Early baseball in Cuba/Club 1
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| Spread of baseball: Home -> Cuba -> Early baseball in Cuba/Club 1 |
| Location | Cuba |
|---|---|
| Year | 1868 |
| City | Havana |
| Country | Cuba |
| Nickname | Havana Base Ball Club |
| First in Cuba | Yes |
"Baseball thus appeared in Cuba as early as the end of the U.S. Civil War and was thriving there only a few years later. Bats, balls, leather gloves, and rules for playing the new North American pastime were first carried to Havana by a pair of brothers, Nemesio and Ernesto Guillo . . . when the teenagers returned from a half-decade of high schooling at Alabama's Spring Hill College in 1864. Within mere days they were organizing rudimentary contests . . . in downtown Havana. Less than four years later, the Guillo brothers . . . had formed the Havana Base Ball Club."
Peter C. Bjarkman, Diamonds Around the Globe (Greenwood Press, 2005), page 2. A key source for this story is an interview with one of the brothers in Diaro de la Marina, January 6, 1924.
Eric Ender's "Timeline of International Baseball, at ericenders.com, notes that in December 1878, "the first baseball league outside the United States is formed on Havana." [League profits were reportedly used to support an independent Cuba, leading Spain to briefly ban baseball on the island.]
