JUAN O. TAMAYO
             Herald Staff Writer

             HAVANA -- Forget the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis and the U.S. embargo
             against Cuba. The Baltimore Orioles are coming to town, and baseball fans here
             want to see a real war.

             ``We want their best pitchers, and we want them to throw fire,'' said banker
             Ramon Jimenez, 48, one of the dozens of fanatics who gather most afternoons in a
             corner of Havana's Central Park to argue baseball.

             The number soared to 300 the day after the Communist Party's Granma
             newspaper announced last week that a Cuban team will host the Orioles on March
             28, making Baltimore the first major league team to play here in 40 years.

             Even for Cubans -- not known for the moderate tone of their debates -- the
             decibel level was high as swirling knots of diehard baseball fanatics engaged in
             feisty arguments over such arcane details as the difference between wood and
             aluminum bats, dead balls, the big-hitting Americans and the speedy Cuban
             fielders.

             ``Pelota, not politics,'' said Felix Sansirena, 64. Pelota is Spanish for ball and
             Cuban for baseball, the national passion that Yankee troops, sugar mill owners
             and missionaries brought here more than a century ago.

             The biggest worry of the Cuban fans is that the game won't be a real contest.

             They don't want to see some anemic exhibition game. They don't want the Orioles'
             manager protecting his stars, or the million-dollar players saving their arms or
             hamstrings for the regular season that begins next month.

             And they didn't particularly like the announcement in Granma on Friday that the
             Cuban team would be ``a selection'' of top players, not necessarily the national
             team that has dominated international amateur play for decades.

             Fans say they want a hard-fought game, one that will give them a hint of just how
             Cuban players, so long isolated from the top ranks of the sport, stack up against
             the American major leaguers.

             Confidence in talent

             Cuba has the raw talent, they know.

             ``We're a quarry for great players, but we don't have the machinery for developing
             them from AA to AAA and eventually the major league,'' high school math teacher
             Andres Palacio said.

             ``Our selection right now is only a Triple-A team. We have not touched major
             league levels in 40 years, and we've stagnated,'' lamented Miguel Angel Ramirez,
             66, dean of the fanatics who gather at the Central Park's ``Esquina Caliente'' -- the
             hot corner, also slang for third base.

             A former umpire, Ramirez still carries everywhere he goes an English-language
             copy of major league rules that he calls his mataburros -- donkey killer -- and uses
             to slap down anyone who challenges his calls.

             Fans reacted with puzzled concern when Granma reported Friday that Cuban
             teams would shift from aluminum to wood bats this week to prepare for the
             Orioles, ``if the game is held, if there is no last-minute obstacle.''

             Sandy Alderson, operations vice president for U.S. Major League Baseball,
             arrived in Havana on Thursday to arrange for ESPN's broadcast of the game and
             ensure that the stadium has safety padding to protect the players. But Orioles and
             Cuban officials have said the game is all but certain.

             Rematch in the works

             Another Orioles-Cuba game is supposed to be played in Baltimore at a date yet to
             be decided -- probably shortly before the U.S. season opens.

             Cubans usually pay two pesos (about 10 U.S. cents) for box seats and one peso
             (five cents) for the upper decks at baseball games, in a country where the monthly
             salary last year was 217 pesos -- $10.85. The prices would equal $22 and $11 in
             a country with an average annual salary of $30,000.

             But fans know that tickets for the Orioles game will be as hard to find as a
             late-model car in Havana, and many said they are already trying to resolver --
             Cuban slang for resolving a problem, usually involving a fair amount of illicit
             activities and trading favors with well-placed friends.

             As one man shouted from a knot of arguing fans at the Esquina Caliente, ``This is
             free enterprise now.''

             The issue of how profits from the games should be spent held up U.S. government
             approval for weeks, with Washington insisting that no money go to the Cuban
             government and Havana pushing to donate the take to victims of Hurricane Mitch
             in Central America.

             A compromise was finally reached last weekend -- the money will be used to
             promote sports activities -- and Havana has since been abuzz with talk of the big
             leaguers who are coming to town.

             Interest never waned

             It's hard to understand how Cuban fans have kept up their enthusiasm over the last
             several decades for American baseball games that are all but ignored by their
             government-monopolized media.

             Granma publishes a few reports on the National Basketball Association but almost
             nothing on U.S. baseball -- a few paragraphs on Mark McGwire home runs, zero
             on the exploits of half-brother defectors Livan and Orlando ``El Duque''
             Hernandez.

             For now, Cuban fans are mostly debating the impact of their shift away from the
             aluminum bats they have used since 1977 to wooden bats, not only for the Orioles
             but because of changes in international amateur rules.

             Wooden bats break, and fans say that Cuba has simply been too poor to produce
             or buy the thousands of wooden bats, at $50 to $400 apiece, that its players
             would need in just one season.

             But aluminum bats have brought their own problems, ``and I'm not even talking
             about that awful noise they make,'' said one fan at the Hot Corner.

             Because aluminum bats on average hit the ball some 40 feet farther than wooden
             bats, Cuban baseball authorities decided about four years ago to use a less lively
             ball to keep home runs down and game scores tighter.

             Fewer home runs hit

             Cuba's best hitting team this year, Isla de la Juventud, hit only 58 home runs with
             more than 4,000 regular-season at bats, said Carlos Yera, a 29-year-old
             accountant. McGwire hit 70 with fewer than 600 at-bats.

             But the combination of aluminum bats and dead balls has its good side, too, Yera
             argued. More ground balls have sharpened the defensive skills of Cuban infielders,
             now considered the best in the world.

             ``The Cuban players have shorter reaction times, so our defense will be good
             against the Orioles,'' Yera said.

             In the long run, however, the top worry among Cuban baseball fans is that the
             Orioles game will be just that -- one game, an exhilarating but brief moment that
             will not lead to regular U.S.-Cuba baseball competitions.

             Said Jimenez, the banker, ``We have a saying for that here: It would leave the
             honey on the tip of the tongue.''
 

                               Copyright © 1999 The Miami Herald