Rafael D. Almeida was a Major League Baseball third baseman with the Cincinnati Reds (1911-13). 77 hits and 3 home runs in 3 MLB seasons. Almeida and Armando Marsans debuted together with the Reds on July 4, 1911. They are sometimes named the first major league players born in Cuba, although that is incorrect.
Six years before Cincinnati, Almeida and Marsans both played "Negro baseball" in the United States as 1905 members of the integrated All Cubans. Almeida played winter baseball in the Cuban League from 1904 to 1925 and was one of ten players elected to the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame in its 1939 inaugural class.
From Almeida's SABR biography: “Wish we had him. He is not colored.”
Those were the words that Frank Bancroft, the Cincinnati Reds’ business manager, wrote to team president and National Commission Chairman Garry Herrmann in 1911 about Rafael Almeida. The Reds were in the midst of acquiring Almeida and fellow Cuban player Armando Marsans, and, as the first two Cubans to play major-league baseball, their signings marked a significant milestone in terms of who could participate in white Organized Baseball at its top level. However, as evidenced in Bancroft’s letter, Almeida’s presence on the Reds roused the suspicions of the league’s white-supremacist gatekeepers, and questions of his perceived skin color and racial background dominated much of his short playing career in the National League.
Anticipating the intense suspicion regarding Almeida’s racial background, Bancroft and the Reds issued a barrage of letters and press insisting on his whiteness. The club called the players “pure Spaniards, without a trace of colored blood,” but the most infamous of justifications came via the pen of the Cincinnati Enquirer: The two Cubans were of “a noble Spanish race, with no ignoble African blood to place a blot or spot on their escutcheons. Permit me to introduce two of the purest bars of Castilian soap that ever floated to these shores.”
Jack Ryder, the Reds beat writer near the start of his 30-year career with the Enquirer, continued to relay Almeida’s performance and the Reds fans’ reactions to his play. In a characteristic column, Ryder wrote of Almeida’s “timely hitting” as a “great [factor] in the Reds’ success” that day, driving in the two winning runs. A few lines below, he captured the crowd’s feelings and alluded to Almeida’s purported racial makeup: “Almeida was greeted with rousing cheers from the populace and responded by doffing his cap in a polite Castilian manner as he left the field. His double was one of the longest and hardest hits of the day and came just when it was most needed to give the Reds the edge on the contest.”
This sort of writing is emblematic of how many tied Almeida’s skill to his perceived white professionalism and class background, a theme common with Latino players in the pre-Jackie Robinson era. Ryder directly linked Almeida’s good performance, his favor among the Cincinnati faithful, and his “Castilian manner,” an important schema of thought for those invested in upholding the color line. When faced with the prospect of those who didn’t fit the black/white binary upon which the segregated major leagues were built, it became vital for those white gatekeepers to engage in the rhetorical whitening of those players. Rafael Almeida’s major-league experiences are an important piece in the story of Cubans gaining entry — or failing to gain entry — to white Organized Baseball in the United States.
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