El Béisbol

The Negro Leagues History page has some neat explorations of Cuban newspaper baseball coverage from around the turn of the 20th century. Players banned from Major League Baseball before 1947 because of their skin color could often find work playing for Cuban teams during the offseason. In the early days of baseball, light-skinned African-Americans sometimes claimed to be Cuban in order to be allowed to play on teams with white players.

Technically, owners would claim that the players were Cuban in order to keep them on the team. And after a few years of this, most African-American players stopped accepting the idea that they had to pretend to be something they weren't in order to play the game they wanted to play. Organized Negro League baseball, when it began, offered opportunities to do just that and were sometimes considered the first step on the path towards integrated play.

Either way, reading about baseball's history in Cuba is interesting. A persistent rumor suggests that formerly living Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had a tryout with either the New York Yankees or Washington Senators. It's not true; while Castro was certainly evil enough to be a Yankee his baseball skills were nowhere near major-league tryout caliber. He was responsible for ending a significant feature of baseball history, though, by shutting down the Cuban Winter League and forcing the minor league Havana Sugar Kings to move. That doesn't really stack up very highly against all of the death and misery he caused, but it shows that ol' Shrubbery Face was a jerk in small ways as well.