Cuba, Baseball and Hemingway
By Benjamin Goggins December 2 was a perfect day under the Cuban sun. My old friend Joe Kelley and I were in San Francisco de Paula (on a group trip) for a baseball game played on a storied field. In the light filtered through a wall of mango trees, with every crack of the commemorative Canadian-maple bats and pop of the gloves, you could hear Ernest Hemingway cheer the boys in his old front yard. We were in Cuba visiting the many places associated with Hemingway. We were at the Museo Hemingway, the Finca Vigia, on that particular day to see the annual Gigi All-Stars exhibition baseball game and celebration. We were there because we had read a very special book, The Homerun Kid: The True Story of Ernest Hemingway’s Baseball Team, by Oscar Blas Fernandez Mesa and Brian Gordon Sinclair. Mesa was the Homerun Kid; Sinclair, a Canadian, is[...]CONTINUE READING