As it happens, this stadium in rural Havana province is also the site of one of Cuba s elite baseball academies, where students spend their mornings perfecting reading and writing skills, and their afternoons learning how to hit the cutoff man. Talented youngsters are identified at an early age, and the most promising are enrolled in this academy by the time they are 17. A few years later, with luck, they might join one of the Cuban league teams or, even better, the Olympic squad. The provincial park is one of the smallest in the league, seating about 4,000 fans. Outfield walls in Cuban parks do not bear advertising, but instead are usually decorated with colorful patriotic slogans.
Participatory sports are the wellspring of champions, reads one sign in right field.
A fair number of fans sport t-shirts bearing the likeness of Che Guevara, the national hero who was instrumental in, as it is called here, The Triumph of the Revolution. Appropriately enough, since carreras means runs in Spanish, the letters atop the scoreboard s line score which would read RHE in the U.S. spells CHE in Cuba. Here an electronic scoreboard has replaced the old hand-operated one, but since there is an electricity shortage on the island, the hitter s name is flashed only briefly as he comes up to bat. Because the teenagers are too busy playing baseball outside the park, old men called carga bates serve as batboys although they seem to spend more time dispensing hitting advice than collecting bats. At sundown, play is interrupted so the flag in center field can be lowered, and everyone stands at attention while the national anthem plays.