By DANA CALVO and DAVID CAZARES Staff Writers
The
Sun Sentinel, March 28
HAVANA -- Three blocks from the stadium filled with 50,000 communist-approved fans and just beyond the billboard that says "Sports, the Right of the People," Zenaida Alvarez sat before a blank television screen and listened to the game between Cuba's baseball all-stars and the Baltimore Orioles.
Alvarez, 64, would have liked to peek inside the stadium at history in the making.
Instead, she stayed in her hot, windowless one-room apartment, cranked up the volume and opened the door.
All through the streets of El Cerro, the poor neighborhood that surrounds the Estadio Latinoamericano, the din of old television sets and radios carried the commentator's voice. Above it all, some of Cuba's most passionate pelota fans could be heard urging the all-stars on.
Inside the stadium, the loudest cheering took place before the first pitch was thrown.
"Fi-del! Fi-del!" those in the bleachers chanted, as their president strode across the diamond to shake hands with the Orioles players before the game began. "Cu-ba! Cu-ba!"
Alvarez listened as the screen went from fuzzy to completely gray.
"The real baseball fans aren't in there," she said.
The game between two countries with no diplomatic relations was played before a live audience pre-screened by Castro. Tickets were handed out to Communist Party leaders and distributed at work centers.
A separate concert planned for Sunday night for U.S. and Cuban musicians was also by invitation only. Like the baseball game, that cultural exchange was designed to foster people-to-people contact between citizens of hostile countries.
In his trademark green army fatigues, Castro spent Sunday's four-hour game sitting between Major League Commissioner Bud Selig and Orioles owner Peter Angelos. The president of Cuba's National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón, and the Minister of Economics, Carlos Lage, also sat behind home plate.
In contrast to last week's national playoffs that roared along to the bawdy cheers of fans who clanged noisemakers, Sunday's match-up was subdued markedly.
Missing were the drums, sirens and air horns, the singing, dancing and rumba music that enveloped the ballpark from the first pitch during Saturday night's playoff game between the Havana Industriales and Santiago.
About 20 rows up from Castro's seat, Julia Pérez, 29, squeezed her temples to ward off a migraine. She likes baseball only "sometimes," she said, but came to the stadium alone in her father's stead because he couldn't make it.
By the bottom of the seventh inning she was hunched over and pale, but said she was too scared "of how it would appear" to get up and leave amid a row of police officers in front of her.
Far from the concentration of officers, hundreds of spectators seated in the sunny outfield seats left mid-way through the game.
"I've never personally met or seen an American before today," said Felipe Pedroso Nuñez, a stadium chef who stole out of the kitchen holding his big white hat to watch the game. He had arrived at work at 6 a.m. Sunday and by 4:30 p.m. he was still at the stadium -- now dressed in jeans, sunglasses and chewing his bottom lip as the game went into extra innings.
At the end of eleven inning, it was Baltimore 3, the Cubans 2. The Cuban fans clapped politely for the Orioles. The Cuban and American players lined up and warmly tapped out high-fives.
Across town, 90 Cuban and American songwriters and performers participating in a cultural exchange project rehearsed for a 9 p.m. concert at Havana's Karl Marx theater. The concert was expected to run into the early morning hours today.
The American contingent of 44 songwriters and musicians spent a week creating compositions with 48 Cuban counterparts. Each pair produced two songs and organizers selected a sampling of at least 25 tunes that include the musicians' consensus of some of the best work and others that represented a broader sampling of the work produced.
"This is not just a concert," said Alan Roy Scott, a California songwriter who founded the "Music Bridges Over Troubled Waters" project. "People are standing up on stage and performing, but 'concert' is a loose word. What we're doing is like an experiment. And at the end we'll present the paper."
Some of the Americans, including singer Gladys Knight and composer Burt Bacharach, couldn't stay for the performance. Due to overbooking, singer James Taylor was a no-show and Jimmy Buffett arrived Friday, too late to work with any of the Cubans.
Throughout the week, organizers lost precious time trying to track down missing guitars and other equipment. In addition, the rehearsals were rough affairs.
Journalists repeatedly asked concert planners to explain the disparate ability level between American performers and their much more experienced Cuban counterparts. In previous Music Bridges in other countries, the American musicians had a dominating presence.
"They don't care who you are," Scott said. "They're so confident in their abilities, and that's been hard for the Americans to deal with, to find people who not only can keep up with them but who can also teach them something."
Cuban troubadour Carlos Varela was gracious about his guests.
"The North American musicians have come here with a lot of expectations of working with Cuban musicians," he said. "But we're learning as much from them as they are from us."
Copyright 1999, Sun-Sentinel Co. and South Florida Interactive, Inc.
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