• Submitted by: manso
• Sports
• 05 / 12 / 2011

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It was cigars all round when Harry Leech sparred with an Olympic champ. Wednesday May 11 2011. Standing on a baseball diamond in Guanabacoa baseball stadium on the outskirts of Havana, a fleeting resolution crosses my mind -- I have to stop getting myself into these situations. I'm holding a baseball bat, squinting through the glaring sun at the man standing on the pitcher's mound.

Jorge Fumero, over six feet tall and a former pitcher for Industriales, Cuba's top baseball team, was the pitcher on the Cuban Baseball team that won the Olympic Gold medal in 1996 and can send a ball at well over 100kmph.

I, on the other hand, have never played baseball. In fact, until now I've never held a baseball bat and haven't played a sport that required eye-hand coordination since I left school over a decade ago. He's winding up to pitch . . .

I hadn't set out to be part of a baseball game with one of the greats of the sport. My main reason for coming to Cuba was to write an article on the Cuban health system. Now it was looking increasingly like I was going to be seeing that system from the perspective of the patient, courtesy of a fastball to the head.

The Cubans are a laidback, welcoming people but if there is one thing that they take seriously, it's baseball, which has been the Cuban obsession since it was introduced to the island in the 1860s.

Regularly beating the US at its own game is a source of national pride and it's no wonder that the Cubans have three Olympic gold medals for baseball and the USA just one.

But even more than its sporting success or healthcare system, Cuba is best known as the home of the cigar. While I was in Cuba, the 13th annual Cuban Cigar Festival was taking place in Havana, and in a roundabout way this was how I had ended up playing baseball in a part of town tourists rarely see.

It's easily forgotten, but each and every Cuban cigar is painstakingly rolled by hand, by highly skilled workers who spend nine months training and must take an intense practical exam before being taken on as an apprentice in one of Havana's famous cigar factories.

The top rollers can make over a hundred large cigars each day, with a level of dexterity that's astonishing to watch. It's considered a good job in a country that has experienced a permanent recession since the USA's economic blockade began in 1962.

The baseball match was the brainchild of Rob Fox, of the JJ Fox cigar shop on Grafton St, and Jaime 'Hamlet' Paredes, the head roller at the Romeo y Juliet cigar factory in Havana, as a means of building friendships between those who sell cigars and the people who roll them. Interested in writing about the event, I was instead roped into playing.

When we arrived it became clear that this wasn't going to be the equivalent of a Sunday morning kick-about. While the venue was a little run down, we were playing in a baseball stadium and the Cuban team were already warmed up.

Our team was bolstered by four Cuban 'ringers', in an attempt to even the odds slightly, including Michel Ford, a retired professional baseball player with Metropolitano and our player-coach Ignacio Balmaseda, who kindly showed us how to hold the bat.

Unfortunately for Ignacio no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't turn our team of hapless amateurs around. It wasn't so much the Mighty Ducks as a duck shoot, and we were the ducks.

Our team encompassed varying levels of athleticism. One of our best hopes, vice-captain Stuart Fox, had forgotten his kit and was playing in jeans and a pair of black shoes and some of the team insisted on smoking their cigars while batting.

The Cubans seemed bemused by all this although one of our batters, Andy Ryan, caused untold confusion when he held his bat with a cross armed hurling grip; there was even more shock when he managed to give the ball a good whack, or as our team manager David McGrane called from the stands "a hit, a very palpable hit".

Unfortunately for us, other than team captain Rob Fox's shock home run, it was also a rare hit. Thankfully the Cubans went easy on us -- that, or we were playing against Cuba's only team of entirely left-handed batters.

After the ninth inning's liquid refreshments were served, a donation was made to the stadium and our team uniforms were given to the local children. We relaxed with our Cuban counterparts -- bar some superficial differences, the Irish and Cubans are very alike.

As we talked it became clear that far more important than the score (22-6), or the fact that I managed to hit a slow, underhand pitch from Jorge Fumero, was that friendships were made in the spirit of a small plaque on O'Reilly St in Old Havana... "Two island peoples in the same sea of struggle and hope, Cuba and Ireland."

For all the hardship that Ireland currently faces, as our new Cuban friends showed us, there is always friendship and hope.

Irish Independent

Source: www.independent.ie/lifestyle/big-swingin-harry-the-day-i-played-baseball...