Synopses & Reviews
In 1998, a mysterious right-handed pitcher emerged from the ashes of the Cold War and helped lead the New York Yankees to a World Championship. His origins and even his age were uncertain. His name was Orlando El Duque Hernandez. He was a fallen hero of Fidel Castro's socialist revolution.
The chronicle of El Duque's triumph is at once a window into the slow death of Cuban socialism and one of the most remarkable sports stories of all time. Once hailed as a paragon of Castro's revolution, the finest pitcher in modern Cuban history was banned from baseball for life for allegedly plotting to defect. Instead of accepting his punishment, he fearlessly fought back, defying the Communist party authorities, vowing to pitch again, and ultimately fleeing his country in the bowels of a thirty-foot fishing boat.
Here, for the first time and in astonishing detail, the secrets behind El Duque's persecution and escape are revealed. Moving from the crumbling streets of post Cold War Havana to the polarized world of exile Miami, from the deadly Florida Straits to the hallowed grounds of Yankee Stadium, it is a story of cloak-and-dagger adventure, audacious secret plots, the pull of big money, and the historic collision of ideologies.
Present throughout are the larger-than-life characters who converged at this bizarre intersection of baseball and politics: El Duque himself, Fidel Castro, the Miami sports agent Joe Cubas, the late John Cardinal O'Connor along with scouts, smugglers, and the Cuban ballplayers who gave up their lives as tools of socialism to test the free market and chase their major-league dreams.
Reported in the United States and Cuba by two award-winning journalists who became part of the story they were covering, The Duke of Havana is a riveting saga of sports, politics, liberation, and greed.
Review
"The best baseball book in years...is about so much more than baseball. While The Duke of Havana relates El Duque's remarkable escape from Cuba in scrupulous, dramatic detail (despite later suspicion, the boat story was essentially as Hernandez first described it), the book also examines life in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S.-Cuban relations, the Miami Cuban community and its influence on U.S. policy and agent Joe Cubas' occasionally shady negotiations with Cuban players. After a thorough, gripping account of El Duque's life in Cuba and with the Yankees, the book fittingly closes with a poignant debate among his friends about whether life was better in Cuba and whether the pitcher was more secure there. The answer, like so many things with El Duque, is not as simple as it first appears....Do yourself a favor. Buy "The Duke of Havana," even if it means delaying a purchase of your favorite team's weekend special alternate road cap. For the same price, you can buy yourself a ticket to an extraordinary land and a fascinating story. Jim Caple, ESPN.com
About the Author
Steve Fainaru is an investigative sportswriter for The Wash-ington Post. He was a reporter for The Boston Globe for eleven years, covering major-league baseball, Wall Street, and Latin America. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Ray Sanchez writes a column for Newsday, where he served four years as Latin America correspondent. He lives in New York City.