In 1986 I went to Nicaragua with a North American baseball team. The Sandinista government was in full flower at the time, which meant that there was almost nothing to be had in Nicaraguan markets; citizens stood in line for basic foodstuffs. Bulgarians, sent by the Soviet government, were offering rather leaden infrastructure assistance, in this case the building of a large cement-producing plant.
Cement interested the Nicaraguans, but baseball fueled our conversations. In one exchange, begun as our bus was passing the cement factory, a Nicaraguan passenger voiced his dismay at American foreign policy. The factory’s smokestacks despoiled an otherwise lovely view of the vernal countryside; the Nicaraguan gestured with his chin toward the factory, then pursed his lips and shook his head. “What do we have to do with Bulgarians?” he asked. “They wouldn’t recognize a baseball even if I handed them one.”
“You like baseball?” I asked.
“It’s the Nicaraguan national sport,” he said. “We love baseball.”
“Even though it was invented in the United States?”
A snicker went up from the Nicaraguans, all of them amused by this display of gringo naivety.
“Señor,” the fellow next to me said. “Baseball is a Central American game.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“The Indians were playing it here two thousand years ago.”
There was general agreement with this. My companion gestured toward the window. In the yard by a roadside farmhouse, a boy was tossing what appeared to be a sock filled with dirt at another boy, who swung at it with a broomstick.
“The Indians didn’t have a sock,” my neighbor said. “But they did have a stick.” We watched as the boys receded into the distance. “They had a kind of rubber ball.” The faraway smokestacks, obdurate Stalinist intrusions on the landscape, rose into the blue sky. “And they had some great pitchers.”
One of my companions on the trip was the novelist and journalist John Krich, who had himself written about baseball, most notably the Oakland Athletics. We were part of a group dedicated to baseball diplomacy, extending the hand of baseball friendship across the turbulent waters of political conflict. . . that sort of thing.
Personally I was there because I wanted to see what was really happening in Sandinista Nicaragua. It is a tiny country that, as far as I could tell, was then causing no particular problem to anyone, yet was being severely punished economically by the United States because of its overthrow of a murderous dictatorship.
The government of Anastasio Somoza had been most notable for robbing its citizenry of all the best land and business opportunities. It was Somoza’s private fiefdom and it quashed all political opposition by murdering and "disappearing" its opponents. Its most public thievery was of all the money that had been collected worldwide to aid Nicaraguan citizens after the terrible earthquake of 1972.
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