Baseball and Guns

In looking up what baseball games the kids would have been listening to on the radio in 1959, I came across amazing connections between Minnesota and Cuba in that year. Although the Cuban revolution was successful in January, 1959, with Fidel Castro driving out Batista and setting up a revolutionary government, at that time he said he was an anti-imperialist, not a communist. Until the embargo against Cuba enacted in October, 1960, there seems to have been quite a lot of coming and going.

At a baseball game in July between the Rochester Red Wings and the Havana Sugar Kings played in Havana, gunfire celebrating the beginnings of the Cuban revolution got into the stadium, wounding two! This could have ended Cuba’s minor league involvement, but Castro loved baseball. He intervened, assuring everyone that teams that came to Havana would be safe.

The Minneapolis Millers were their league champions that year and in the Little World Series played the Havana Sugar Kings. After a couple of frigid games at the end of September in Minneapolis, the series moved to Havana, playing five games. Castro attended every game along with 3,000 soldiers with guns and bayonets. The Minneapolis players were somewhat unnerved by this, but they still tried their hardest. Nevertheless, they weren’t too sorry that in the end they lost! You can read the whole wild story, including Castro’s threats, told here by a historian of the Millers, Stew Thornley: http://stewthornley.net/millers_havana.html. I found it fascinating!