Originally brought by immigrant workers in the early 20th century,
cricket in the communist stronghold is enjoying an amazing resuscitation.
Andy Bull
July 6, 2007 11:18 AM
Amongst the swarm of minor pieces of information that slipped out of the
press wires on Thursday there was a small snap, around about 4.55 in the
afternoon.
"ST JOHN'S, Antigua, July 5 (Reuters) - Former West Indies fast bowler
Courtney Walsh believes that Cuba has natural cricketing talent and
could become a force in the game. Walsh said on Thursday he had visited
the communist country several times and had been amazed by the talent on
show."
Cricket in Cuba - a curious idea, that. Curious enough to make your
eyebrow flicker up and down when you read it.
It could almost be a joke (the same kind of joke that led Matthew Engel
to remark of Chinese cricket, in the 2006 Wisden Almanack, that "if I
ever get the chance to report the first China v England Test at
Guangzhou, I would be delighted to celebrate with a plateful of
sweet-and-sour hat").
It's not. On Wednesday, the Texas-born billionaire Sir Allen Stanford
announced that Cuba and Turks & Caicos Islands would be joining his
Caribbean-wide Twenty20 competition. Stanford is investing $100m into
Caribbean cricket over the next three years, with a genuine conviction
that he can create a profit.
It's serious business. And it suggests that in Cuba, unlike the vast
majority of the International Cricket Council's 101 members, the game is
played by more people than just a few ex-pats in panama hats. As in so
many other ways, Cuba is different.
On January 1 1899, the USA took formal control of Havana after the end
of the Spanish/American War. Within four years a patsy regime was in
place, and a lease was imposed by America on Cuba that allowed them to
take possession of Guantanamo Bay. Construction of the naval base soon
began, and a long and inflammatory history was sparked.
Cricket, in its first flourishing in Cuba, was one of the minor, and
undocumented ripples of change that occurred in consequence. The
American presence led to waves of immigrant workers from the Caribbean.
At first it was Jamaicans coming to construct the base and its
infrastructure, then, in the 1920s it was Bajans coming to work in the
sugar mills.
The game came with them, and in Oriente region, to the east of the
country, it thrived. Leagues were formed, cup competitions held. In 1955
and 56 the Guantanamo Cricket Club hosted teams from the Bahamas and
Jamaica.
And then came the revolution. Cricket clubs were, like everything else,
nationalised. The government did not take a great interest and the game
dwindled and died. In the records the scorecards run up to one final
match in 1974, and afterwards the game all but disappeared. One match a
year was played in a town to the south, Baragua, in celebration of
Emancipation Day.
For 25 years there was no cricket other than that, and a handful of
games organised by various English-speaking diplomats, in Cuba.
The astonishing resuscitation that took place over the decade between
then and now was caused by several things. Among them was the
receptiveness of Fidel Castro's administration towards alternatives to
baseball, even as Bill Clinton was preaching 'diamond diplomacy' and
organising friendly matches in Havana between the Baltimore Orioles and
the Cuban national team; also, the British government grew wise to this
new angle of relations, and set up a 'Memoranda of Understanding'
between UK Sport and the Cuban Sports Ministry.
More than either of those, though, the transition was, incredibly,
brought about by just one woman.
Leona Ford was born in 1943, in Guantanamo. She is a second-generation
Cuban; her father Leonard Ford came to the Cuban sugar plantations from
Barbados. Leonard was the founder of the Guantanamo Cricket Club.
"The club meetings were held at my home, and when I was little I used to
hear about it a lot. There were cricket photographs all over the house,"
Leona remembers now. After a lifetime spent working as an English
professor, she decided to write a history of Cuban cricket in her
retirement. The details above are only widely available because of her
work. She was increasingly drawn towards the idea of re-establishing the
game.
In 1998 she presented a paper on the subject at the annual meeting of
the West Indian Welfare Association. In the crowd was a man named Sir
Howard Cooke. Cooke was Governor General of Jamaica. What was more, he
had captained one of the Jamaican teams that had visited Guantanamo CC
in 1955, and remembered playing against Leona's father.
With Cooke's support, not least in the form of getting his old friend
Courtney Walsh involved, Lord set about re-establishing the game in
Cuba. They started appealing for donations for equipment, and rounded up
elderly former players to act as coaches and umpires. Earl Best, a
sportswriter with the Trinidad Express, volunteered to run a six-week
coaching course, bringing an Argentinian copy of the Laws of cricket
with him.
Amazingly, and despite the unique problems Best faced in a
baseball-crazy nation ("for a Cuban a bat is held and wielded
horizontally," he wrote), the game began to take off. It was designated
a 'recreational sport' by the National Sports Institute of Cuba (INDER).
That meant it could be taught in schools. With the help of the British
Consul, the campaign grew and kit donations flooded in.
In 2002 they were given affiliate membership of the ICC. In 2003 the UK
Sport started sending out teams of coaches as part of their new pact
with INDER. By then there were eight senior teams, and the game was
being played in 37 different schools by over a 1,000 children. The first
provincial tournament was held in 2004. From there, the curve continued
upwards until two days ago, and Stanford's announcement.
Ford, having spent a long time running the national association out of
her house, spending much of her free time watching video copies of Test
matches from overseas, was made the ICC's global Volunteer of the Year
in 2002. Now 64, she is still the only female head of a national cricket
association in the world.
Her's has been an astonishing feat, and one that now looks certain to
have a real legacy. The descendants of the Bajans and Jamaicans who
first introduced cricket to Cuba now make up 8% of its population. And
of course the popularity of baseball ensures a certain affinity with
cricket on the rest of the population as well. Possibly the only thing
working against the game growing further is the fact that there's not
nearly so much satisfaction to be had in whupping the USA at it.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2007/07/06/the_curious_revival_of_cricket.html
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