Monday, October 6, 2014

Cricketers Fight for Foothold in Baseball-Mad Cuba

Cricketers Fight for Foothold in Baseball-Mad Cuba
HAVANA — Oct 6, 2014, 12:26 AM ET
By ANNE-MARIE GARCIA Associated Press

The ball bounced off the pavement and Yordeni Caballero swung, whacking
it with a soft thud and hurling his bat to the side as if he'd hit a
homerun. As the 7-year-old raced down a street-turned-cricket pitch, his
coach shouted instructions about a sport that's barely known in Cuba.

The Caribbean is divided between baseball-playing countries with U.S.
ties and cricket-playing islands that once belonged to the British
Empire. Nowhere is more baseball-crazy than Cuba, but even here, a tiny
but passionate group of men is trying to win people over to cricket,
baseball's slower-paced, more courtly British relative.

Mostly descendants of sugar-cane workers who migrated from other islands
in the early 20th century, Cuba's cricket partisans subsist on homemade
and donated equipment from the embassies of cricket-playing countries.
They recruit players from the streets and teach them rules of the new
sport, while exploiting baseball-honed skills such as batting and
running bases.

The offspring of immigrants from the island of Martinique, Kiomai Aguiar
said he played baseball and basketball as a child, then switched to
cricket at 16, falling in love with its leisurely pace and courtly
interactions between players. He now coaches Caballero and other youths
playing pickup games in San Miguel del Padron on the outskirts of Havana

"It's a game that forces you to think, to organize, to do things
deliberately. At the same time there's respect and unity among the
players," said Aguiar, a 35-year-old unemployed maintenance worker.
"There's not a single cricket pitch in Cuba, so we play where they let
us, on a soccer field, a baseball field, a running track."

Cuba has organized cricket in six of its 16 provinces, with 1,150
registered players throughout the country of 11 million, said Barbara
Delarra, an official with Cuba's National Sports Institute.

"Youngsters like it because it's similar to baseball, with pitching,
batting and fielding. It's a new sport and appealing to youngsters
frustrated with baseball," she said.

Cricket is also part of the cultural identity of Caribbean migrant
communities in Cuba, the descendants of some 250,000 workers from
Jamaica, Dominica and other British colonies who moved to sugar towns in
eastern Cuba where they attended Protestant churches, ate spicier food
and played cricket.

"They kept a lot of their identity," said Jorge Giovannetti, chair of
the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Puerto
Rico and an expert on Caribbean migration to Cuba. "They kept some of
their diet, they kept some of their religious heritage, and cricket is
part of it as well."

Cricket is most deeply rooted in the eastern province of Guantanamo,
home to many of Cuba's immigrant-founded communities, where cricket is
frequently taught to children in afterschool athletics programs despite
the lack of standard equipment.

"If we don't have a bat, we make it from a stick. If there's no ball, we
make it from rags," said Eliecer Brooks, the descendant of Jamaican
immigrants who plays for Guatanamo's cricket team. "We've wanted to
maintain this tradition because it's beautiful to remember one's roots."

Without a national tournament, Cuba has amateur tournaments like one
played on a Havana soccer field last month between three Cuban teams and
three teams of students from cricket-playing countries like Pakistan and
Sri Lanka.

Adithya Senavirath, a Sri Lankan studying at the Latin American School
of Medicine, where foreigners receive free medical education, said he
enjoyed playing against Cubans instead of the fellow foreign students he
usually faced in cricket.

"The Cubans have skills, they're good bowlers," he said. "They lacking
some technique, but they learn fast."

————

Michael Weissenstein in Havana contributed to this report.

————

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mweissenstein

Source: Cricketers Fight for Foothold in Baseball-Mad Cuba - ABC News -
http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/cricketers-fight-foothold-baseball-mad-cuba-25984627

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