By: Michael Powell

To walk the playing fields at Ciudad Deportiva – a vast public sports complex – is to wander into glorious obsession in full flower. One dusty baseball diamond stretches after another after another. To the limits of the eyes, all anyone is doing – child, parent and grandparent – is tossing, swinging at or catching a baseball. It’s like an American sports reverie circa 1965.

I wandered into a showdown between two neighborhood teams of 11- and 12-year-olds, Marianao versus Guanabacoa. Marianao’s coach, Lorenzo Rojas, 62, a diminutive fellow with white hair, held court as if in his living room rather than a dugout. He called to his star power hitter, Gerson. Gerson, 11, had reached for a high fastball and watched it twirl away from his bat. Rojas offered him advice. Gerson peered back from the plate, puzzled.

What, I asked Rojas, did you advise the kid? “I said we have visitors from Obama’s land,” Rojas said. “I said he should show NYT his power.”

Gerson’s next swing was an easy rip that launched the ball to a distant spot in right-center. Mothers hollered. Aunts clanged cowbells. Cousins toot-tooted horns.

Absorbing a culture

Soccer has made nibbling inroads in Cuba, but baseball is its grand preoccupation. From the games on these fields to those played in streets with baseballs wrapped in duct tape or bottle caps tossed with precision, this country long ago absorbed baseball into its pores.

It’s a love pursued amid the ruins. At the entrance to Ciudad Deportiva, so many letters have fallen off the giant sign that it looks like a half-completed Scrabble board. There were two rickety viewing stands, but a rusted tin roof had blown off. A line of laundry girdled the back of the home dugout, where Marianao players sat in their bright red uniforms.

We drove around several corners and in Barrio Cerro found a dozen men, 14 to 23, playing a post-apocalyptic sort of street baseball. All around them were tattered, paint-flecked apartment buildings as they stood on a basketball court where one rim was missing and the other hung loose like a busted lip.Amid giant gray banyan trees and roofless old Art Deco homes, long ago abandoned and now looking like Roman ruins, some older men played paddle ball and handball. One of the baseball players wore rubber rain boots and tugged on a cigarette. Five ran barefoot. They had a single baseball glove among them, although the fleet-footed, sure-handed center fielder with a Mohawk wore a handball glove.

Most of the players possessed beautiful swings, and the balls they hit often soareyoung d beyond trees, sailing through long vacant windows or crashing into old houses. The game was good-natured but intense until a young woman walked by. She had auburn hair and legs like a river, and although she was holding hands with a man, she looked back over her shoulder and flashed an electric smile at the players.

They all smiled back.

We turned a corner, and down the street, in the soft light and shadow of approaching twilight, four children played baseball. They were throwing what looked from a distance like a tiny whiffle ball. These boys, 9 to 13, play for Marianao. So scarce are bats and gloves that the coaches gather them up at the end of each game. So amid lines of laundry on Avenue 49, in the shade of coconut trees, they played baseball with a sturdy wood stick and a white plastic bottle cap.

It seemed a child’s fancy, but that was not the case at all. The boys had etched a base on the street, and David settled in with his Yasiel Puig stance. The pitcher, a skinny boy with glasses, Jorges, gave a peekaboo leg kick like the great Cuban pitcher Orlando Hernandez, and the game was on. Jorges was a magician; he could make that bottle cap dance. Sometimes it fluttered, like a knuckleball. Other times, it flew in on the hands at astonishing speed. David, however, was disciplined, waiting, waiting, sometimes hitting, sometimes not. The boys laughed and dug in again and again, waiting for that flickering, floating cap. This was baseball love, Cuban style.