As Roberto Gonzalez Echavarria eloquently discusses in his book The Pride of Havana), Cuban baseball was curiously integrated at the professional level while being racially segregated at the amateur level. The image to the left says it all: It is the 1914 amateur team of the Central Soledad, a sugar mill plant near Guantanamo. The vast majority of Central Soledad's people were black Cubans, many of Jamaican and Haitian ancestry, and yet not one black man is represented in the team.
The Cuban baseball racial paradox is perhaps inexplicable to Americans, but made perfect sense in the racist Cuban society of the 20th century, which even allowed a President of mixed blood (the tyrant Fulgencio Batista) to take over the government in 1933, and yet refused him membership into the Havana Yacht Club, which only allowed white members.
But in professional Cuban baseball, black and white Cuban players, together with black and white professional American players and newscasters, as well as visiting US Major League teams, played in curious indifference to the racial division of baseball in the United States, and clearly showed Americans that black players - both Cuban and American - could play on an equal level to the MLB visitors.
Roberto Estalella was a handsome, powerful man, and his muscular appearance earned him the nickname "Tarzan."
He was also a man of evident African features, who in Cuba would not have been called black, but perhaps mulatto, or in the Cuban slang "jabao," which is the equivalent of the term "high yellow" used by African Americans to describe a light skinned person with some African ancestry, although in Cuba, "jabao" is not a pejorative or derogatory term.
Estalella's professional US career started with Albany in 1934 and then he played for nine seasons with the Washington Senators and the Philadelphia A's and also for other Minor League teams in the Deep South (he played for Charlotte and he also led the Piedmont League in batting two years in a row in 1937 and 1938). He would have played many more years, but he was one of the players fined by MLB for his part in the Mexican League fiasco of the 1940s.
What tribulations Estalella must have endured! He was no blue-eyed Luque, able to blend in visually, and certainly in the Deep South, no one was fooled by the owners' claim that Estalella was not black but Cuban. But the spectacular deception worked, at least on paper, and this talented athlete thus became the first man of recognizable African ancestry to play Major League Baseball in the US. Were there players before Estalella who had some African blood? Probably, as race mixing was not a unique Cuban phenomenon, and there are many instances of "white" American players with African features being passed as "Indian" and being abused by fans and other players (in fact, recent DNA studies show that as many as 50 million white Americans have a black ancestor in their family tree).
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