Baseball in the breach: Notes on defection, disaffection and transition in contemporary Cuba

Abstract

This article explores the popular ambivalence permeating contemporary Cuban socialism as Cuban citizens struggle to reconcile a deep sense of pride and accomplishment in the revolution with the need for political, economic and social reform. I focus on the everyday lives of Cuban baseball fans attempting to make sense of the deprivations and distortions of an economy and cultural order in crisis that is made all the more real for them in the emergence of baseball player defections to play in American professional baseball. Through an analysis of these defections as well as Cuban baseball fan responses to them, I argue that the context of economic crisis in contemporary Cuba has entailed a dynamic rethinking of Cuban culture and political economy, a process that is intimately bound up with American cultural, political, and economic forms such as Major League Baseball, but that these Cuban transformations are never simply determined by them.