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What was baseball’s most successfully “dynasty” franchise? Was it the Casey Stengel-managed and DiMaggio-Mantle-Berra-led Yankees of the 1940s and 1950s? Or was it perhaps the pioneering nineteenth-century Cincinnati Red Stockings under the guidance of innovative Harry Wright? Or might it actually not have been a big-league professional club, at all, strange was that proposition might sound? Should we not consider here the various editions of the Cuban national team—almost annual world champions over the full five decades marking the reign of legendary fast-baller-turned-dictator Fidel Castro? What other ball club—at any level of competition—can boast a streak of 159 consecutive games without a single loss, or 44 “world championships” over a stretch of a mere 49 years? And such relentless winning only scratches the surface of the remarkable success story behind the Cuban squad’s half-century of relentless domination in international baseball competitions. When it comes to on-the-field successes, there is no story that can match the heretofore undocumented saga of baseball’s most legitimate claimant to the colorful designation of “The Big Red Machine.”

This ground-breaking present volume, penned by Cuban baseball’s foremost historian, is the first to chronicle the complete story of baseball’s most winning all-time “franchise.” Bjarkman unfolds in colorful detail a remarkable half-century success run unparalleled at any level of professional or amateur baseball competition. Ever since Fidel Castro seized political power on the baseball-crazy island of Cuba—and in the process outlawed all professional sports—the thrust of the small nation’s “national pastime” has been focused squarely on beating the rival American “Yankees” (i.e., the USA national amateur and professional teams) at their own game during prestigious international competitions. Baseball—in the guise of the showcase national team—has, in fact, become Cuba’s greatest single propaganda weapon in an ongoing ideological struggle with “the great imperialist demon” to the North. And the achievements of the powerhouse Cuban teams in Amateur World Series (IBAF World Cup) matches, Olympic competitions, a half-dozen added international tournament venues—and even in exhibitions against major league ball clubs—has been not only unparalleled but almost unimaginable in a sport where winning six of ten games is normally an undisputed mark of unqualified success.

For most North American fans—familiar with Cuban baseball only through occasional trumpeted “defections” by a handful of national team stars to the big leagues—the Cuban national team has remained little more than a mythical entity cloaked in mystery and surrounded by all-too-frequent misunderstanding. Few stateside fans know who the great individual Cuban stars have been down through the decades, where they come from, how they are selected and trained, or what the true level of their talents might actually be. This first thorough-going portrait of Cuban national teams and their countless victories over the past five decades peels away these reigning misconceptions and in the process only adds more flesh to a growing legend of Cuba as baseball’s unrivalled international power.

Cuba’s successes in international play have indeed bordered on the truly astounding. A few facts are sufficient to clinch the case. There have now been 49 major international tournaments involving the Cuban national team since Fidel Castro’s 1959 rise to power: these include the World Baseball Classic of 2006, Olympics competitions since 1992, the IBAF World Cup staged in alternating years, the IBAF Intercontinental Cup matches since 1973, and the Pan American Games and Central American Games competitions held every fourth summer. The Cuban all-star squad has won all but five of these events, losing in the final championship game on those five non-championship occasions. In summary, it is an accomplishment that boggles the mind and remains unequalled not only in baseball but in any other major team sport boasting international competitions—a full half-century of reaching the final match of every major tournament entered and in the process losing less than a dozen total individual games along the way. In big league terms this would equate to the New York Yankees playing in every single World Series since the end of the fifties and dropping the Fall Classic on less than a half-dozen occasions.

Cuban teams have dominated Olympic baseball (the most visible international event for Americans viewers) since its inception in 1992. A single title loss came at the hands of the Americans during the Sydney finals of 2000, when future big league ace Ben Sheets shut down the Cuban sluggers in what many believe to have been the future Milwaukee Brewer’s “performance of a lifetime.” During one particular stretch run—between 1987 and 1997—Cuban squads captured 159 consecutive matches without losing even a single individual contest: that string separated a preliminary-round loss to Team USA during the 1987 Indianapolis Pan American Games (which the Cubans quickly avenged with a gold medal victory over the Americans) and an upset loss to Japan at the 1997 Intercontinental Cup finals in Barcelona. Cuba’s most recent rare loss to Team USA in the Taipei finals of November 2007 World Cup interrupted yet another remarkable string of nine straight world titles, this time dating back to 1982. Even Cincinnati’s legendary 19th-century Red Stockings—the sport’s reputed most legendary winners—did not match such a skein of total winning success. And this largely uninterrupted string of Cuban victories against all comers has notably been accomplished with a half-dozen generations of constantly rotating ballplayers, managers and coaches. For Cuban teams, such total victory on the diamond seems to be something found in the island water, or perhaps in the native blood.

During decades separating Fidel’s rise to power and the 2006 World Baseball Classic, it was repeatedly claimed by skeptics that these relentless Cuban successes were only hollow and illegitimate triumphs, all earned by pseudo-professionals playing against nothing more than rank amateurs. The standard complaint by critics of Cuba’s world baseball domination was that American squads competing in Olympic venues were only collegiate nines, unrepresentative clubs thrown together with only a haphazard interest in winning. If the Cubans were to play real big leaguers, or even top minor leaguers, it might be quiet a different story. At least that was the bold cry of generations of doubters who were quick to discount USA losses in their own national pastime as a mere matter of disinterest. And perhaps there was a small grain of truth to the argument. The Cubans did perform against college all-stars and not against big leaguers, and it was indeed difficult to measure their true potency on the Olympic diamonds to which they were limited.
That shallow disclaimer overlooked one important element, however, and that was the uncanny abilities of generations of Cuban all-star teams to somehow always escape upset in a sport where even the tail-enders are likely to beat the champions about a third of the time. And then the picture began to change at century’s end. With the introduction of seasoned professionals (top minor leaguers) in international “amateur” play after 1999, with the historic staged exhibitions between Team Cuba and the Baltimore Orioles in that same year, and especially with the recent MLB-sponsored World Baseball Classic (where Cuba faced Japan in the finale, while American, Dominican and Venezuelan big leaguers sat on the sidelines), the expected collapse of the Cuban dynasty in the face of stiffer competition simply did not materialize. Cuba continued to win relentlessly against all challengers, no matter what the improved level of competition. If Japan walked off with the WBC crown, Cuba’s all-stars were nonetheless again found in the championship match. If the Baltimore Orioles did not have much at stake when playing the Cuban national team in 1999, nonetheless the evenly fought two-game set seemingly proved that Cuban League squads could play head-to-head with big leaguers. And if Team USA finally won a World Cup finale in 2007, the Cubans nonetheless still boast a 29-2 overall individual games record in the three World Cup tournaments played with professionals so far during the new century. And if further evidence is needed for the level of talent on the Cuban national squads, the handful of “defectors” who abandoned national teams for the big leagues (René Arocha, Osvaldo Fernández, Rolando Arrojo, El Duque Hernández, José Contreras, Kendry Morales and recently Alexei Ramírez) have all experienced little difficulty breaking directly into major league starting lineups.

But who are these unknown Cuban “big leaguers” proudly wearing the national colors and thus turning their backs on lucrative contracts from North American professional baseball? What explains the plethora of diamond talent on this island (with a population barely approximating that of New York City) and what truly lies behind the unrivaled successes of Cuba’s national team? How are the Cuban teams assembled, and trained, and why do they perform so remarkably well under the immense pressures of single-elimination international tournaments? All these mysteries are unraveled in this first book to look deeply behind the mystery of a Cuban baseball phenomenon heretofore masked by misinformation and propaganda surrounding the half-century reign of Fidel Castro’s communist government

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Chapter 1 - "The Streak" and the Long Road to Beijing
Chapter 2 - Cuba's Forgotten Pre-Revolution Amateur Tradition
Chapter 3 - Fidel Castro and the Cuban National Team
Chapter 4 - They Might Be Giants: Cuba's Remarkable Saga in Olympic Play
Chapter 5 - Beating the Americans at the Shared "National Pastime"
Chapter 6 - Team Cuba's Pantheon of International Stars
Chapter 7 - Baseball Détente and the Baltimore Orioles Series
Chapter 8 - Major League Baseball's First World Baseball Classic
Chapter 9 - Eleven Million Managers and the Uncertain Future of Team Cuba

Appendix I - Year-by-Year Results for Team Cuba
Appendix II - All-Time Statistical Roster for Team Cuba
Appendix III - Year-by-Year Team Cuba Rosters

Bibliography
Index