The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba and the Search for the American Dream, by Steve Fainaru and Ray Sanchez.
New York: Villard, 2001.
$24.95 - 338 pages.

If history ever produced a sports figure with a biography made for Hollywood, that figure is Orlando Hernandez, the star pitcher for the New York Yankees.

In fact, the only reason Hernandez’s story never made it to the big screen is that no producer could ever come to terms with the pitcher’s avaricious and reputedly unstable agent over the rights to the story.
Had Hernandez’s journey from abject poverty to a World Series championship followed the path of Yankees’ shortstop Derek Jeter, from Ohio through North Carolina to Yankee Stadium, it’d just be another moderately interesting sports story.

Instead, Hernandez took the most difficult route into Major League Baseball anyone has ever taken, with the possible exception of Jackie Robinson. His story of personal triumph is not only a metaphor for, but is a real-life vindication of, capitalism and democracy as the world’s greatest champions of human fulfillment.

Hernandez’s grandfather was commander of a military base under Cuba’s Batista. Playing for a toothpaste company called Pasta Gravy, Hernandez’s father appeared on his way to the major leagues until a band of guerillas led by Fidel Castro overthrew the government. Instead of playing for the New York Yankees, as was his dream, the elder Hernandez wound up playing for the Havana Psychiatric Hospital.

From the beginning of the younger Hernandez’s life, the petty functionaries who operated Castro’s omnipresent government made their influence felt by incompetently or corruptly blocking what in a free society would have been a comparatively effortless attainment of a boyhood dream.

Hernandez desperately wanted to be a ballplayer like his father. But as his father before him discovered, under Castro one plays where and how Castro wants, or one doesn’t play.

When Hernandez was 11, bureaucrats decided he wasn’t baseball material. With that one decision, the future Olympic and World Series hero was kept out of the Sports Initiation Schools, where Cuba’s “amateur” athletes were trained and prepared for international competition.

That decision was just the first of a series of flaws in Cuba’s communist system that the mere existence of Orlando Hernandez exposed. Hernandez was taught by one of the best coaches in Cuba, a man who repeatedly refused government offers to teach in the Sports Initiation Schools. Instead, on a local playground he taught the kids that the government had rejected. He taught them so well that Cuba’s best teams were filled with his students.

From this informal school came Orlando Hernandez, who landed a job as the ace of the Industriales, “the New York Yankees of Cuba.”

Hernandez was not the most naturally talented athlete, but his work ethic was unparalleled. He soon became Cuba’s best pitcher, the ace of the Cuban Olympic team, and a national hero used by Castro to proclaim the superiority of the communist system. Ironically, Hernandez had developed his skills in spite of, rather than because of, the communist system.

In 1996, his half-brother Livan defected to the United States for a shot at playing in the majors. (The next year he helped the Florida Marlins win the World Series.) Under Castro’s regime, guilt-by-association is the equivalent of being caught red-handed. Hernandez was banned from baseball for fear that he may defect.

In response, Hernandez, who had never considered defecting, did just that. After being trapped on a small uninhabitable island for four days, he was rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. A few months later he helped the New York Yankees win the World Series.

Hernandez’s story, as told in The Duke of Havana, is both appalling and inspiring. It shows the unconquerable power of free will in determining one’s destiny - even if that free will is being exercised by one person for the purposes of denying freedom to another.

(Cline is managing editor of Carolina Journal, the newspaper of the John Locke Foundation, from which this review was reprinted with permission. Carolina Journal is available online at www.carolinajournal.com.)

 

Back to Top

The Smoky Mountain News