The fun is over in Cuba

Hundreds of thousands of fans of Cuba's national sport were left with honey on their lips on Saturday when the expected start of the First Elite Baseball League was suspended, a brand new high-level tournament starring the crème de la crème of baseball players of the island and designed to strengthen the discipline and make it more competitive.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
08 October 2022 Saturday 21:30
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The fun is over in Cuba

Hundreds of thousands of fans of Cuba's national sport were left with honey on their lips on Saturday when the expected start of the First Elite Baseball League was suspended, a brand new high-level tournament starring the crème de la crème of baseball players of the island and designed to strengthen the discipline and make it more competitive. The start of the league was postponed until further notice for the simple reason that there were no uniforms. The equipment had been commissioned “abroad”, according to the National Baseball Commission, without specifying where. The delivery was not possible "for reasons beyond the control of the parties." Alternatives were sought. But "inconveniences in the field of transportation" frustrated all attempts.

Running out of baseball is not the biggest problem in Cuba today, when the majority of the population is having great difficulty securing a livelihood; with food shortages of the first order, sky-high prices, a housing crisis, continuous blackouts –especially after the devastating passage of Hurricane Ian through the West of the island–, and, in response to all this, more repression and arrests before the protests of the most disadvantaged.

The suspension of the baseball league is, however, a highly symbolic misfortune, as well as symptomatic. Not only because of the shame that the inability to manufacture a few uniforms, or at least to buy them in time from whoever is needed, means for a country that has declared this sport as Cultural Heritage of the nation; The baseball mishap is also especially inopportune as it comes to cover the only escape route for Cubans to evade their incessant hardships.

Now “the fun is over” in Cuba. Who would have told Carlos Puebla (1917-1989) that this phrase from his famous song Y en este lo Fidel arrived, referring to the end of the abuses of the Fulgencio Batista regime and its elites, would today turn against what remains of the revolution led by the commander in chief and his lieutenant Che Guevara, the one with the "dear presence" according to the same composer.

Another Cuban singer-songwriter as little suspected of being a counterrevolutionary as Silvio Rodríguez declared a few days ago his "sadness" at what he saw in one of the protests last weekend in the country's capital: those that, after almost 100 hours of the blackout caused Due to Cyclone Ian and the chronic deficiencies of the electrical service, groups of residents of Havana carried out amid shouts of “we want light”, “freedom”, “down with the dictatorship” and “Diáz-Canel, singao”–this in allusion to the president–, according to the independent newspaper 14ymedio.

Rodríguez's sadness was due, as he wrote on his blog Segunda cita , to the fact that "those who rebuked a government heir to a Revolution made by blood and fire, in favor of the humble, did not seem to belong to the privileged classes." The author of Ojalá wondered “How has such distortion been reached? Is it a mirage due to the intensification of a 6-decade blockade, because of how difficult it has become to get food after the pandemic or because of the damage that a hurricane has done to us?

But the musician also celebrated the "positive" fact that the demonstration he saw, the one on October 1 on 31st Avenue, "was guarded by the forces of order but not repressed, as far as I know." Other witnesses, demonstrators and the media learned of very different events. Civilian patrols armed with sticks helped the police suppress the protests, resulting in more than twenty-five arrests and numerous injuries. It was not funny.