Fidel Castro and Baseball

Baseball has been as much of a national pastime to Cuba as it has to the United States, due in no small part to Fidel Castro’s love of the game. This book chronicles the central role Castro played in transforming the sport from professional to amateur status in the small island country, which has produced dozens, if not hundreds, of baseball stars.

The late Peter C. Bjarkman was a widely recognized authority on Cuban baseball history and a frequent visitor to the island nation. A past winner of the The Sporting News-SABR and Macmillan-SABR awards for baseball research, in 2011 he appeared on the Cuba episode of the Travel Channel's No Reservations. He was the senior baseball writer for www.BaseballdeCuba.com, the leading Cuban League website.

Acknowledgements Prologue: A Rationale PART I: THE MYTHS Chapter 1: "History Will Absolve Me" Chapter 2: Baseball's Most Outrageous Myth Chapter 3: The Infamous "Barbudos" Game PART II: THE TRANSFORMATION Chapter 4: Sugar Barons and Sugar Kings and the Death of Cuba's Professional Baseball Chapter 5: The Grand Socialist Baseball Experiment Chapter 6: The Other Big Red Machine and Cuba's Dominance in International Baseball PART III: THE LEGACY Chapter 7: The Fictional Personas of Fidel Castro Chapter 8: The Cuban Baseball Defectors Phenomenon Chapter 9: The Ultimate Collapse of Cuban Baseball Chapter Notes Sources and Further Readings Index About the Author