By Tony Francis
Last Updated: 2:09am GMT 05/03/2007
While goats grazed in a rubbish tip beyond the boundary wall and scorers
on the roof of the toilet block grappled with the concept of pierna
delante del wicket (lbw), cricket officially went communist last week.
Tony Francis
Have bat, will travel: Tony Francis samples street-life in Havana before
his match-winning effort on the pitch
The venue was Cuba, only a few hundred miles from where Michael Vaughan
and the troops were warming up for the World Cup, but oblivious to the
frenzy on their doorstep.
Baseball and boxing were the national obsessions on the largest but most
isolated of the Caribbean islands, until a longboat carrying me and the
London Community Cricket Association beached on the northern shore last
week.
We exchanged our cargo of willow and thigh pads for the finest
hand-rolled Havana cigars before being carried shoulder-high through the
Spanish quarter by a throng of wannabe Curtley Ambroses.
May WG Grace forgive us for what we have done. If 12 million
Afro-Hispanics cotton on to reverse swing, the future could be
unplayable. For now, we feel deeply honoured to have represented England
in the first cricket "international" played against Cuba.
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I was the guest of LCCA, a charitable mission resolved to push this
highly sophisticated, yet basically simple game, into every last corner
on earth. We had a team of decent club players and a giant Jamaican
called Silverback who once bowled at 85 mph but now snores louder than a
Co-op horse, and twice as long.
The fact that we beat Cuba may come back to haunt us. The fact that I
personally reaped five for 19 with a devastating spell of military
all-sorts suggests two things: Cuba need to stiffen their middle order,
and Steve Harmison might be trying too hard.
News of cricket's incursion into this crumbling outpost of the Spanish
empire, where tourists smoke £50 puros and natives drive 50-year-old
Buicks left over by the Americans, reached Fidel Castro's ears within hours.
The veteran dictator, forced by chronic illness to hand over the
day-to-day running of the country to his loyal brother, Raul, is
apparently recovering well at an undisclosed location. Defeat may not
speed up his convalescence, but he can take comfort from the knowledge
that cricket distances him even further from the enemy across the water.
The apparently endless US sanctions against Cuba sit uncomfortably with
its continued occupation of Guantanamo naval base five years after the
lease ran out. During Castro's enforced absence, cricket has been
officially adopted as the 38th national sport since the revolution
began. It has been reported in no fewer than 10 of Cuba's 12 provinces.
The national director of recreation, Jose Cedeno skipped around the
boundary like a badger with a jam sandwich, admiring the aesthetic
beauty of an English cover drive, while being careful to avoid goat
droppings.
He told me: "This is a great step forward for us. Fidel is a baseball
fan but I'm sure he'll love cricket." The perimeter wall is adorned with
Castro's teachings: El ejercicio fisico sinonimo de calidad de vida, and
so on. Cuba is among the world's top-10 Olympic medallists because
sport, along with health and education, is a mainstay of communist ideology.
The LCCA, backed by UK Sport and the Foreign Office, believe cricket's
unique valency as an individual game encased in the team ethic has
limitless powers to create a feel-good factor in troubled communities,
while diverting youngsters from crime and keeping them healthy.
Their director of programmes, Andy Sellins, had already prepared the
groundwork on two previous coaching visits to Havana - now he was trying
to figure out a way of beating them. Cuba's national team contained a
dangerous sprinkling of lithe young quicks from Santiago and Guantanamo.
They had us in trouble at 56 for six, on a bright green plastic wicket
laid across the sand of a rough and ready baseball stadium. Because time
was running out, the South African-made wicket had to be sent from
Johannesburg in a diplomatic bag - another first for cricket. One of our
problems was batting to music - an incessant Cuban reggae without whose
deafening throb no one on this island seems to function properly. Only
the throatiest appeal stood a chance of being heard.
Not only were they impressive boleadores (bowlers), but they also showed
a surprising sure-footedness on perilously uneven terrain only
quadrupeds would normally risk.
We recovered to 126 all out, before tying down their less confident
bateadores (batsmen) with an all-spin attack. They still have a tendency
to play baseball shots, but then so does Kevin Pietersen so perhaps we
shouldn't knock it.
Modesty prevents me from detailing my own bowling strategy. Suffice to
say that I tried to present the seam and keep the delivery arm high.
Others may be less charitable. Our audience was an eclectic mix of
excited teenagers from San Miguel Cricket Club, which runs five teams in
this shabby suburb, the Indian ambassador to Cuba who sported a baseball
cap beneath her sari because the sun was so fierce, and a
second-generation Cuban umpire who bore a striking resemblance to Ernest
Hemingway. He treated the laws of cricket as a basis for negotiation and
once ruled out a caught behind because the wicketkeeper's laces were undone.
Cuba's finest then lost narrowly to a West Indian XI made up largely of
sports science students from Jamaica. There's a neat symmetry about
this. It was Jamaican slaves working on the sugar plantations around
Guantanamo in the 1920s who first brought cricket to the island.
It eventually died out but enjoyed a mini revival in the 1980s and has
survived in a fairly primitive form among third-generation Jamaicans
ever since.
I think it's safe to assume that Jamaican influences will continue where
LCCA left off and that the West Indies Cricket Board, seduced by the
fusion of African elasticity and Spanish invention, will annexe this
potentially fruitful nursery.
A sticking point will be how to get Cubans playing professional sport
when it's banned by the state. Cedeno has already received an invitation
for Cuba to take part in this year's Stanford Twenty20 competition,
which encourages lesser cricketing islands to compete with the best.
He hasn't replied yet because Stanford is bank-rolled by an American
tycoon living in Antigua. Their aversion to anything carrying a US stamp
may be softened by the $500,000 each country is paid for taking part. It
would buy an awful lot of pads and helmets.
In the meantime, Havana cricket relies on bagfuls of equipment donated
by LCCA. We even left sections of an English willow with Cuba's major
baseball bat manufacturer, and Ikea-like instructions on how to assemble
it. He seemed confident enough.
Before we sailed away to convert more non-believers, the Jamaican
students informed us that they had managed to cultivate Cuba's first
grass wicket. Things really are looking up.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/sport/2007/03/05/sccuba05.xml
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