Castro's Curveball - Hardcover

Wendel, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345424417 ISBN 13: 9780345424419

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1999

Synopsis

Fresh, original, and peopled with a rich cast of colorful characters, Castro's Curveball captures the passion of baseball and the vibrant flavor of Cuba in a grand-slam work of fiction.

Whether you believe in fate, the stars, a Supreme Being, or Mr. Coincidence, you can always count on one thing--life will throw you a wicked curveball or two. Billy Bryan has seen his share. A former minor-league catcher for the Washington Senators, Bryan is now a retired high school teacher, widowed with a grown daughter, and "coming to the end of many things." Then a long-forgotten scrapbook stirs memories of a distant past--and beckons him on a reluctant journey to relive his own extraordinary role in history. . . .

In 1947, Bryan is playing winter ball in Cuba, immersing himself in the decadent nightlife of Havana, and dreaming of someday "making it" to the majors. But his future on the diamond is as uncertain as Cuba itself, a country where rumblings of revolution hang in the air like a high fly ball to left. Then one fateful night Bryan witnesses a young student radical named Fidel hurl pitch after amazing pitch. So begins Billy's tug-of-war with destiny--to score a victory for the game he worships, win the heart of the woman he loves, or make his mark in a world racing toward revolution. . . .

About this title

Reviews

In a touch of iconoclastic ingenuity, Wendel builds on evidence of the youthful Fidel Castro's athletic prowess and pitching ability to construct an outstanding sports novel that also closely observes Cuban society and politics. In fact, he casts the Cuban dictator in what American sports lovers consider a heroic role: baseball player. The account opens in the present with septuagenarian Billy Bryan and his daughter, Cassy, arriving surreptitiously on the island. The trip is inspired by Cassy's discovery of a 1947 photo that shows her father, then an aging winter leaguer, in a friendly pose with a youthful Fidel. Flashbacks return Billy to the halcyon days of prerevolutionary Havana, when nightclubs, casinos, mobsters, prostitutes, secret police and baseball thrived in a nation on the brink of upheaval. Billy recalls his last season with the Havana Lions, and also his love affair with the beautiful Malena Fonseca, photographer of the revolution and friend to Castro. In possession of a phenomenal bender that flummoxes the best hitters, Castro has a future in the game that Billy himself, sadly, does not, and Billy is commissioned to sign and seal the promising star for the Washington Senators. Wendel's knowledge of baseball?the jargon, the players?enlivens the novel with some of the best game-action sequences in fiction. (The players' conversation, alas, lacks the casual profanity endemic to the sport, and thus is less credible than it might be.) Wendel also has a demonstrable feeling for Havana, then and now, and an understanding of the revolution and what it meant to both its leaders and its once hopeful, now hapless adherents. The love story, however, is a little too pat, focusing more on steamy looks, silly spats and lightweight sex than on powerful emotion. Castro comes off as an egocentric but not entirely bad fellow. But USA Today Baseball Weekly journalist Wendel (Going for the Gold) writes smooth, sometimes elegant prose, and his portrait of Cuba is multifaceted and intriguing. (Feb.) FYI: In an author's note, Wendel provides background about the youthful Castro's athletic prowess and his pitching ability.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A wry, ruefully nostalgic debut novel from USA Today sportswriter Wendel (Going for the Gold, 1980) puts a naive American baseball player on a misguided quest for heroism as he tries to persuade a young Fidel Castro to pitch for the Washington Senators. In 1993, the aging Billy Bryan and his daughter Cassy make a clandestine trip to Cuba, where, half a century earlier, Bryan was catching for the Havana Lions, a Cuban League farm team whose best players went on to the American major leagues. The sad ruin that is modern Cuba makes Bryan recall the heady winter of 1947, when a student protest momentarily halted a game and a lanky, beardless Castro demonstrated the effortless baseball talentand the potential for baseball heroismthat Bryan never had. Bryan's pursuit of Castro led him to the passionately political Malena Fonseca, a Cuban photographer who may also have been Castro's lover. Thus begins Bryan's backward glance at a tragicomic adventure in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Wise to the ways of baseball, Bryan sees Castro as a charismatic fraud, manipulating adversaries and acolytes with real and metaphorical curveballs. Yet he falls in love with the manipulative Fonseca, who, after becoming his lover, compels Bryan to sacrifice his career to save Castro from an embarrassment that could have thwarted the revolution. Fonseca refused to accompany Bryan back to the US, and died shortly after growing disillusioned with Castro. Now, on his furtive return to Cuba, Bryan wonders how he'll ever know whether Fonseca really loved him; questions whether Evan, the daughter Fonseca bore before she died, is really his; and ponders how the world might have been different if either Bryan or Castro had become the baseball greats theyd hoped to be. A superbly crafted meditation on heroism, duty, and the irony derived from recognizing everyone's imperfections but your own. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Catcher Billy Bryan is playing winter-league ball in Cuba, hoping against the odds to extend his career one more season. There may be another way he can stay in the game: help a Washington Senators scout sign a young Cuban with a wicked curveball to a big-league contract. The Cuban, Fidel Castro, would like to play ball, but he has another interest: politics. Sportswriter Wendel uses the rumors of Castro's flirtation with a baseball career to produce a beguiling mix of thriller and love story. The action juggles between the present, when Billy returns to Cuba, and the last weeks of the 1948 season, when a pennant race, a love affair, and a student revolt become inextricably linked. Some heavy-handed philosophizing about heroism bogs things down a bit, but Wendel makes the most of his premise while soaking plenty of atmosphere out of his prerevolutionary Havana setting. He gets the baseball right, too, capturing the Bull Durhamlike camaraderie of has-beens and wanna-bes struggling to keep their dreams alive--and stay out of the way of those whose dreams are bigger and much more dangerous. Bill Ott

In this first novel, well-known sportswriter and radio commentator Wendel explores the legend that Fidel Castro could've been a contender in America's major leagues. In 1947, protagonist Billy Bryan is at the end of his baseball career, playing winter ball in Cuba for the Senators, when one night university students come onto the field to protest their government; Fidel actually pitches a few wicked curveballs, striking out the team's best hitter. Billy forms a complicated, edgy friendship with Fidel and the beautiful photographer who documents the growing revolutionary movement. Nearly 40 years later, he returns with his daughter to the bleak Cuba his old friend created, intent on resolving some of his conflicts with his past. Beautifully written, and with a ring of truth to it, this is a book public libraries will definitely want to buy.
-?Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, IA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

We are up above the clouds--safe for now. Even through the plane's window, the Caribbean sun feels as hot and dream inducing as I remember it.

Besides me, my daughter Cassy sleeps the sleep of the innocent and the stubborn. With my fingertips, I slowly bring her head, with its fine blond hair, to rest on my shoulder. Softly, so as not to wake her, I stroke her neck just as I'd done when she was a child. I listen to the roar of the jet engines, feel this southern sun again on my face for the first time in many years, and wonder what we have gotten ourselves into.

Cassy has her mother's round face and my sharp nose. Some would say that she would have been better off with a little less of each, but I don't think that. When she was seven or so, I can remember walking the fields out in back of our house and talking to God about her, wishing her plain. Please, let her be a plain girl, a plain Jane. I was convinced only that would keep her safe in this world. For I know that the pretty and the beautiful, those talented and the gifted, the ones made closest to His image, always end up getting hurt. Of that you can be sure.

As with most conversations I've ever had with God, the results weren't exactly as I'd hoped for. In terms of her looks, my daughter didn't turn out to be classically beautiful. But there's something about her smile, the way her gray-blue eyes sparkle, that people, especially boys, always seem to enjoy. Even I am not immune to being carried aloft by her enthusiasm. After all, she is the one who has led me back to Cuba after all these years.

My Cassy flies all the time. She is the lone flight attendant on a commuter airline making hops from Buffalo to Cincinnati or Washington or Boston. She makes at least four round trips a day, five days a week. That's why she got such a kick out of how they do things on this Cubana Air flight. No drinks or snacks. Instead candies--peppermint, butterscotch, mango--are offered up in straw baskets to keep our ears from popping. There are no other services on this ninety-minute flight from Cancún to Havana.

Cassy's breathing is soft and relaxed. I turn from her to look out the window. Far below, in between the clouds, I catch my first glimpse of Cuba in more than forty years. It's how I remember it--a ribbon of white sand beach and then mile after mile of dark-green interior. After all the times I meant to come back here, especially that night in '53, it seems strange to come back now, with a grown daughter in tow. If it wasn't for Cassy, I would have stayed in Middleport, NY, living on my high school teacher's pension, learning to be a widower after thirty-seven years of marriage. I am coming to the end of many things, and, quite simply, I want to be left alone.

My wife, Laurie, died nine weeks ago this Tuesday. I especially miss her on cold mornings and late at night when every sound, real or imagined, echoes through the empty farmhouse on Slayton Settlement Road that we filled with devotion and purpose for all those years.

It's funny. Once upon a time I thought that I would be enjoy being alone again. Staying married, learning to overlook the small trespasses that mount over the years, can exhaust anyone. A man can be married to a veritable saint, as I believe I was, and yet he can still find himself walking the fields in back of his house, wondering where he will find the strength to hold himself, hold the marriage together. That's what being married does to you. It demands penance in the form of compromise and responsibility. When your living it, it can all seem to be too much at times. But now I find myself trying to make sense of a different kind of pain.

Here again, I think that God has fed me a little off speed pitch to keep me off balance. He has taught me that missing someone you loved deeply makes you long for the days of making adjustments, enduring the rounds of petty disagreements than can dim any marriage. Though she is gone, my wife remains, as she always did, very much with me. As I sit here, suspended above an island that once held such promise for me, I don't feel worthy of such devotion.

I feel this and simply want to fade away; try and wrestle thos feelings to some kind of stalemate. That's what I had planned to do until Cassy found that damn scrapbook.

Leave it to my whirling dervish of a daughter to take it upon herself to clean my house, attic to basement, days after her mother's death. I had told her nothing of Cuba, the years I spent playing baseball there. It was her mother, even through she had every reason to want to forget those years I spent in Cuba, who put those scrapbooks together, kept them tucked away where I couldn't get at them. It was only when she lay in a foggy shroud of pain killers near the end that she mentioned Cuba again, told me how proud she would have been if she could have seen me that last year. All I could do was squeeze her hand, a whispered thank you barely able to tear its way past my constricted throat.

After the discovery of the scrapbook, one thing led to another. Cassy especially liked a photo she found from those times of a farm boy struggling to lead a pack of plow horses. She had it framed and after I reluctantly told her who took it, she wrote repeatedly to Cuba, eager to locate more of this photographer's work. To my amazement, her efforts were rewarded.

        First came the letters, with stamps of orange-tipped butterflies and old generals. In a neat script, the photographer's daughter, Eván Fonseca, told a fantastic tale. One in which her mother, Malena Fonseca, and I were companions in that time before the revolution. She told my daughter that we should visit. How there were plenty of Americans down here. How she met them every day on the streets.

        To further convince us, she sent cheaply made books of her mother's works. Published in Spain and Mexico, they were filled with black-and-white photographs of Cuba before the revolution. Then came the volume simply entitled "Fidel." In flipping through the shots of the Cuban president, my Cassy came to a picture of me and my best friend at the time, Chuck Cochrane, and, standing between us, a boyish Fidel Castro. Yes, that Fidel Castro.

        He was so skinny back then. No bushy beard. Just a wisp of a beard that I remember he had only started to grow. At times he was so self-conscious and unsure of himself that he constantly covered his upper lip with his hands, looking more like a blushing teenager. Other times he was as brash as a school yard bully.

        In the photograph, all of us were smiling like fools in the bright mid-day sun. The caption said the picture was taken in 1947.

        Our plane banks and we begin our descent into Havana. Americans aren't legally permitted to enter Cuba. Back in Cancun, we had bribed who we hoped were the right people. We had been told repeatedly what to say, how to act, when we reached customs in Cuba. Sitting by the side of Mexicana Hilton pool, a gentle breeze sweeping in from the gulf, it had seemed so easy. But now, as I look again at my precious daughter, I worry that this trip will bring us only heartbreak and sorrow. When you're as old as I am, you can sense trouble coming from a long ways off. It is another curse of growing old. Often you can see the future, but nobody ever heeds your warnings.

        Around my neck, tucked inside my shirt, hangs a pouch with one thousand dollars in it. Another thousand dollars, also in small bills, is in my money belt, with the final thousand underneath Cassy's left armpit, riding in a shoulder holster contraption.

        Because Americans cannot draw on U.S. banks in Cuba, we won't be able to use credit cards or traveler's checks there. We plan on paying cash for everything.

        My daughter awakens and smiles at me.

        "You said you would tell me more about Cuba on flight," Cassy says, yawning.

        "But you fell asleep."

        "I'm awake now."

        She leans forward, looking past me out the window. "So that's Havana?" Cassy turns back to me, her eyes doing that sparkler thing they do, and I see the two of them in the kitchen, sitting knee to knee in chairs facing one another, their heads tilted forward, sharing some revelation or another. I should have pulled up a seat and joined them, but I chose the company of my regrets instead.

        I can't hold her gaze, so I turn toward the window and the skyscrapers and the patchwork of neighborhoods hugging the sea.

        "Yes. That's it."
        "Is it like you remember it?"

        "Who can tell from here, hon? Memories fade, places change."

        "Tell me about what it was like back then," she says, refusing to let me mire myself in gloom.

        "We're almost on the ground."

        "C'mon, Dad. We've got plenty of time."

        "Where to start?" I say, trying again to beg off. "It was so long ago."

        "Start at the beginning," Cassy tells me, refusing to let it drop.

      &#...

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345424417
• ISBN 13: 9780345424419
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286