THE BEST LITTLE SPORTS MACHINE IN THE WORLD

Though beset by defections, economic hardship and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba continues to turn out champions

by S.L. PRICE

from Sports Illustrated May 15, 1995

This is victory. Alberto Juantorena grins: He is 19 years past his great moment, but he radiates a young man's vigor, enthusiasm, muscle. Remember Montreal? He blew the field away in the 400 and 800 meters at the '76 Olympics, head tilted, mouth agape, chugging at spectacular speed while the other runners prayed for him to flag. It never happened. El caballo, they called him, because only a horse ran with that kind of power, and the Horse hasn't flagged yet. No, he hops in and out of his chair, he grabs his phone and has two conversations at once, but mostly he grins and jokes because this is Cuba, you see: a shattered economy, begging and prostitution on the rise, hard-liners in Washington and Miami straining to cut off the island's last bit of air -- all that, yes, and Cuba is winning still.

The halls outside Juantorena's office in Havana have no lights and stink of mold. His athletes eat poorly and play in second-rate venues. So? Who won 238 medals -- more than any country but the mighty U.S. -- at the recent PanAmerican Games in Argentina? Who, despite gas shortages and power outages, has the world's best high jumper, best national baseball team, best women volleyball players, best amateur boxers? Which country won the most medals per capita at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona?

``And I promise you,'' says Juantorena, vice president of his country's Olympic committee, raising five splayed fingers before his face, ``in Atlanta we'll be better. I'm going to be there. You can interview me afterward, and I'll show you. I'll have the medals in my hands.''

Suddenly, Cuba's female volleyball sensation Mireya Luis, who was raised to loathe capitalism, is pocketing money to play in Japan while 500 Cuban coaches and trainers ply their craft in 38 countries. High jumper Javier Sotomayor, holder of the world record, owns a Mercedes-Benz and wears the name of a Spanish gin maker on his chest when he competes in Europe; six more Cuban track stars will do likewise this year. Last year five Cubans played baseball in Japan for the first time -- and that number will triple and expand to Italy this season. Long a cocky bastion of amateur ideals, the best little sports machine on earth now rattles and rings like a cash register.

But if such a trend irks Juantorena, a true believer who embodied Castro's purist athletic aims better than anyone, he doesn't look unhappy. No, he says, there has been no betrayal of socialism. ``That's what the world says, but we still control the athlete,'' Juantorena says. ``We control the money.'' And more: Aside from keeping 70% or more of the athletes' pay, the state ensures their return by making them travel without their families.

Juantorena beams, his face colored by a superb tan. He feels so good about Cuba's flirtation with capitalism that he becomes playful; he taunts those Americans who drool over the possibility that a prime talent like third baseman Omar Linares will someday play in the major leagues.

``Linares? Our cleanup hitter?'' Juantorena snorts. ``No, we're going to keep him around, so we can keep beating you in baseball. Instead, why don't you let one of our teams be in the big leagues? Then you'll see if we can compete. Then you'll have a true World Series, then you'll see how great a World Series can be. Think about this: You let in the Cubans, and a whole new rooster will crow.''

He pops to his feet again, shuffling papers on the desk. He claps loudly: interview over. Wait, his norte americano guests say, just one more thing. . . . No, Juanto rena rolls toward the door like a towering, jovial wave, arms wide, gathering the small crowd before him and pushing it out. But just as his backpedaling guests prepare to fall out of the room, Juanto rena abruptly halts. ``Hey!'' he says. He raises his hand -- but not, this time, to make predictions.

``Where,'' says el caballo, hero of the revolution, ``is my cash?''

For a stunned second, no one knows what to say.

Then he closes his fingers into a fist. Then he laughs.

U.S. Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay

The dust never dies. Riding an insidious wind, it cuts through skin, burrows under eyelids, tongue and fingernails, blasts through lungs as you walk, as you sleep. Imagine a day, a week of this. Imagine six months of being eroded by the sunbaked grit, and then one morning word comes through from the other side, from across a minefield where too many have stepped wrong and dropped screaming, from Castro's Cuba: Your father has died. It is a Thursday in February, noontime, and here in the tent it is cooler and dark. ``Last week I got the news,'' says Ramon Ledon, once one of Cuba's boxing stars. ``He was 54. I don't really want to talk about that. I came here, and I'm prepared for what happens.'' He waits a moment, then says, ``But I can't accept that he has died.''

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the novelist and Nobel laureate, has a famous friendship with Fidel, and perhaps that is appropriate for the here and now. What else but Garcia Marquez's magical fiction could capture the two faces of Cuba today? What else could conjure the bizarre anomaly of a U.S. naval base -- complete with McDonald's -- rooted on the southeastern tip of enemy soil, and the fact that more than 20,000 Cubans, hoping to escape a dead-end life at home, tried to flee to America but ended up in American captivity in Cuba? What else could explain how, even as Cuban athletes continue their outsized dominance in world competition, dozens have defected over the last two years, hopping hijacked boats, jumping fences at a competition in Puerto Rico, braving sharks and a merciless sea in absurd, tiny rafts? What would Garcia Marquez call such a story? Sports in the Time of Cholera?

Ramon Ledon, bantamweight, former member of the Cuban national team, shoved off from Havana last Sept. 4. He is 29 years old. ``I left when I saw I had no choice,'' he says. ``There is no respect for athletes in Cuba; athletes can't decide for themselves what they can and can't participate in. The money you get for competing, the government keeps, and after you're done, you get nothing.'' His raft was picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard 16 miles off Cuba. In several months all refugees at Guantanamo will be allowed to enter the U.S., but for now the boxer lives in tent F-9, under mosquito netting.

Ledon, short and compact, maintains a dignity at odds with Guantanamo's open baths and 16-man tents, the oppressive crush of humanity. He speaks softly. He keeps out of the sun. All about him, men wear raggy shorts, no shirts. His pants are impeccable, his shirt white and clean.

``My wife, my son . . . they came to say good-bye at the edge of the sea,'' he says. ``It was an anguishing day.''

On his makeshift bureau sits the ball-and-ring hardware for a speed bag. Ledon works out twice a day, shuffling through the dirt. When he makes it to the States, he will be greeted as some sort of hero, but he knows: Cuba is never that simple. No one stays, or gets away, totally clean. Ledon left behind all he valued for some vague notion of freedom, and now his family suffers without him. He thinks of his son, eight years old, all day.

``I've got faith in God that I'll see him again,'' Ledon says. ``I just received a card. He wrote: `Papa, you shouldn't have gone. Your plan failed. Come back soon or I'll be sad.' '' The boxer's face tightens, twitches. ``That left me weak all day,'' he says. ``I won't read that letter anymore.''

Havana

Outside the baseball commissioner's office, under the stands of Estadio Latino-americano, there is a giant poster, vintage late-'50s, of a woman hiking along a path. ``Celiat Sanchez?'' someone asks, and the man sitting at the desk answers yes. Asked why a picture of her here, the man shrugs. ``She came out of the mountains with Fidel,'' he says. There are no pictures of Cuba's baseball legends; only three tarnished trophies, the golden ballplayer on top of each grasping only the handle of a bat. The meaty part has been snapped off. Someone looking to hawk the gold plating? The man at the desk shrugs again.

Domingo Zabala comes out of his office, cigar first. The lines in his face run deeper than they did just two years ago when, traveling with the national team, he met up with his brother Tuto in Millington, Tenn. Tuto is Domingo's twin, but time and place have worn them differently. Tuto, a boxing promoter in Miami, left Cuba in 1961, when the brothers were 23, and was one of the founding members of the anti-Castro paramilitary group Alpha 66; his face is full and prosperous. When Domingo smiles, he resembles a leering hound smoking a stogie.

Not that he has time to worry over American foolishness: Zabala, in his fourth year as commissioner, presides over one of the stellar moments of Cuban ball, in which all-time greats like Linares and center fielder Victor Mesa and pitcher Lazaro Valle mix with an astounding core of stars that big league clubs would love to suck through their systems. Cuba's national team has won 21 world championships, the last Olympic gold medal, 119 straight games in international competition -- and there's no reason to think this dynasty will slow anytime soon.

``This is the Golden Age,'' Zabala says. ``It's the first time in Cuban history that we've had three or four players of equal ability at every position. If we could take two teams to the Pan American Games, we'd finish first and second. ''It is the day after the naming of the national team that will win the gold medal in Argentina, and its pitching staff, in particular, is a happy embarrassment; Zabala ticks off four of the nation's top pitchers before getting to Rolando Arrojo, ace of the Cuban league champion team, Villa Clara, who went 12-0 with a 1.85 ERA this season and beat the U.S. at the 1994 world championships in Nicaragua. ``It was a close game,'' Zabala says, deadpan. ``We won 15-2.''

It is a terrible time. Squeezed by an economic vise that Castro dubbed the Special Period but might well be called the Great Depression, Cubans suffer severe shortages of fuel, soap, meat, medicine. Asked how athletes still maintain such a high level of play, Zabala cites various strengths of the island's cradle-to-Olympiad sports system. But his first answer is as good as any: ``We've got balls.''

Certainly the baseball establishment isn't living much better than the average Cuban: Zabala's dingy office has its own bathroom, but the tiles are cracked, and the toilet backs up. You want to call him? ``These are the phone numbers, but they don't work,'' he says. Then again, he does have some advantages. After the announcement of the world-beating Cuban team, the commissioner was seen walking out of the stadium with two sandwiches in his hands. Shoving them under his arm, he pulled out his keys and unlocked a small, battered blue Lada station wagon. He had his food, he had his Golden Age, he had enough gas to get home.

Miami

He is away from it now. But the best relief pitcher in Cuban history still can't be sure what to say, whom to trust, how to behave. He squints, ducks his head into his shoulders. On the escape boat, which was buoyed by four empty 55-gallon oil drums, the good water ran short, and he was so thirsty, he drank from the sea when his wife wasn't looking, and he kept rowing, rowing. Experts believe that only 40% of those who leave Cuba in rafts survive the journey. What if his boy or wife had slipped over the side? Euclides Rojas would never have forgiven himself; he would've killed himself, maybe. He sits in this nice house on the edge of the Everglades, sure of this: He would never put his family through that again. They were picked up after 4 1/2 days at sea, 67 miles out of Cuba, by a Coast Guard vessel with three numbers painted on the side.

``Seven-two-one,'' Rojas says. ``I'll never forget it. At least we weren't going to drown. We saw a lot of empty rafts. After we were picked up, I saw a woman in the water, all bloated.''

He and his family spent six months interned at Guantanamo, his son wheezing with a constant lung ailment. They had dropped into the sea off Havana's More Castle at 11 p.m. on Aug. 17 -- when U.S. policy still would've allowed them to enter the country -- but on their third day out, President Clifton directed that all refugees be sent to the base. Finally, in February, all three Rojases were allowed to enter the U.S. on medical hardship. Here, Euclides says, ``I know my son will not have to go through what Rene and I did. His future will be a lot better. He's going to live like a human, not an animal.''

Rene Arocha reclines near Rojas on the couch here, in his home. Arocha, now a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, was the first Cuban ballplayer to defect. Fed up with communism, he left the national team on a stopover in Miami in July 1991, abandoning his wife and young daughter. Rojas was with him then; he wavered and rejoined the team only because his wife was back in Cuba, pregnant. Arocha's gear returned to Cuba, sat unclaimed on the floor in the Havana airport. ``Everybody looked at my bag as if it had a bomb inside,'' Arocha says. ``Euclides picked it up and gave it to my family. The police and everyone saw. The only one who had the guts to pick it up was Euclides.''

In July 1993, at the World University Games in Buffalo, two ballplayers, including New York Met prospect Rey Ordonez, jumped out of Cuban hands. That November, at the Central American and Caribbean Games in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 40 Cuban athletes defected. Last July pitchers Hansel Izquierdo and Michael Tejera, two top Cuban juniors, stayed behind when their team stopped in Miami. Then came Rojas, 30, who pitched for Havana in the Cuban league and in 1994 broke the single-season save record, with 13, giving him 99 for his career. Cuban authorities shrug off each rebuke: Those athletes are deserters, greedy, weak; who needs them? The medals and championships keep coming.

``But if everything is so good there, why were all those people in Guantanamo?'' Rojas says, voice rising. ``The champions from here don't go elsewhere looking for liberty. Why did we risk our lives? Why did we risk the lives of our families?''

Santa Clara, Cuba

So this is where Joe DiMaggio has gone. The good old days America has mourned for three decades never died; they went south, they thrived in the echoing tension of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, and they show up here, tonight, in Sandino Stadium in the city of Santa Clara at the sixth and deciding game of the 34th Cuban National Series. You want sports free of snaky agents, stupid owners, contract talks, arbitration, salary caps, clever sneaker commercials, millionaire rookies? A game played by athletes who were actually born in the provinces where they play, who know their fans by name? Tonight the club from Villa Clara will win its third straight Cuban championship, beating the team from Pinar del Rio 4-3. Linares will crack one laser-beam home run for the visitors and, in the fourth inning, turn an astonishing double play: After running down one man all the way to second base and tagging him, Linares will spin and, falling backward, fire the ball home to nab another runner at the plate.

Admission: five cents. Kids half price.

Before the game both teams stand in a line running from third base to first. The national anthem plays; the players and the 21,000 fans spilling into the aisles stand to face two enormous Cuban flags dangling over the gaps in left and right centerfield. Here, in the lush countryside, the roots of Castro's revolution sank deepest; here, before Fidel, health care was a luxury, and a poor man could not hope to go to college. Now, every day, kids play pickup baseball in the shadow of a gargantuan monument to rebel hero Che Guevara. Here the shortages that have savaged Havana aren't as severe; on a farm there is always something to eat.

The baseball stadium's walls glow from paint strokes of green and gold, the color of the earth in bloom. There is no advertising, no Jumbotron, no HIT SIGN, WIN FATIGUES -- just the constant presence of an overarching government. Painted up the wall along the third base line is the slogan REVOLUTION: WHAT I'VE DONE UNTIL NOW, AND WILL DO, IS FOR THAT. On the first base side, it's UNION OF COMMUNIST YOUTH. The outfield wall reads READY FOR PRODUCTION AND THE DEFENSE OF THE HARVEST. A TASK FOR ALL. No one is fat. Cowbells ring, horns sound. A salsa beat cuts the smoky air.

And there in the middle of it all, on either side of the pitching rubber, stand the two pillars of Cuban baseball -- el locoand el nino, the Madman and the Kid. Victor Mesa, the Villa Clara star who earned his nickname because of his pell-mell base running, hyperbabble and facial tics, will in two years surpass the all-time Cuban hits record of 2,215. Throw in his career stolen base record, and you have Cuba's answer to Pete Rose and Rickey Henderson. Linares, the Kid, began his career a decade ago at 17 and quickly established himself as the finest cigar in the box. ``He's the best ever,'' says Zabala. ``He's got a chance to break all our records -- home runs, runs scored, RBIs, walks.'' Mesa won't own the hits record long. ``In four or five seasons, with only 100 hits [in 110 games] a year,'' Zabala says, ``Linares will pass them all.''

But he isn't enough tonight. Villa Clara surges to an early three-run lead, and when pitcher Eliecer Montes de Oca, working on a three-hitter, strikes out the Kid on a full count in the sixth inning, the stands break into a noise as sudden and loud as thunder.

But with the final out of the series fast approaching, something is missing. Police on horseback aren't ringing the field, no one fears his car will be roasted in a U.S-style flame of ``celebration,'' the announcer doesn't threaten hooligans with arrest. When it's over and Villa Clara is champion of Cuba, the crowd simply flows onto the diamond to dance. Mesa is grabbed by dozens of hands and lifted high; grinning, he is tossed over and over into the air. A song plays: Villa Clara is the champion. . . . Don't stop. . . . Go on, go on. Now Mesa is back on his feet; neighbors and friends and people he has never met come to hug him, and he hugs back. There is no threat, no fear. The last time a win was celebrated so purely? In the U.S., maybe Pittsburgh, Bill Mazeroski, 1960. In Cuba, maybe last year.

``This means a lot, because it's my province,'' Mesa says. ``It's where I live, where people take care of me.'' He sits in the dugout, still sweating, and a casual line of men and boys forms, walking past to see him, touch him, perhaps shake his hand. Later, when asked about this closeness, so rare in modern athletics, Mesa grins and rubs his fingers together. ``It's money,'' he says. His monthly salary is 318 pesos, about $8. ``If your big-time athletes didn't have so much money, they'd have to associate with fans. Some think the money's bad, and'' -- he shrugs -- ``some think it's not.''