Revisionist history: How Castro's resignation impacts on baseball

In this 2002 article from Reason.com, we learn how the decision by the communist dictator to step down might open the door for baseball scholarship.

According to the piece by Matt Welch, Cuban national Severo Nieto

basically invented Cuban baseball research in 1955 when he co-authored the country’s first-ever baseball encyclopedia, laboriously reconstructing the statistical record of the professional league’s first 78 years out of a mountain of newspaper clippings, program scraps, and his own scorecards. Since that dramatic debut, Nieto’s been on one of the longest losing streaks in modern publishing history. He has spent a half-century documenting Cuba’s tremendously rich professional past in more than a dozen books, but not a single one has been published in any country.

“I tried several times,” Nieto told me in his cluttered Havana apartment four years ago, “but they say it’s difficult now in Cuba because we don’t have any paper.” Castro, of course, has been overseeing one of the world’s most politically selective paper shortages for decades, reserving precious pulp for odes to Cuba’s famed amateur athletic accomplishments while rejecting books that glorify anything about the pre-revolution era.

Cubans aren’t the only ones who suffer from this revisionist whitewashing. Americans want access to the archives, because the history of the two countries’ professional development is closely intertwined. Indeed, the story of the U.S. national pastime is inextricably linked to Cuba.

Tagged as: Cuban baseball, Fidel castro