As published in the Cincinnati Tribune on June 23, 1911: The Reds have signed two players from the Connecticut league who have Spanish blood in their veins and are very dark skinned. As soon as the news spread that the Reds were negotiating for the Cubans a protest went up from the fans against introducing Cuban talent into the ranks of the major leagues.
Cuban baseball legend has it that when August Herrmann, the president and owner of the Cincinnati Reds, went to the train station to meet them, he gasped when he saw two young black men come out of the train, and that he even approached them first. But they were not the Cubans. The two Cubans had an escort who had brought them to Cincinnati, and he in turn approached and spoke to a shaky Herrmann, who then met the Cubans for the first time. Herrmann was pleased and relieved about their appearance. They were not, as it was incorrectly reported in the next day's paper, "small and swarthy in complexion," [but showed] "practically no effects of the tropical heat and sun." The Reds appeased the alarmed fans by assuring them that both of these players were of pure European blood. In fact, this was true, as according to Cuban sources and accounts of the times, Marsans was the son of Catalan immigrants to Cuba, and Almeida the son of Portuguese immigrants. This case of first generation Cubans was not that unusual in Cuba during the 1800s (both of them had been born in 1887) and even more after the Spanish-American War. The new nation had just achieved independence from Spain in 1898, and was in the midst of receiving large immigration waves from Europe. The large numbers of immigrants so alarmed native-born Cubans, that afraid that they would be outnumbered by European immigrants, Cuba severely curtailed immigration in the 1930s. In fact, according to Hugh Thomas, in the first decade of the 1900s alone, nearly 200,000 European immigrants arrived in Cuba. Considering that the 1899 census noted that there were around 1.5 million people in the island, this immigration wave, together with significant immigration by Chinese and Eastern European Jews in the 1920s, had a significant impact on Cuban society and ethnic diversity.
To make matters worse for Marsans and Almeida, it was customary with Cuban and other Latin American players, regardless of race, to play in the US Negro Leagues. In doing so, players could play year round: summer in the US and winter in Cuba. Both Marsans and Almeida had earlier played in the Negro Leagues.
Article comments
1 - danielle
hi ny name is danielle aka dani