From Baseball to Prison

Liz Balmaseda has an excellent editorial piece in yesterday's Palm Beach Post:

Ramon Vidal Fuentes keeps his favorite memories in an old spiral notebook. Its wrinkled pages transport him to the late 1940s, when he was a robust, young outfielder with the Havana Cubans baseball club.

There are photographs, yellowed clippings and handwritten captions attesting to his successes on the steamy fields of the class C Florida International League circuit, including the home field of the West Palm Beach Indians.

This is the only notebook he was able to salvage from his original collection of 14 such "albums" he had compiled in his native Luyano, Cuba. He picks it up often on quiet evenings at home now in West Palm Beach because he doesn't want to forget the details of the years spent touring American baseball towns in his proud Havana uniform.

The headlines of the era proclaimed him a terrific slugger, an athlete of some promise. And then, after a sepia barrage of baseball agate, there's nothing, only blank lined pages. That's because what came after baseball in Vidal Fuentes' life cannot be categorized as cherished memories.

What came after baseball was a hellish tour of Fidel Castro's political prisons, years spent in cramped, disease-ridden dungeons, punishment cells and forced labor camps.

Read the whole harrowing story here.

Posted by Val Prieto at September 5, 2006 07:29 AM

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Posted by: George L. Moneo at September 5, 2006 08:43 AM

Posted by: Firefly at September 5, 2006 10:10 AM

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