Sugar-white beaches, swaying palm trees and a tropical climate greeted the boys and their chaperons. Never mind, it was December.
It was Havana.
Cuba in the pre- Castro 1950s was the tourist mecca and baseball hub of the Caribbean. It would be the site of a week of baseball for a not-so ragtag group of "all- stars,'' ages 10-12.
On this first trip, how could they know they would be among the last American goodwill ambassadors to the island?
Andrew Espolita, the local baseball genius of the day, assembled these "very good players'' to participate in an exchange program with Cuban baseball players, who would visit and play in Tampa in the summers.
Espolita, 92, organized youth baseball games at Cuscaden Park in Ybor City, where he was recreation director. The former player and Nicaraguan National Team manager coached a dozen teams at a time before the days of Little League.
This is where the boys from Central Tampa learned organized baseball, eight to 10 hours a day, as it had been learned by Espolita, who was like a second father to the boys when they were at the ball park, said Charlie Miranda.
Buck DeLaTorre shows off the black- and-white photos pressed between plastic pages of a scrapbook. The smiling boys in his company included, among others, a future high school baseball coach named Frank Permuy, future City Council member Miranda and a future big-league player and manager named Tony LaRussa. At 9, he was the youngest, but best shortstop, of the group.
The boys' parents entrusted them to Espolita and the male chaperons from the Ybor City Optimists Club who arranged the exchange program.
AS FOR WINS and losses, memories get a little foggy. That first year, they were 3-3, although Miranda recalls with certainty the Cubans were older, more accomplished players, some of whom "even shaved'' he said.
The first trip in 1954 was the first airplane flight any of the boys had taken. DeLaTorre can still hear the whir of the propellers.
This still was a Cuba of wealth and excess, where the boys were treated "like royalty.''
There were palace tours, banquets arranged in their honor and visits to country clubs with swimming pools and jai alai courts.
Miranda stayed with the president of the Havana Optimists in a hilltop villa with marble floors, a lavishness he was unaccustomed to in Ybor City.
In this competitive baseball environment, even when it involved youngsters, the stadium was packed. They felt like big- leaguers.
By 1956, soldiers with ammunition belts strapped across their chests lined the streets and there was fighting in the mountains. The team was detained several days because National Airlines wouldn't fly into Cuba. Finally they were out and it was ended.
The boys knew nothing of political strife, rebel forces or coups. What did any of that have to do with playing baseball?
Some of the boys wrote letters to their Cuban buddies; soon that ended, too. No one recalls that any of the Cuban players made it to the states as a big-league ball player, though Espolita recalls that one of them became a Tampa banker.
On occasion, they get together. Baseball circles don't grow old, only bigger.
THE SALADINO BASEBALL Tournament is the best time for reunions made possible at the annual Old Timers' Day.
There in 2001, Espolita carried a worn manila envelope and carefully extracted faded photographs from days when baseball was played with no other thought in mind than hitting the next pitch or fielding the next hit. DeLaTorre was there, too, with scrapbooks in hand.
They traded the same stories they have for 20 years. About that first plane trip, about skinny, little Tony LaRussa, the lanky first baseman Permuy, the hot bat of John Palmieri, Paul Ferlita letting nothing past third base, Red Alonso shoring up the middle and Billy Vargas or DeLaTorre behind the plate.
For a few hours, they still are 12-year-old boys whose nemesis was the sunset.
Not-so-old-timers like Permuy say he owes all his baseball knowledge to Espolita, and to the experiences he had playing against boys who shared a similar love of the game, whether they came from Ybor City or Havana, Cuba.
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