Counterartifactuals

[eclectic_boy]

Because sometimes an urban legend is just too good to remain a legend. And because some things just seem like a good idea at the time... especially if the time is 2AM... and then 3AM... and then 4AM.

Comments

[god-of-belac.livejournal.com]

Have you read Castro's Curveball?

It's a very funny baseball book, about the Cuban baseball league in the last year before the Revolution. The narrator is an American, playing there on Fidel Castro's team.

[q10.livejournal.com]

you'd already explained the idea to me, which must have diminished the impact a bit, but i'm still in awe.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

There was an issue of Asimov's sometime in the 1995-01 window or so (roughly when I had a subscription) with two different alternate history stories about Castro's baseball career in the same issue. At least, I think they were the same issue; I know there were two different stories. Durned if I could get you a citation easily, though.

... ok, the Internet has everything. Almost:

[discussion of a panel at WorldCon '94 about alternate histories] Buchanan also mentioned Benford's Hitler Victorious, which reminded Grant that there was a recent issue of Asimov's which ran not one, but two, stories about alternate worlds in which Fidel Castro became a baseball player.

Which doesn't explain why I remember reading an issue of Asimov's from several years before I had a subscription, unless Gardner pulled this stunt twice....

Nope, it was definitely in 1993:

I'm not sure just why they showed up in the August 1993 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, but there they were: two short stories revolving around the "what-if-Fidel-Castro-had-been-signed?" question.

John Kessel's "The Franchise" (Fidel in the title role) is a marvelous and mischievous mix of fact and fantasy, which is hard to put down (it stretches over 30 small-print pages.) Before it's over, we are fascinated by being inside the head of Washington Senator first baseman George Bush, and once again looking over the shoulder of Richard Nixon. There are no robots or aliens, so this is really more fan-tasy than sci-fi.

Fidel is in uniform again in "Southpaw," by Bruce McAllister. This time it's Desi Arnaz (and Lucy) in the lineup, and as long as you have the magazine, give it a shot. (It's just 10 pages, and I found myself feeling like that was enough.)

Break up your re-entry into reality by looking up an oldie by Myron Cope, Broken Cigars, in which he interviews Don Hoak, who claimed to have actually batted against Castro in a winter league!

Color me confused. Andrea must have had it laying around? I don't know!

'tain't true

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

However fun it is to play with the idea (and those Howard-Waldrop-esque stories sound excellent), there doesn't seem to be much to the Castro-as-promising-player legend.

Snopes.com (http://www.snopes.com/sports/baseball/castro.asp) quotes Yale professor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria's history of Cuban baseball:

I have written a book that I hope will correct some of the views Americans and others have of Cuban baseball. To me, the most vexing example of how lightly and condescendingly the history of Latin baseball is dealt with in the United States involves a story about Fidel Castro that I would like to set straight here once and for all. Every time I mentioned that I was writing a book about Cuban baseball, the first thing Americans said had to do with Fidel's (which is how we Cubans call him, never "Castro") alleged prowess in the sport, and the irony that, had he been signed by the Senators or the Giants, there would have been no Cuban Revolution. The whole thing is a fabrication by an American journalist whose name is now lost, and it is never told in Cuba because everyone would know it to be false. Let it be known here that Fidel Castro was never scouted by any major-league team, and is not known to have enjoyed the kind of success in baseball that could have brought a scout's attention to him. In a country where sports coverage was broad and thorough, in a city such as Havana with a half-dozen major newspapers (plus dozens of minor ones) and with organized leagues at all levels, there is no record that Fidel Castro ever played, much less starred, on any team. No one has produced even one team picture with Fidel Castro in it. I have found the box score of an intramural game played between the Law and the Business Schools at the University of Havana where a certain F. Castro pitched and lost, 5-4, in late November 1946; this is likely to be the only published box score in which the future dictator appears (El Mundo, November 28, 1946). Cubans know that Fidel Castro was no ballplayer, though he dressed himself in the uniform of a spurious, tongue-in-cheek team called Barbudos (Bearded Ones) after he came to power in 1959 and played a few exhibition games. There was no doubt then about his making any team in Cuba. Given a whole country to toy with, Fidel Castro realized the dream of most middle-aged Cuban men by pulling on a uniform and "playing" a few innings.