Cuba & Venezuela: National Memory & The Magazine

[dbussell12]

This is going to be a bit of a long post but here it goes...

Thing that got me into this first were the 1967 Retirados. Young, Mathewson, Wagner; the mythic image of US baseball reflected back internationally in a baseball hotbed that began to claim baseball as a massive if not singular part of its own national identity. Sport Grafico having a significant involvement in producing these; debatable how much Topps was involved with the Retirados as opposed to the Venezuelan Topps cards of the mid century.

Fast forward to Sport Grafico taking this process into its own hands and fully printing and producing and mythologizing Venezuelan baseball in the 1970 Ovenca set, which includes 'Immortals' and contemporary legends like Aparicio and Colmenares -- hero of the 1941 series against the then undefeated Cubans. Important to note here that this Sport Grafico work is magazine based.

Here is the connecting throughline -- a similar process is occurring in Cuba in the early part of the mid-century through its biggest magazine --- Bohemia. What is interesting to observe in the case of the Cuban phenomenon as in the Venezuelan is the use of magazines as publications to remember the cultural foundations of the nation's baseball history. Much in the way of Grafico's reproduction of the early myth and foundation of its enshrined baseball history through the Ovenca and Retirado (Venezuelan greats published alongside US historical champions in the set) sets, you have Bohemia (and others I am sure, for now my focus has primarily been Bohemia) reprinting from original negatives and creating halftones from existing/remaining cultural documents a recovery of its national baseball history, all the way back to its founding age of baseball in the mid 1800s.




What I'm suggesting here is that the way that primary artifacts and linear narrative history through documents functions in the US is not the same in Venezuelan and Cuban baseball history --- primarily by way of the cultural, economic, and political differences which shape archival and recovery processes -- as well as cultural memory itself. The reproduction, or the retrospective by way of the magazine, is actually a critical and essential method in both Cuban and Venezuelan baseball history in order to codify (by way of remembering) tradition. The primary difference in my understanding is that Venezuelan cultural and collective memory did not undergo nearly the amount of seismic transformations and shifts that the Cuban memory did over the span of years Cuban baseball history necessarily encompasses -- going all the way back through revolutionary movements and political shakeups from the 1860s to the early and even mid 1900s.

Of course, the Cuban national and cultural memory of baseball in particular is critical. Here is the writeup I had simulated previously to begin to broach this topic in the forum:

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"Early Cuban Baseball History: I would like to start a thread here dedicated to early Cuban baseball history. Really would enjoy hearing peoples' perspectives on the 19th and early 20th century of Cuban baseball, particularly surrounding what I am understanding more and more to be the epicenter of the founding of the modern Negro Leagues through the Habana team and early black American participation in Cuban baseball. The key figure here is Rube Foster and his time in Cuba on Habana with Pete Hill and Home Run Johnson, among others. This was in the early 1900s. Decades before the YMCA meeting that would establish the American NL with Foster as lead.

I would love to hear more from other serious scholars or people who have given this deep thought. This thread to me weaves all the way back to the founding of what we might term modern baseball in Cuba with Nemesio Guillo Romaguera and his brother, shortly after Nemesio returned from the American South from a period of schooling; equipped with formative baseball knowledge. The revolutionary periods of early Cuban baseball history (literally, Cuban revolutions; figures like the more well known and remembered Emilio Sabourin) are crucial to global baseball history itself; as I have outlined above, modern American baseball history at large. Without the work done in Cuba, we would simply not have modern baseball; if we did, it would look very different than it does now."

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What we are talking about in regards to Cuban baseball history and archival information is nothing less than the process of recovery of the critical and fundamental underlying thread and foundation of Baseball history -- both global, national in terms of Cuba itself; national in terms of American -- as the throughline and thread which in large part set the stage for American integration and itself was the creation of integration in the hemisphere wherein America functioned as exclusionary and singular racially with the exception of several Cuban and Native American ballplayers.

To me, this integrative hotbed and permissiveness to create a competitive fabric of a multitude of demographics and ethnicities was itself the template for all that was to come; in this way you cannot truly have a deep and foundational history of baseball and baseball's modernity without a true, foundational understanding of how baseball emerged in Cuba; its cultural and political circumstances; how the memory of baseball functions therein. And in doing so, we have to radically overhaul our archival standards for how artifacts function and in which way. Artifacts that are based in 'rememory' (or, cultural and archival recovery of documents by way of 'new prints' [in photo language, Type 3s from magazine archives in the early 20th century], or 'retrospective cards' [such as the Ovenca set]) are not only critical but perhaps even more important than 'original/originary' historical documents. This is due to precisely how historical and cultural memory functions differently in different places and environments depending on what remains over time; how it remains and is preserved; how it returns into collective and contemporary cultural consciousness by the institutions (in this case, magazines, not monoliths).




I do not think yet we have a accurate understanding across the broad swath of baseball historians and archivists of just how important these documents are of global baseball consciousness and history/recollection; I am looking forward to the day that they are brought out into ever clearer light. I think as time passes we will come into a much, much deeper understanding of the importance of Cuba as the original ground of baseball's modernity (by modernity I mean integration -- of culture, values, nations; visions of the sport); Venezuela's more recent (as in the mid 20th century) adoption of baseball as something deeply akin to a national myth and mythos in its own right. And, accordingly, we will come to understand the importance of the magazines Sport Grafico, Bohemia; I'm sure, others -- that played and play a critical, crucial role in documenting, telling, retelling, and seating the national history into a mythos that through their documentation remains comprehensible today.

This will challenge our existing presumption that 'primary source' documents as in 'artifacts produced simultaneous with the historical moment they are referencing' are supremely important and tell the tale we are needing to know, hear, and understand. This has traditionally been the case in historical and curatorial lenses and frameworks dominated by a traditionally Western view and mode of history as linear and not recursive. The magazine mode of witnessing as retrospective and articulation of history through the lens of national celebration and pop cultural votive is essential to understanding the importance of documents that increasingly emerge into global and American consciousness through their import by way of immigration, shipping, and digital sharing across borders and cultural and political contexts. It is quite exciting; we are witnessing in real time the emergence of a far more globally articulate vision of what baseball is and means in terms of a history that is woven through multiplicitous threads: across cultural languages in which it was founded, established; translated.

The Cuban contribution, in particular, I simply cannot emphasize enough. We will come to understand in ever more high contrast detail just how essential Cuba and Cuban baseball history is and was to the modern American game in terms of integration; the founding of Foster's NL. I am very excited for that level of consciousness to come into being.





Cheers; thanks for reading. Please let me know your thoughts and your work, perspectives, and otherwise. This is fresh and fantastic terrain for our collective, international, intergenerational understanding of the global importance of baseball.

David