Foul ball: How a communist dictatorship and a U.S. embargo has silenced a Cuban historian.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Severo Nieto

GEORGE W. BUSH would love to be the president who finally topples the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. He also probably wouldn't mind winning Florida by a somewhat more comfortable margin in 2004, or seeing his brother Jeb get re-elected governor this November.

With these goals as a backdrop, the Bush administration launched a crackdown last July on Americans who have the bad manners to spend money in Cuba--766 unlucky travelers were fined up to $7,500 for violating the Trading With the Enemy Act in 2001, up from just 188 during Bill Clinton's final year as president. By punishing a tiny fraction of the estimated 200,000-plus Americans who visit the communist island each year, Bush hopes to inflict some kind of indirect damage on the septuagenarian tyrant who has confounded no fewer than eight of his previous U.S. counterparts.

Which brings us to the revered Cuban baseball historian Severo Nieto. Nieto is certainly among the most peculiar and unsung victims of the long standoff between the U.S. and the Castro regime. While perhaps less spectacular and certainly less harrowing than many tales of repression emanating from Cuba, Nieto's story brings to light a sad and often unexamined effect not just of Castro's tyranny but of American policy: how the U.S. embargo, whatever its intention, starves both sides of meaningful and important communication.

The apolitical Nieto, who is a few years El Jefe's senior, basically invented Cuban baseball research in 1955 when he co-authored the country's first-ever baseball encyclopedia, laboriously reconstructing the statistical record of the professional league's first 78 years out of a mountain of newspaper clippings, program scraps, and his own scorecards. Since that dramatic debut, Nieto's been on one of the longest losing streaks in modern publishing history. He has spent a half-century documenting Cuba's tremendously rich professional past in more than a dozen books, but not a single one has been published in any country.

"I tried several times," Nieto told me in his cluttered Havana apartment four years ago, "but they say it's difficult now in Cuba because we don't have any paper." Castro, of course, has been overseeing one of the world's most politically selective paper shortages for decades, reserving precious pulp for odes to Cuba's famed amateur athletic accomplishments while rejecting books that glorify anything about the pre-revolution era.

Cubans aren't the only ones who suffer from this revisionist white-washing. Americans want access to the archives, because the history of the two countries' professional development is closely intertwined. Indeed, the story of the U.S. national pastime is inextricably linked to Cuba.

Long before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier (after the Dodgers' 1947 spring training in Havana, incidentally), Cuba was the only place where the best white major leaguers--Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth--played against some of the top black talent of their era. The U.S. Negro Leagues were stocked with Cubans such as Martin Dihigo (a Hall of Famer in four separate countries), and black American stars from Josh Gibson to James "Cool Papa" Bell to Buck Leonard, who spent their winters starring in the competitive winter league in Havana.

In the tumultuous 1950s, the Cuban Sugar Kings served as the AAA affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds in the summer, while winter-league fans could watch the likes of Brooks Robinson and Jim Bunning duke it out with Cuban stars Minnie Minoso and Camio Pascual. American scouts, led by Papa Joe Cambria of the woeful and heavily Cuban Washington Senators, fought over a talent pool that would produce many of the names that defined 1960s and '70s Major League Baseball--Hall of Famer Tony Perez, three-time batting...