The Cuba Diaries: A 56-Year-Old Batboy Shares His Story

Editor's Note: VICE Sports senior staff writer Jorge Arangure Jr. recently went on a reporting trip to Cuba. "The Cuba Diaries" series is a collection of his stories while exploring the country. Click here to catch up on previous installments.

It is surprisingly quiet and peaceful inside Estadio Latinoamericano in the hours before Havana's Industriales play. Later, the stadium will get loud and rowdy, but not now. Now I can hear the maintenance crew in the stands picking up trash. If I listen carefully enough, I can also make out cars and trucks rumbling outside past the stadium.

In the U.S. there is always some kind of commotion at sports venues prior to a game; either the sound of stadium workers preparing the concession stands; or beer kegs loudly rolling to their destinations; or luxury suite attendants planning out how they will seat the VIPs when they arrive. It's never totally quiet.

Here there are no beer kegs because alcohol is not sold inside stadiums. There is no VIP section because everybody purchases the same ticket. Seating is first come, first serve. Socialism indeed.

INDER—Cuba's national sports federation, or the Instituto Nacional de Deportes, Educación Física, y la Recreación—has granted me all access to Estadio Latinoamericano prior to this game, although it seems one hardly needs permission to enter.

If you look confident, appear to know what you're doing, and are carrying some kind of reporter equipment—perhaps a recorder, or camera—you could probably walk into the stadium without a problem. Nobody asks me if I'm supposed to be there. I just walk right in.

No autograph seekers are waiting by the team entrances, and I wonder if this is because of the politics. A different form of idolatry exists here. No one is going to sell an Industriales autograph on eBay. No one is going to bring a binder full of baseball cards to get signed. No one is going to get their official team jersey signed because so few people even own jerseys.

The crowd usually arrives right at game time or later because most everyone is at work. So for now, the stadium, the field, all of it, is all there for me—and really, as the only reporter, only me.

The first person I see on the field is an aged man in full uniform, and at first I assume he's a coach. But he soon starts to pick up bats and place them inside the dugout. Afterward, he tends to the dugout to make sure it is ready for when the players come out for batting practice. The man turns around and I see the initials "C.B." (carga bates) on the back. He is the batboy, or batman, or however you want to refer to someone of adult age handling the duties usually given to a kid.

Adult batboys are common in Latin America. You will see them in the Dominican winter league, among other places. Some are considered unofficial mascots. Many times, these adult batboys started hanging around the team as kids and then never left.

But even so, this man seems older than most. He could be somebody's grandfather. His face is wrinkled and his body is hunched in a way that happens after years of bad posture from too much time in a dugout.

I approach him and inquire about the nature of his job. And he tells me about how at age 56, he is the batboy for the most storied team in Cuba.

Fidel Ramirez Coll was born and raised in the Guanabacoa neighborhood of Havana, and at a young age was left to tend to his mother after his father abandoned the family and fled to the United States. He would never see his father again. Ramirez loved baseball, and while he professes to having had a good arm, he admits that he wasn't a very good student.

"And here you know that if you aren't a good student, you won't be allowed to be a good athlete," he said in Spanish.

In 1979, his playing career ended unceremoniously at age 18. He had no future prospects as a player. But he didn't want to leave the game altogether, something he told friends and family in the area. Soon after his last game, the administrators of his local municipal team—baseball in Cuba is a regional sport where one plays for their respective town, then their county, and then finally, if talented enough, for the state (provincial) team in the Serie Nacional—asked if he would be interested in becoming the squad's batboy.

While some would scoff at accepting such a lowly position, Ramirez quickly accepted.

"I loved the game so much I wanted to do something within the game," Ramirez said.

He spent the next year picking up bats in his hometown. It certainly wasn't glamorous work, but it was enough to keep him in the game. And that was enough for Ramirez.

Following the season, team administrators summoned him for a meeting. Ramirez wasn't sure what to expect. He thought he had performed his duties ably. What could he have done wrong?

While expecting the worst, Ramirez received the best news he could have imagined. The Industriales had just lost their batboy and were looking for a replacement. Someone recommended him, and now Ramirez was being offered the position. It was all too much to handle. Essentially, Ramirez had gotten a call up to the majors after only one season in the minors. He was a phenom. A bat grabbing, dugout cleaning, equipment gathering super prospect. So at age 19, Ramirez was hired to work alongside some of the biggest names in Cuban baseball.

If it all seemed a little too much to believe, Ramirez's first game as Industriales' batboy brought him back to reality. During the middle innings of his debut, Ramirez went to fetch a bat and accidentally tripped the catcher in the middle of a live play. His stint as a big league batboy could have ended after one game.

"They wanted to kill me," Ramirez said.

After the game, Ramirez got a stern lecture from team administrators.

"They told me that things would come easier with experience," Ramirez said. "But I needed to pay more attention. Because I shouldn't be picking up a bat until the play was over … Ever since that moment, I've never had another problem. It's all about learning from that experience."

Ramirez's rookie year ended up being a resounding success.

"It was a beautiful year," he recalled. "I was amongst historic figures of the Cuban game. And since then I've been lucky to meet even more big names in Cuban baseball. Yasmany Tomas, Rene Arocha, 'El Duque' Hernandez, all those guys. All of those players I knew them as rookies. Even now the director of the Industriales I knew him when he was on the Industriales youth teams. And we've never separated since. Lazaro Vargas, Pedro Medina, Rene Arocha, Kendrys Morales. I know all of them."

For more than 35 years, Ramirez has pretty much stuck to the same routine. He is the first to arrive, when the stadium is eerily quiet, and then the last to leave, when only the sounds of crickets accompany him home.

Ramirez arrives at the ballpark around 3 p.m. for a 7 p.m. game. He brings out all the equipment for batting practice. During batting practice, Ramirez often has to go into the stands to recover foul balls. Baseballs are not as readily available here as they are in the U.S. Then, of course, during the game, he fetches bats. It's past midnight by the time he arrives home.

"I've adapted to the physical aspect of it," he said. "I don't get too tired. At first I would get exhausted. But not so much anymore."

Ramirez also takes his responsibilities as an elder statesman in the batboy community seriously. During games or during batting practice he will go and chat with the opposing team's adult batboy. There is a certain kinship among the group. No one knows exactly what it's like to be a batboy as a grown man except for the ones that actually do it.

"We love baseball and to not be able to actually play it, this is the next best alternative," he said. "We all get along really well. We're like a family. We give each other advice. We help one another."

During our interview, Industriales catcher Frank Morejon, also a member of the Cuban national team, walks up to us and curiously listens to the conversation. It's quite likely that he's never seen Ramirez being interviewed. He smiles at some of Ramirez's answers. Mostly he's trying to give Ramirez—now revered as an Industriales institution—a hard time. Ramirez tries hard not to laugh, but he's obviously distracted, and even a bit bashful now. His answers get short while Morejon is around.

It's this type of banter and interaction with players that Ramirez will miss when he retires from his batboy duties.

"I still love it," he says of the job. "And I want to still be alongside some of my kids here. They love me and I love them."

Ramirez thinks he has maybe one more year left in him. But he'll continue to do the job as long as his health permits.

"The years don't pass by easily anymore," he said. "It's been a long time."

We finish our talk and Ramirez goes back to work in quiet anonymity, the way people are taught to do here in Cuba. You are part of a team, part of an ideal.