Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball

Rating:
Summary: Baseball in Cuba
Review: "Smoke" should not be your only book on Cuban baseball. Nonetheless, it's a wonderful book. It's a comprehensive look at baseball in Cuba. The pictures are astonishing. I just returned from a short stay in Cuba. Cubans I met were transfixed by this book, so compelled were they by the pictures of their athlete-heroes. The text by Bjarkman, an expert on Latin-American baseball who has written widely on the subject, is a bit repetitive but on the whole lively and informative. The book badly needs an index. I gave my copy to a (most grateful) Cuban friend and have purchased another. It's a book I would give to any of my friends who enjoy the game in its international dimension.

Rating:
Summary: Baseball in Cuba
Review: "Smoke" should not be your only book on Cuban baseball. Nonetheless, it's a wonderful book. It's a comprehensive look at baseball in Cuba. The pictures are astonishing. I just returned from a short stay in Cuba. Cubans I met were transfixed by this book, so compelled were they by the pictures of their athlete-heroes. The text by Bjarkman, an expert on Latin-American baseball who has written widely on the subject, is a bit repetitive but on the whole lively and informative. The book badly needs an index. I gave my copy to a (most grateful) Cuban friend and have purchased another. It's a book I would give to any of my friends who enjoy the game in its international dimension.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best ever baseball books I read...
Review: ?Este libro es un jonr?n soberbio! (In Spanish: This book is a superb HR!)
From the introduction of "beisbol" into Cuba until the "socialization" of the ball passing over the glories of the Almendares Alacranes and the Havana Leones, the book comprises very well without forgetting any thing.
Very well elected photos to illustrated the stuff and a quase-novelesque prose to follow a rich baseball history like the Cuban ball.

I regarded SMOKE as a pearl in my particular library.

Rating:
Summary: A "must" for baseball fans & students of Cuban pop culture.
Review: Mark Rucker and Peter Bjarkman's Smoke...is a special title covering the lore of Cuban baseball. The history of Cuban baseball is revealed in a fine gathering of photos and stories which covers the sport in Cuba from its introduction in the late 1800s to its pioneer players. Packed with vintage and beautiful color photos throughout, this is an exceptional title for any baseball fan or student of Cuban popular culture.

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Summary: Highest Praise from SCD
Review: Reviewer Richard Miller in the January 21 issue of "Sports Collectors Digest" finds SMOKE one of the year's most remarkable baseball books. For Miller: "SMOKE is visual, visceral energy. The text is more like extended cutlines to describe the myriad of photos, sepia, black-and-white, color, that fill every page, often with all three hues on the same page. Every angle of Cuban baseball is explored - its origins and pioneers, Cuban stars who played in the US major leagues, early barnstorming tours that took the likes of Babe Ruth and Christy Mathewson to Cuba. The dilemmas of racial identity are seen as light-skinned Adolfo Luque was welcomed to the North American Majors, while dark-skinned Martin Dihigo, considered by many the greatest of all Cuban ballplayers, was barred. Statistical records span nearly 120 years with never-before-available data from Cuban competition for the years 1962-1998 (even Fidel Castro's short-lived pitching career receives its due). Rarely does a baseball book offer so much new information to a new audience (American fans) in such superb fashion."

Rating:
Summary: What a delight!
Review: SMOKE has received glowing reviews in almost all quarters. Richard Miller writes in Sports Collectors Digest that "rarely does a baseball book offer so much new information to a new audience (American fans) in such superb fashion" (1-21-00). LA Times reviewer Kevin Baxter praises the book's "warm and vivid picture of Cuba's 125-year-old love affair with America's pastime" and calls the volume "a fan-friendly Ciff's Notes version-brightly written and breezy, but still managing to hit all the high points" (9-23-99). Most significantly, El Nuevo Herald (the Spanish-language version of the Miami Herald)-often an uncompromising voice for Cuban-American anti-Castro sentiments-is lavish in its praise of SMOKE as "perhaps the most groundbreaking book on the history of Cuban baseball" (11-8-99) and touts the work for avoiding the "politicization" which weakens other Cuban baseball histories and also for giving equal voice to the stories of both pre-revolution and post-revolution baseball on the island.

Not surprisingly, however, even an unpolitical book will (like Elian Gonzalez) become a political "football" when Cuba is the subject of inquiry. Some of SMOKE's recent on-line reviewers, voicing a Miami-based Cuban-exile viewpoint which still finds anathema in any and all positive words about everything found in post-revolutionary Cuba, have taken to the internet to blast our book as insulting to the American-Cuban community because it does not find fault with Castro's purported human rights violations, and also to blast the book's authors as "knowing nothing about Cuba or its history."

It is our contention that potential readers of SMOKE would be well-warned to approach such off-target "reviews" in the context in which they are written. Yes, there are a small handful of typographical flaws in this book as in every other, and we are admittedly not at all shy about lavishly praising contemporary Cuban baseball as the refreshing and entertaining spectacle we have experienced it to be. Our book's considerable value and strong reception is best measured, perhaps, by the fact that SMOKE has been nominated for each and every one of this year's top literary awards in the field of baseball history: Spitball magazine's prestigious CASEY AWARD (finalist), The Sporting News-Society for American Baseball Research Award (finalist), The HAROLD SEYMOUR MEDAL (finalist), and the Davey Moore Baseball Literature Award (Honorable Mention). And Miami's Nuevo Herald found the book so meritorious that it ran an eight-week Spanish-language serialization during the months of November, December and January.

The charge that the book's authors know nothing about Cuba or the Cuban baseball scene is also quickly belied by the strong and enthusiastic reception of SMOKE in Cuba itself-among baseball officials, old-time dedicated baseball fans who are in touch with both the pre- and post-revolution Cuban League scene, the Cuban sporting press, and the dedicated "aficionados" in Havana's Parque Central who are the self-appointed caretakers of the island's grand baseball tradition. The book has been praised in the pages of GRANMA (the official government press) even though it has taken the bold step (not favored in many Cuban government circles) of carrying photos and relating accounts of the careers of players like "El Duque" Hernandez and Livan Hernandez who have subsequently fled the island for major league careers.

Contrary to nostalgia-based popular opinion found in some quarters of the Miami Cuban-exile community, baseball did NOT reach a final "golden age" in Cuba during the decades of the forties and fifties. In truth the sport was dying on the island in those mid-century decades (as it also was in the US, in the face of decade-long New York Yankees domination and the early advent of televised games). Havana's ballparks were half-empty for Cuban winter league games throughout the '50s and the AAA Sugar Kings ('54-'60) unsuccessfully begged for fans. More importantly, there was no Cuban national baseball whatsoever before the revolution; professional baseball on the island during the century's first six decades was strictly a limited Havana affair. And the amateur leagues of that era were unexceptionally reserved for white players only.

For all its other possible disastrous consequences, the revolution of 1959 launched a truly national baseball league on the island, revived waning fan enthusiasm, and opened some of Cuban baseball's most glorious chapters. Those chapters, as well as the ones that preceded, are more vividly recounted in both photos and text in SMOKE than in any other Cuban baseball history. We have also salvaged a photographic record of Cuban baseball that is slowly but surely being ravaged and destroyed by the passage of time and the existing economic conditions on the island. Open the pages of this book and step into any epoch of Cuban baseball you might chose. Be enthralled by the full-color imagery that is almost as lively as the island's national pastime itself. This is one book, we believe, that truly can be judged by its cover.

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Summary: ITS ABOUT TIME
Review: The controversial book about Cuban beisbol is a hit with me. I am the grandson of a cuban baseball player. (NO MY GRAND-FATHER IS NOT MARTIN DIHGO) My grandfather was Strike Gonzalez. As my father use to tell me he was the best in his time. I am glad a book like this was published. Not because I hate Fidel or love him. Just because its about CUBAN BEISBOL. This sport means so much to our people that it is refreshing to live in the states and find such a book. Good job.

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Summary: "Baseball America" Gives Kudos
Review: Writing in the April 17, 2000 issue of "Baseball America" Kevin Baxter reviews his choices for the top three books on Cuban baseball - Milton Jamail's "Full Count" plus S.I. Price's "Pitching Around Fidel" and Rucker and Bjarkman's "Smoke". Regarding "Smoke" Baxter writes the following:

"Peter Bjarkman's lively 'Smoke' takes us back 125 years to the origins of the sport on the island. Though the book, which was released last fall, tills much of the same ground plowed months earlier by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria's authoritative 'The Pride of Havana,' Bjarkman's writing is far more accessible - and enjoyable - that Gonzalez's dense, academic style.

"Bjarkman moves quickly through the history, stopping to examine the first legends of Cuban baseball, the postwar Golden Age of baseball on the island, and the post-revolution era, in which sport became a weapon in the Cold War. The text is accompanied by more than 200 rare photographs collected by famed baseball archivist Mark Rucker, and a comprehensive collection of statistics from Cuban League play, both before and after the revolution. By its very scope 'Smoke' is necessarily less detailed than Jamail's book. But as both an introduction to and a photographic history of Cuban baseball, it stands unequalled."