Béisbol Begins: How Nemesio Guilló Brought Baseball to Cuba

Gr 2-4–With some justice Olivera dubs baseball the “national sport of Cuba,” and looks back to profile a figure who may have done more than any other to popularize it there. Scion of a prosperous Havana family, Nemesio Guilló was sent in 1858 at age 11 to a private school in Mobile, Alabama, where over the next seven years he was not only exposed to a new language and culture, but also to a then-new game called “baseball” which, the author writes, seemed to him both exciting and superior to bullfighting due to its fair rules and emphasis on team play. Returning with “un bate de bèisbol” in his luggage, Guilló recruited fellow “peloteros,” and by 1868 had formed a team good enough to beat visiting American sailors. As the author notes in his historical afterword the organized sport went on to be banned for long periods both by local authorities and, later, Castro, but Cubans have been playing pro ball in the U.S. from the 1870s to today and the game remains popular throughout the Caribbean. An illustration of the original Cuban team, posing and playing in quaint boaters and neckerchiefs, is depicted with uniformly light skin, which may be a stretch—but at the end Guilló strikes a final pose surrounded by portraits of later, more diversely hued, Cuban Hall of Famers.