How Did Baseball Affect Cuban Nationalism?

In countries around the world, sports have an integral role in society. Many times these sports are thought of in purely entertainment purposes. Often times, however, a sport means much more to a nation than simply being a form of exercise and entertainment. As with baseball in Cuba, sports can unite a nation’s people and carry intensely political implications. Baseball was successful as an instrument of Cuban nationalism because of the game’s ability to transcend racial and gender divisions and the fluidity of its symbolism and values of the game made baseball easily adaptable to the changing cultural, political, and economic conditions of the country.

By the 1860s, discontent was growing with Spanish colonial authority in Cuba. Spain,

Emigration to the United States was reaching its peak during this time and wealthy Cubans were increasingly sending their children to be educated at American universities. This spike in Cuban emigration coincided exactly with the immense rise in popularity of baseball in the United States. America had already become the pinnacle of modernity and progress for Cuba and Cubans were eager to participate in the sport that was increasingly becoming the iconic American sport. These Cuban students were the first to introduce baseball, known in Cuba as la pelota, in either 1865 or 1866 to their home country when they returned home from the United States. As stated previously, baseball provided a conduit to the United States. Luis Perez asserts, “Cubans received baseball as a medium of North American culture, able to reproduce social relationships and reveal normative boundaries of North American society - a way to mediate the Cuban encounter with the north, to grow familiar with North American ways and participate in those ways.” Baseball provided a pathway for Cubans to begin to disassociate with Spain and align further with

A rigid social hierarchy placing monumental importance on a person’s place of birth and skin color marked Spanish colonial society. Baseball was devoid of any such rigid structure. People of all races joined together to play baseball and cheer for their favorite teams. For minority ballplayers, baseball provided something the rigid hierarchy of Spanish colonialism could never provide: upward social mobility. The Cuban baseball world, in exact antithesis to colonial rule, was dominated by ability not birth. This was very appealing to Cubans who found themselves at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy. No other part of Cuban culture had the ability to bring together such diverse groups of people as baseball