort of olive drab eyes. He told the men he was ready, and he wondered what he was ready for.
They all crammed into an East German Trabant, which is a two-cycle car like a motorcycle and is mostly glued together with plastic panels. It makes a VW Beetle look like a Cadillac. Old Fidel, he sure got shit for his bargain with the devil — you’d think for a smart guy he would’ve at least looked at the kind of cars they would end up sending him for being a Communist. Well, they rattled through Havana that night, over to one of the few buildings with lights on.
Let me tell you, it is scary in a city at night with no lights on in the buildings. You wonder where the bad people are. And for all I know, the bad people wonder where you are.
All the while, Raul kept asking the goons what was going on and they kept saying nothing. Nada.
When they got to the government house, the men untangled themselves from the Trabant like three clowns getting out of the car in the center ring and went up the steps. Raul said he had a charley horse from the way he had to sit in back and I believed it, having ridden in a Trabant since then and being two inches shorter than Raul.
When they got inside, they went up another set of marble steps to a landing and down a hall to a big wooden door, the kind of door that is built that big just to intimidate the shit out of you. I mean, nobody needs a door that big for anything. Raul said he was intimidated, but he carries himself with such natural dignity for someone only twenty-three years old that I doubt it showed at the time.
They made him wait alone in an office for a long time. He studied the office while he waited. There was a photo of Fidel on one wall and another of Che and one of Fidel cutting sugar cane with the peasantry.
Then they came for him around one in the morning and took him down another hall to a bigger room.
He sat down in a bigger chair with ornate arms and red cushions. He asked for a glass of water and the goons ignored him.
About two in the morning, Raul looked up and there was Fidel himself sweeping into the room with a small entourage of toadies.
Raul had never seen him up close, just at the May Day rally and once when he came out to the park to throw out the first ball, but Fidel had been in and out so fast that it didn’t count. Now he was in the same room with Raul, and Raul said Fidel lit it up until it hurt his eyes, like all the lights going on in a dark bar at last call. (Raul didn’t say nothing about last call or a dark bar, but I imagined it my own way.) Raul stood up by instinct and the president came around a desk and gave him a big bear hug, chattering away as he did it.
Castro has a tenor voice sort of roughened by the cigars he smoked for a long time. Raul recalled that Castro said:
—- Hey, big man, what a game tonight, I saw your first homer before I had to leave, big man. You are sweet, Raul, you swing like Ted Williams could swing in his prime. What do you think of that?
— Many thanks, Mr. President (Raul said). I was lucky tonight.
— Was lucky? You ARE lucky, Raul, this is your lucky night, son. Talk about luck, you are the luckiest man in Havana tonight and I am so happy for you.
— Why? What has happened?
— Hey, you, let me tell the story and you just listen, okay? You know what has happened? I am always looking out for people like you, great people rising up in Cuba, the flowers of the revolution now bearing fruit.
Raul said at this point he wasn’t following the president very well, but that Castro had removed his hands and arms from the bear hug and was letting Raul stand alone.
— Raul, little Raul, we are going to show the world now what they have been missing for thirty years while the Americans followed their pigheaded plan to destroy Cuba. Well, we’re not destroyed, we’re just catching our second wind, true, Raul?
— Yes, it’s true (Raul said).
— Time now to show the world on the stage of the world what we are made of, what our young men can do when the challenge is thrown down in a fair and square way.
— Yes.
—- Do you know what is the stage of the world, do you, little Raul? You are so young, you were not even born thee, when I went on the stage of the world. Do you know where it is?
— No, Mr. President, I do not know.
—- Of course not. You are a humble child of humble farming people and only your great talent and determination have worked to give you the chance to go on the world stage which I, your president, have arranged for you because my life is devoted to the flower of the revolution, to all the flowers.
Raul said he waited while this went on for a while. Then Castro interrupted himself to ask a question.
— So you don’t know where the world’s stage is?
— No, Mr. President.
— Then I will tell you.
—- Yes, excellency.
— No, no, not excellency, that is for the bourgeoisie. President. The stage is New York City.
— What?
— New York City.
— I’ve heard of it. Yes. I know what you mean. New York. A city.
— Well, thank God for that, it would be no good to go some place you have never heard of it, would it?
Raul said Castro laughed then, and I can imagine it, but Raul said he was too nervous to do anything but just stand there.
—- So (Castro said) what do you say?
— About what, Mr. President? Castro frowned.
— About what I have proposed.
— What have you proposed, Mr. President?
— Aren’t you listening, you cloth-eared bumpkin?
— I’m listening, Excellency. I’m just confused.
— You are going to be a Yankee.
Raul said he thought he would pass out. Someone had spoken lies against him and this was a cruel sort of joke, they were going to send him to prison, maybe for years. He thought of his beloved fiancee Maria Velasquez then and of a thousand other things and he wondered if he would be allowed to play baseball in prison.
— No, no, President, I am not a Yankee …
— I did not say that, bumpkin, little Raul, I said you were going to be. You are going to be a New York Yankee. You and a brave, handpicked contingent from Cuba will go to North America and show the gringos that we have the finest ball players in all the world. You are going to lead Cuba to glory as a Yankee, Raul. You are going to help Cuba win the World Series.
— As a Yankee?
— That’s temporary. In time, when Havana is admitted to the major leagues, we will be able to stay home and invite the world to us to see our brave young men battle the enemies. (He paused.) But for now, a small step, you will become a Yankee.
— I don’t want to go to New York. To be a Yankee. I want to be here. Raul said Castro frowned for a moment and then said:
— I know, I know. Defectors. Traitors to the Revolution. We have too many of them, but I don’t worry about you. Or the others. When we played in that disgusting lick-spittle Costa Rica, the gymnasts defected and that discus thrower, Pah. Not one of my baseball players would betray the Revolution, even though the worms of Costa Rica taunted them to be trayal. I am not concerned, my little one, not at all. You will be a Cubano in New York and you will show New York what Cuba’s greatness really is.
And that is the way it started rolling down the hill. I take Raul’s word for it because he was there and no one says it wasn’t true, so I suppose it was. Besides, when Raul talked about it, it was straightforward like frying eggs, and everyone knows that lies are made like omelettes.